BLOOD FREAK:
“Rest In Pieces: The Shocking Truth Revealed!”
by Lucio Holocausto
Warning! Not to be read by the easily gullible, by those who have no appetite for “bad taste, ” or simply by those without a sense of humour. If you should find yourself “offended” by this, you should immediately consult reality & get a grip and/or life.
On the morning of August 12th, 2005, three men motored out of the sunny and serene suburban sprawl of Anaheim, California, their hometown: Jason Grinter, aged 36 years; Jon Sellier, aged 35 years; and Pete Dobbins, aged 36 years. Horror-worshippers, drive-in/grindhouse sinema-aficionados, and classick death metal & goregrind-devotees one and all, they were, respectively, the bassist & vocalist, guitarist, and drummer of the forgotten horror-obsessed gods of underground nastiness known until only recently to only a few old school demo-traders as … BLOOD FREAK. And in but two days, they – BLOOD FREAK – would be dead, tragically loosing their lives in a freak crash deep in the belly of the Oregon hinterlands …
Having gorged themselves even more fiendingly than usual upon a revoltingly brain-rotting repast of Deep Red & Gorezone back issues, Tales from the Crypt & Creepy comics, big boxed video cassettes of everything from The Devil Master to The Glory Stompers, and their needle-gouged IMPETIGO & AUTOPSY vinyls, Grinter and his fellow BLOOD FREAK gore-mongers were ready to record their latest offering of corpse-grinding death metal for Rot Island’s very own Razorback Records: Live Fast, Die Young, & Leave a Flesh-Eating Corpse, the fifteen-years-in-the-making follow-up to their unreleased (‘til 2003) debut splattergrind platter, Sleaze Merchants. Sellier handed over the keys of his horror memorabilia shoppe – “Killer Kollectibles” – to his assistant manager. Dobbins parked “The Butchermobile” – the classic ‘50s Cadillac Hearse he had been restoring and customizing for well over a decade – in his parents’ garage. Grinter kissed his black bride of thirteen years – Martha Rettalpsh‰d – goodbye, for, alas, the final time. And having done so that otherwise unremarkable August morning, the three BLOOD FREAK boils, their rented U-Haul van loaded with their instruments and a box full of “inspirational” sundries, left Anaheim for the eleven-hundred-mile-drive to Seattle, where they would record Live Fast … over the course of that next week at Kryptfiend Studios.
For Grinter and his brothers in barbarous BLOOD FREAK-ery, the beginning of that roadtrip to Seattle from Anaheim was without incident. Each of them took his turn at the wheel of that rented van and killed those early hours on the road between listening to the latest GHOUL & FRIGHTMARE demo tunes and watching the likes of Night of the Demon, Dr. Butcher, M.D., & a bootleg screener of Murder-Set-Pieces on Sellier’s beloved portable dvd player. But it would seem that Fate would have other, and more dreadfully doom-ridden, plans for the three BLOOD FREAKs, as their drive would not so very uneventful for much longer remain. And on the fog-heavy morning of August 14th, it was in Oregon – or, variously, “Goregon” or “Whoregon”: the home of a coffin-full of BLOOD FREAK’s fellow “Horror Hive” macabre musick-makers, such as ENGORGED, LORD GORE, & SPLATTERHOUSE – that their roadtrip was befallen by such absurd tragedy.
Grinter, Sellier, and Dobbins had just eaten breakfast in the sleepy town of Parker’s Grove along Oregon’s craggy, brine-reeking coast and BLOOD FREAK’s rented van, Grinter now behind its steering wheel, was motoring amidst the Eggs Spill Harbour National Park, its headlights cutting through the sylvan murkiness therein. Dobbins was saying how these shadow-drenched coastal woods reminded him of the summers he used to spend in Dead River, Maine, as a kid when Grinter, steering the van around a bend, espied … something … lurching out of the darkness of the treeline and towards their van: a shape, a thing, walking on its hindlegs like a man but far too big – and hideous – to be one. As the thing crept further towards their van as it hurtled down that road cut through the dense woods like the gaping throat of a headless body, Ginter experienced – nay, was stricken by – a feeling of unspeakable dread, nauseatingly palpable, that made his skin rise with goosebumps and curdled his blood within his veins. Jason Grinter, lead vocalist and bassist of BLOOD FREAK, life-long and tried-and-true horror fiend for whom the notion of actually being “frightened” was something from some long-forgotten past life, a time before he had become obsessed by Horror, be it in film, books, and even music: yes, it indeed was this very same Jason Grinter who was inexplicably “frightened” – a surge of terror churning in his guts the likes of which some strange aeons ago had made the Cro-Magnon Man hide in fear from thunder and lightning and all that could not be explained – by what he saw before him. Whatever the thing was, it had the face – Grinter gasped in disbelief – of a monstrously malformed and morbidly malicious … turkey! And as it stared at Grinter through that rented van’s windshield, unseen by the other brutalians of BLOOD FREAK-ish butchery, the thing’s foully fowl eyes glowed an otherworldly red and, although he did not see its beaked-face move, it whispered – gobbled – the wickedest of words into his brain … “Lowly men of BLOOD FREAK: Behold … your DOOM!” Before Grinter knew what was happening, that rented van’s steering wheel was spinning through his sweat-wet hands, out of his physical, mortal, control. And before he, or either Sellier or Dobbins, knew it, that rented van, BLOOD FREAK’s rented van, was careening through the woods and down, deep down, into the unforgivingly boulder-laden gorge below.
In an instance that is the very definition of “coincidence,” that very same day, that very same morning, the shadow-thick woods of the Eggs Spill Harbour National Park was being visited by yet another dread-doing dismember of the Horror Hive: Neil Smith. What had brought “Maniac Neil,” electric headsman for such Razorback acts as LORD GORE & FRIGHTMARE, there was the very same thing that had made these woods the popular hunting grounds of throngs of cryptozoologists, amateur and professional alike, during the “Bigfoot” craze of yesteryear. Having read that the recent rumblings of decades-dormant Mt. Saint Helens had driven the Sasquatch population south towards Oregon, Maniac Neil fitted himself out with some appropriate monster-hunting gear and his trusty flannel jacket and set out to determine the validity of these reports. He had been humping through the thick of those woods and was dumbfoundedly examining a skin-crawlingly anomalous three-toed “foot print” when he heard, in the distance, the muffled noise of a violent crash followed by a cacophonous explosion. Following the black smoke billowing above the treetops, Maniac Neil made his way towards the location of this unsettling ruckus. As he drew nearer, he began to find sundered and fire-scorched debris lying about the forest floor: the severed neck of a Kramer V guitar; the twisted steel of what looked to have once been a bass drum pedal; the shredded pages of half an issue of Gore Shriek. His curiosity whetted by this all-too-familiar wreckage, Maniac Neil made his way to the crash site and found before him the smoldering remains of a rented U-Haul truck. As he did, he stumbled upon the carneous stuff of the charnel house – flame-engulfed and ensanguined human carrion: an arm; feet; entrails and other steaming offal; freshly brushed human teeth. For Maniac Neil, there could be no doubt that this unfortunate accident had left no survivors; however, he was wrong, as he heard, ever so faintly the sound of wheezing, laboured breathing over the crackling of the fire that still burned within the shell of that demolished U-Haul van. To his incalculable dismay – a shock deep within young Maniac Neil’s gentle heart that will know no end – he found, jutting out from the smashed driver’s window, the still-breathing body of his brother Horror Hive boogeyman and long-term pen-pal, Jason Grinter.
With a shriek, Maniac Neil tried to pull Grinter’s battered and bloody body from the ruins of the horrid accident but found the task before him far too easy a thing to do and, looking down, found that the BLOOD FREAK vocalist and bassist had been verily cut in two, his torso pulling away from his lower half, leaving a wet trail of reeking seepage in its path. Aghast, Maniac Neil knew that his label mate and his mentor of sorts in the horrific ways of death metal-urgy, could not walk away from such trauma as this. It was then that Grinter opened his bloodshot eyes and, recognizing Maniac Neil – without a question to such curiously coincidental circumstances – beckoned him to draw closer. It was not without the least bit of dread that Maniac Neil did so, his nostrils filled with the smell of the foetid gases diffusing from Grinter’s rent bowels, his eyes filled with the surreal glimpse of Grinter’s still-twitching disembodied lower extremities. It was in a gasping, pained whisper that Grinter told Maniac Neil of what he had seen on the road – the Nameless Thing with the Turkey Head Which Cannot Be Named – and of the secrets of BLOOD FREAK’s necrophilously nasty necromania. With a shaking, already-Death-embracing hand, Grinter reached within the smoky darkness of that ill-fated rented U-Haul van and, with all the strength he could muster, dragged out a small knapsack. He pulled woe-begotten Maniac Neil’s very own hand down upon the badly burned and bloodied bag and, squeezing the younger gore-grinder’s fingers over it, choked, “We … me and Jason and Peter … we are – were – but men, naught but flesh and blood … But BLOOD FREAK – the Horror that is BLOOD FREAK – will never die … It will live on … in you … You, Maniac Neil, you are BLOOD FREAK … !” Shocked and at a loss for words, Maniac Neil began to rise away from Grinter, but the dying gore-grinder grabbed him by his flannel coat and pulled him back down, down towards his face. Grinter’s dying eyes began to glow with a ghastly eerie greenness and seethe with a life that was not his own. And when he howled into Maniac Neil’s horrified face, it was in a voice that was not his own. Taking Neil’s hand in his, he growled, “Swear an oath in the name of the always hungry and always wet Gods of Gore that you will take what you find in this bag and keep BLOOD FREAK alive! Swear, Maniac Neil! SWEAR!” With that, Maniac Neil did as he was told, muttering an oath but an oath nonetheless, consecrated as Grinter’s blood – and whatever unearthly Horrors from beyond this world wormed their way amidst it – seeped through the skin of Maniac Neil’s trembling hand and oozed into his very flesh, his very cells, his very soul. Grinter’s body fell back upon the blood-weltered forest floor, he having actually died moments before …
It was the memory of this experience deep within the shadows of the Eggs Spill Harbour National Park that otherwise unremarkable morning of August 14th upon which Maniac Neil ruminated day and night, his thoughts unable to escape the ominous glowing of Jason Grinter’s dead eyes – and the oath he had sworn, in blood, whilst held in their green glare. He could not open the knapsack Grinter had given to him for at least a week afterwards, his gray matter still reeling from events he could not explain, the unreal details of which he could still not tell were born of conscious fact or nightmare-born fancy. But when he did bring himself to unzip the bag’s mysterious contents, what he found within was a relief, if not a pleasant surprise: a few audio cassettes labeled, in Grinter’s very own handwriting, as the “Live Fast … Demos” and a spiral notebook entitled – jokingly or not – The Grimoire of Grand Gore. When Maniac Neil examined the tapes, he found that they were chainsawing riffs that Sellier had cooked up for BLOOD FREAK’s upcoming album, some drum beats and blasts that Dobbins had been working on, and, finally, a few fully demoed tunes of torture. Grinter’s Grimoire …, however, had not escaped the fiery wreckage of BLOOD FREAK’s crashed van thusly unscathed: only half the notebook’s pages had been spared – and but two devoted to Grinter’s musings amidst a morass of the macabre which were the black roots of Live Fast, Die Young, & Leave a Flesh-Eating Corpse. All that remained was a list of song titles and some cryptic notes about each: “Goretits,” “Full Moon Sacrifice,” “From the Coffin to the Worms,” “The Nameless Stench of Forgotten Celluloid,” and so on.
Sitting before the would-be makings of BLOOD FREAK’s second helping of horrendously horrific Horror-fied death-grind within the midnight-blackness of his bed chamber, thoughts of BLOOD FREAK’s resurrection swirled through Maniac Neil’s gray matter like tombyard worms. As if channeling the hungers of the horridly howling Gods of Gore beyond this world, Maniac Neil knew that what Grinter had said was true: he was BLOOD FREAK and, through him, BLOOD FREAK would indeed live on to commit acts of aural atrocity that would make even the most jaded of goregrind-hounds puke with disgusted delight. It was then that Maniac Neil made the decision to devour Grinter’s tapes and record Live Fast, Die Young, & Leave a Flesh-Eating Corpse himself, utilizing the sick minds of the Horror Hive’s most depraved and disturbed dread-dealers – Ryan Gorensen, Digestor, Sly the Gorenome, Lucio Holocausto, and the Gore Boar himself, Billy Grossera – to put lyrixxx to Grinter’s song titles. And by doing so, while the corpses of Grinter, Sellier, & Dobbins may rot away in their narrow houses back in Anaheim, BLOOD FREAK shall dwell amidst wonder and glory in the house of the chunkblowing Gods of Gore forever ...
BLOOD FREAK is dead. Long live BLOOD FREAK!
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