Trinie Dalton “Wide Eyed”

Published in San Francisco Bay Guardian, Nov. 2005

Basically this book is pretty fucking rad. It’s a succession of semilinked stories blending Trinie Dalton’s obsession with proto-punk rock stars, animals, and horror movies to form her amazing and fake autobiography, Wide Eyed. After the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” helps her to drown out the sounds of lobsters being boiled alive and later to cope with her mother’s remarriage, Mick Jagger appears to our narrator in a vision, and she explains to him how Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovered sperm by looking at his own semen under a microscope and dissecting rabbit testicles. In “Decrepit,” Dalton and her roommates, living in a house inhabited by a ghost, enact a play about a giant maggot, which threatens to grow so large that it suffocates the residents. “The maggot play was meant to be retro like Godzilla or King Kong – one of those huge creatures dominating humanity stories,” Dalton writes. “But we were wasted on Xanax, dressed in red dresses and red feather boas, so it had a New Wave feel … ‘I vill crush you,’ said Heidi in a low Krushchevian maggot/dictator voice from behind the door. ‘I am zee maggot.’” After all of this temporal compression, it is fitting that Dalton makes the ghost a po-mo poster child: “Eras run into one ageless mess. Ghosts live in different eras simultaneously.”

Kill or be Killed: Comparing Death Sequences in Horror and Action Movies

This article or originally appeared in Kitchen Sink magazine.

In the first Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Tina falls asleep after making sweet teen love with trouble boy Rod. She later begins thrashing beneath the blankets and Rod tugs them off. Tina’s baby-blue striped pajama top opens to reveal what looks like the polyvinyl chest of a CPR dummy. Four slashes appear down the center and Tina begins gushing hunter-orange blood. Freddy is attacking her from the dream world but is invisible to Rod and the audience’s waking eyes. Rod looks repulsed as Tina fumbles at her sliced open torso and makes puking sounds. As she levitates gymnastically in the air; her head slams into Rod, sending him careening into a bedside lamp. Gravity is inverted for Tina and her body is dragged upwards leaving a smear of red Wet’n’Wild up the wall, until she is spasming half-naked on the ceiling, reaching out towards Rod with the peacock-encrusted wallpaper dividing them. When she at last succumbs to death, gravity resumes its normal pull and she falls to the mattress with a splash. That’s how much blood there is; the sound evokes a diver who has completed a complex maneuver and dropped to the pool below. Her corpse slides on her bloody sheets face first into a heap beside the bed. Hearing Rod’s screams, Tina’s friends Nancy and Glenn break down the door and the audience is forced to stare at their extensive collection of sad and shocked facial expressions.