by Adam McPhee
Skullface is a fucked up mutant from Moontown, a shitty little town on the moon. He has a job cleaning up messes at the mall, and he seems to hit it off with SLOPP (“Socialist Labor Organization of Proletarian Plasmoids”—a sort of gelatinous collective organism). Before long they end up raising Abomination!, a baby they find in a bottle who leaks Brownish Soda from his face holes. Still, Skullface needs to work on his anger issues, because when he gets worked up he starts glowing until pink foam spews from his eye sockets, nose hole, and mouth.
Tentaclehead, by contrast, is a depressive with a tendency towards self-harm. He burps up knives and uses them to whittle his tentacles down to stumps. He works at a dollar store and lives in the other half of a duplex shared with Skullface. He wants to buy a mannequin from a closing department store. Unfortunately for Tentaclehead, Skullface scoops it up first.
Thus, we have Rick Claypool’s Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War (Anxiety Press, 2024; 303 pp.), and things only get weirder from there. At its best, it’s like listening to beloved comedian/body-positivity spokesman Stavros Halkias trying to narrate the chaos and grotesquerie of Phil Tippet’s stop-motion epic “Mad God.”
There are bizarre and lengthy fights, captivity in a secretive laboratory, and a seemingly literal supply chain that connects the moon to its planet. All the mutants seem to puke up consumer objects specific to them. Just off the top of my head we have knives, pink melty foam, parking metres, argyle socks, tubes of chapstick, prefab hot tubs, distressed jeans, watches, flash drives, and lawn mowers. When Tentaclehead finds others of his kind they use their puked-up knives to stab themselves together into a giant collective—Skullface ends up pretty angry when he sees that his friend has been made into their foot.
The whole thing climaxes with a fight involving, among other things: a collection of factories that form a giant humanoid (I hesitate to call it a robot or mecha or whatever—it’s much stranger than that), a similarly large and animate park, and a moon reshaped into a giant skull. Yet these big, setpiece battles aren’t nearly as compelling as the strange domestic scenes the author paints, such as Skullface stressed out after finding a mutant in a bottle of soda at the small afterwork gathering he’s hosting, or the witch’s picnic held on the flesh of Carla the living park, or the bond Skullface forms with his fellow captive Ray as they fantasize about opening a video rental store. This joyful weirdness is the sort of thing comic books used to be good at doing, before they became testing platforms for movie studios.
Claypool — if it’s not a pen name it’s a fantastic case of nominative determinism — is fascinated with slime, goo, glop, and sludge, with how his substances interact and propagate, and he’s able to take it to some delightfully strange places. My favourite is SLOPP’s internal parliament — or I guess Central Committee — which is constantly debating itself on whether to let its nutrients nourish others, or if it’s time to devour their friends to provide for their own growth. Later they battle a similar collective organism that happens to have a capitalist growth mindset, and the clash of ideologies is rendered literal, and sloppy.
Fictional weirdness exists on a spectrum. Too far one way, and you get science fiction and fantasy that’s dull from being overexplained. Too far the other way, and you get the sort of surrealism that’s just words on a page, descriptions that can’t be envisioned or images without any relation to the world, resulting again in tedium. Claypool gets it right more often than not, landing somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.
Welcome to the Skull Slime Tentacle Witch War.
Adam McPhee is a Canadian writer. He’s been published in Old Moon Quarterly, Wyngraf, Ahoy Comics, and longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. He lives in Alberta and writes a newsletter, Adam’s Notes, on substack.
