my current primary project is an experimental horror novella called In The Abattoir. It is a weird fiction-type story that slowly spins out and dissolves, piling in a multitude of identities, narrators, and styles. It is about meat and blood and memory. Trauma and the utter inability to arrange your life in a way that makes sense. It concerns a man who arrives to stay at a very strange hostel. Or perhaps a woman who does the same. A man haunted by the ghost of his twin or of his own self or of something else entirely. A world sacrificing everything to the blood and guts that flow underneath it all.

Some primary influences would include:
- Jose Donoso - The Obscene Bird of the Night
- Samuel Beckett - The Unnamable
- Robert Aickman - The Hostel
- Susan Taubes - To America and Back in a Coffin
- Jean Ray - Malpertuis
- Marcel Schwob - The Book of Monelle
- Unica Zurn - The Trumpets of Jericho
- Edith Wharton - Kerfol
- Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
- Maggie Siebert - Bonding
- Clive Barker - Books of Blood
a series of intermitten reflections on my "project" as a writer

today

definitions

by project i mean the thing that i am doing (or more specifically the thing i want to do but am incapable of (forever incapable of) which is a mix of influences and desires and pain which is to say ah let's start again

i don't like the word project (but i do like it because it is painfully unromantic) but i think it is the best choice for that thing all artists have (that is to say, you don't have to lay out a manifesto to have a project (i just mean what you are trying to do with your art (and how you are trying to do it)) therefore ah let's start again

constellation points:
- surrealism (to destabilize, to bring something out from below, to push into something else)
- modernism (to explode into new logics)
- postmodernism (to recognize that the only logic that exists must be exploded)
- marginalized literature (to be small to be anti-hegemonic to be anarchist to find value in anything else but this)
- fear and rage (to scream to scream to scream)
- radical transfeminism (to explode my own body into liberation to push back to try not to die to recognize the world wants to kill me)
- mad pride (to write through and for my brain and nothing else)

thus, writing (such as it is (is it funny or awkward or embarrassing to write this while i'm still working on a collection that expresses these things) and such as it will be)


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M.I. Gelb

September 2025

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