10-7-17 Wolpertinger? It damn near killed ‘er!

Byline: Gary Llewellyn

Dateline: October 7th, 2017

Are you religious? If you’re reading this in Europe maybe not. If you’re reading this from America, particularly in the south or Colorado Springs, you probably are or will say you are for the sake of self-preservation. Well, worry about your unfortunate condition no longer. There are beast roaming the forests of Bavaria that will convince you, once and for all, that there either is no God or he/she/it just does not give a fuck; the Wolpertinger. These genetic potlucks, look like someone animated one of those children’s books, with the ring bound cards where you can mix and match the animal parts by flipping the different segments. Like a spiral bound manifesto of Doctor Moreau. It’s when genes cross the line between random chance and just fucking with you. All the woodland creatures gathered one day and had a key party and today their mutant spawn roam the countryside of Bavaria and generally make annoying little shits of themselves.

For instance, I present a duck with antlers, a sparrow’s wings, and rabbit’s ass. How is any of this shit supposed to work together? There’s not enough mass here to make use of the antlers and too much to make use of the wings. And that rabbit ass is just gonna sink. Here one would expect natural selection to perform its merciful duty and nip this shit in the bud, but thanks to the tourism industry, modern man can once again give a knobby, rigid middle finger to natural selection and provide a support system to Mother Nature’s little burdens of the state. Tens of thousands of cooing nitwits flock from middle-class abodes around the world to gawk, take pictures, and throw their Cheetos at these cruel parodies of the Almighty’s craft. This arrangement is fine (depends on how loose you’re willing to get with the word ‘fine’), if you fall somewhere on the Kawaii scale between ‘Adorable to the point of eliciting the urge to consume it’ and ‘At least it doesn’t stink’. But what about the others that couldn’t even chart as ‘so ugly it’s cute’? Other’s like the flying tarantula faced rattlesnake. Or as the locals call him, ‘Meingottinhimmel’.

Meingottinhimmel and his friends Lamprey Toad and The Squid Face Kid have taken to a life of petty crime. However, since none of their bits work right together, they are pretty awful at it and often go to bed hungry. It doesn’t have to be like this.

So this is a message to all the kids out there who are itching to make a difference in this world. Maybe, your parents might have taken you to Bavaria to see a bunch of lame penguins with otter heads. You must be dying to see something metal. Well, tell your folks to take you on down to Gary’s Metal Wolpertinger Tours. When you’re tired of watching your little sister getting nuzzled by fennec fox monkeys, Gary’s got ya covered. For just a few clams you watch a praying mantis chihuahua eating live school children. I don’t know where he gets them and I’m not getting involved. That shit’s got nothing to do with me. But, for five euro I’ll tell you where you can see it.

10-7-17 It’s Magic

Byline: Stephanie Morgan

Dateline: October 7th, 2017

O.M.G., SEG-ers, these things are soooooo cuuuuuuteeeeee. I can’t stand it. Oh my god, I want to hug them so tight I crush them and eat them alive. I’m going to live here. This is where I shall found my kingdom. My religion. We’ll need a new one, the old ones no longer suffice. God doesn’t exist. At least not in the forms they speak of. If there was a God, this is what regular animals would look like. The baby seal, crossed with a baby otter, crossed with an adult angora bunny, that shall be the standard that flies on my banners.

Gary and the kobolds were wandering around this adorable paradise, moping around and glum, because I refused to allow them to make and market Wolpertinger shoes and handbags.

The kobolds will get over it and Gary already has. He’s trying to get a bunch of freaked out emo kids to pay to watch this tarantula snake thing eat mice. Not all of the Wolpertingers are cute and fuzzy. Not sure I could live somewhere with a very real risk of leaping, carnivorous squid jumping out of the bushes barking at me. But, I can’t exclude some Wolpertinger from my realm and not others based purely on appearance. That’s not a world I would want to live in. But nor is it a world with scorpion puppies. So I must leave this place. Leave behind the slow loris/piglet combo that fell asleep on my shoulder and is softly snoring his dreams into my ear. Goodbye, slow piglet. When you awake I’ll be gone. But I’ll leave you with a dream of my own. A dream of land for all you adorable, freaking, monsters. Squee, I can’t take it. I just want to eat them up.

Gary needs to get me out of here. I did a full three sixty on my own epiphany, that’s usually about the time he starts tapping his watch. He needs to pull me from this bewitchment, but I just saw him running from the police with The Squid Face Kid. I have to fight this. This isn’t just cuteness overload. This is magic. Is this Alwyn’s doing? The piggie just snorted! No. Fight it. Start walking, Steph. One foot in front of the other. Get out of the Wolpertinger forest.

But...where am I going to go, really? I’m being silly, I can’t leave here. The standard kittens of Man’s World can no longer offer satiety when I have seen baby goats with rabbit feet...on a trampoline...in pajamas. And nobody ruined it with Yakety Sax.

10-14-17 Love Like Blood

Byline: Gary Llewellyn

Dateline: October 14th, 2017

Folks, people like to stop me on the street and ask, ‘Gary? How can a column like the Page Five Ghouls go so long without even taking a look at vampires?’ First of all, stop doing that. I got shit to do and I don’t have time to answer the same question fifty times a day. Second, 95% of pop culture has you covered there, from Nosferatu all the way to glitter boys. No need for me to waste my time rehashing the lame antics of Monsterdom’s most punchable emo kids.

However, due to recent events I’ve been forced to rethink my position on nature’s original Bauhaus fans. You see, recently, Malawi has become host to a fairly ornery clot of vampires who seem to have given away their last fuck, forming hunting retinues in broad daylight. Things have gotten so hairy the UN bugged out. And I know how hairy it must be for the UN not to want to have its nose firmly wedged into the situation.

As typically happens, the locals have begun turning on each other, often with lethal outcomes. Statistics show that 93% percent of deaths during vampire wildings are actually caused by bumpkins going ham on each other. What invariably happens is that they start making a laundry list of bullshit signs they pull out of their asses to tell if someone is a vampire. Pretty soon after, wearing plaid on a Tuesday becomes a slayable offense. This is the sorry state of monster awareness in the 21st century. Nobody teaches anybody about this, so they learn a bunch of folksy bullshit from their grandmothers.

Vampires often never kill their victims. Why finish it when you can send it back for a refill? Most vampires don’t even go after humans. Too much hassle. Many would rather stand around in a dark room with a strobe light, doing a dumb goth dance where they only move their arms, listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees. Plus, these things reek of patchouli and cloves. If you can’t smell these fucks coming from a block away, you may be one of the weak ones on the edge of the herd. Some have reported faintly hearing a chorus-drenched Simon Gallup bass-line drifting somewhere in distance, preceding a vampire incident. Others claim it was Peter Hook, but that’s losing sight of the key point here. Chorus-drenched and played with a pick is what you want to be listening for. Straight eighths, always on the root. You get the idea.

Vampires are really one of the easier infestations to deal with. Sure you can find their nest and stake them all the their sleep. You do what they do in the Scandinavian countries and hang UV lights everywhere. Garlic fumigation. Leave a trail of Stephanie Meyer and Charlaine Harris novels out of town or into some vampire traps, so they can be relocated to gentrified, inner city neighborhood. These vain shits love to read inspirational fiction about themselves. I took the more direct approach. I traded them my live Cure bootlegs from ‘79-’82; in other words the good era. In exchange they would fuck off. And so they did. Off to search for crushed velvet waistcoats in a thrift store in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

10-14-17 Fear of the Dark

Byline: Stephanie Morgan

Dateline: October 14th, 2017

Not what I imagined, SEG-ers. Vampires are actually kind of annoying. They mostly just moped around while Gary went through a bunch of shoeboxes full of cassette tapes. Whenever he would hand them a tape to look at, they would grab them with their thumb and forefinger. I don’t know why, but that drove me crazy. They’re like this kid I knew in school. We were in creative writing together. He only wrote poems about the apple he had rotting in his locker and how that related to the darkness in his soul. I’ll admit, I had a crush on him. I thought he was so deep. But whatever darkness he thought he was harbouring, he wouldn’t last five minutes on this column. An apple rotting is the darkest thing you can think of? Well, that’s vampires.

I mean, what do they do? They spend all their time in a cave and only come out to eat things, like bears or raccoons. If you break it down, you shouldn’t be anymore terrified of vampires than you are of bears. Which is not to say you shouldn’t be terrified of bears, exactly. Just that vampires don’t warrant an extra level of terror. Sure they do that mist thing, but on the other hand, a ravenous bear isn’t going to wait for an invitation to crack open your front door like a walnut to get at the sweet, sweet human meat within. There’s a million more things you should be terrified of way more than vampires. For instance, a kobold will flay you alive while you’re hooked up to IV drip of adrenaline so you don’t pass out from the pain. Then they’ll make a pair of boots from your skin and kick you where your dick used to be. A tarrasque could clear out the island of Manhattan in an hour. If you had a life outside of the house in the 80’s you might never have heard of a tarrasque. That’s like never having heard of the hydrogen bomb. Do zombies scare you? Sure one can skeletonize a cow faster than a piranha fish. But they’re slow, predictable, and easily controlled, and they don’t last very long. If there’s an outbreak in the summer, they’ll be eaten alive by maggots. In the winter they’ll freeze solid. Why is it that the manageable monsters are the ones we are most concerned about? Yet, the prospect of being kicked in a bloody Ken doll crotch doesn’t even occur to most people. Monster education, people. This isn’t taught in schools. I wasn’t taught. Grammy Morgan used to give me tidbits here and there. I knew my grandfather was a necromancer, but otherwise had no idea what that was. I had to learn in the deep end. Your kids don’t have to.