n 1996 I was asked to write an introduction to Registry of Death, a graphic novel by Matthew Coyle and Peter Lamb, which was being published by Kitchen Sink Press. Here's what I came up with. This is the first in a loosely linked series of fiction in which all the characters will be worms or larvae.
Poppy Z. Brite

In Vermis Veritas

"It's nothing to do with mortality but it's to do with the great beauty of the color of meat." So said Francis Bacon, an artist of the twentieth century, explaining why he painted scenes of gore and squalor. While admiring his sentiment, I would also postulate that Bacon's appreciation for the color of meat made him a connoisseur of the very mortality he pretended to eschew.
I consider myself a connoisseur of mortality. While my millions of brethren and sistren chew, chew, chew their way through whatever [bad word] along, inexorable but mindless, I preserve my energies for the sweetest meat: the carcass tainted by fear. The carcass that suffered the protracted death, the agonizing death. Meat crisped alive by fire, meat sliced open by steel, meat with a bullet in its gut.
Here in the slaughterhouse, I dine well.
It is everything to do with mortality. It is the great beauty of the color of meat, of its many colors: the spongy purple of drowned flesh, the translucent rose of fresh viscera, the seething indigo of rot. Bacon must have painted in the slaughterhouse. It is the great beauty of the flavor of meat, of its many flavors.
When we reduce a carcass to bone, we not only reveal its [bad word]  we [bad word] composed of its elements. For most of the others, this is a matter of breakingdown proteins and replenishing simple larval tissues. For me it is a kind of catharsis. I take on the qualities of the deceased, I am nourished by his perceptions, and perhaps somehow I aid in releasing his soul.
Consequently, I have lived thousands of lives. I have memorized countless tomes, and written more than a few. I have [bad word] dynasties, then torn them down or watched them fall. I have been a foetus in a womb and a [bad word] in a cave. I have digested the concepts of "freedom" and "love" and "eternity," and excreted them, over and over again.
Men kill other men, sometimes for sport, sometimes for love, sometimes just sending them to the slaughterhouse to feed still more men -- or, if left too long, to feed me and my kin. Each one thinks he has lived in the worst of times, but nothing has ever been different.
I curl in the slightly damaged brain of a young man who died for no particular reason, after a protracted and honorable hunt. The glistening whorls are [bad word] unglued, breaking down into their [bad word]  I gorge myself on the primordial soup of his mind. The terrible realization that dawned upon him at the moment of death sharpens the taste.
I [bad word] [bad word] on his flood of experiences and emotions. I synthesize his knowledge. I live his entire life in the time it takes me to eat a path through his liquefying brain. I wallow in his world. I die his weary death.
As always, it makes me glad to be a maggot in the slaughterhouse and not a man.

«Со смертью ничего не поделаешь, чего не скажешь о великой красоте мяса», –– так говорил Фрэнсис Бэкон, художник двадцатого века, объясняя, почему он изображает смерть и разложение. Восхищаясь его позицией, я уверен, что это отношение к мясу говорит о том, что Бэкон был знатоком смерти, хоть и предпочитал это скрывать.

    Я считаю себя знатоком смерти. Пока миллионы моих братьев и сестер прогрызают себе путь через всю ту дрянь, что встречается им на пути –– неутомимо, но бессмысленно, –– я берегу свою энергию для самого вкусного мяса: для трупов, изуродованных ужасом, истерзанных долгой, мучительной смертью. Мясо, до хруста сожженное заживо, мясо, изрезанное холодной сталью, мясо с пулей в кишках.

    Здесь, на бойне, я обедаю досыта.

  Со смертью можно делать что угодно. О, эта великая красота мяса и множества его оттенков