Killing It

by Mike Bockoven

Genres: Horror; Thrillers

Synopsis

From the twisted and imaginative mind of Mike Bockoven, author of the cult classic FANTASTICLAND, comes a wholly original and witty new novel of terror, perfect for fans of FROM DUSK TIL DAWN and SHAUN OF THE DEAD.

 

Since the late 1980's, The Square had been one of the most important clubs in New York for the alt-comedy scene. But before that it was something much darker and is now a place where evil lingers, waiting for a chance to spill blood.

 

After a night of killing on stage, four comics find themselves in a desperate situation as the spirits of the past come out to play, and a fight for laughs becomes a fight for survival in the most unlikely of places.

Release date: April 15, 2025

Publisher: Datura Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Emcee Set

Live From The Square in Manhattan

Friday, October 12 Braden Bond Set

Yes! Hello. Thank you for coming out to The Square tonight. Who’s ready for some live, raw stand-up comedy?

[crowd claps]

Yeah, it’s gonna be raw. My name is Braden Bond and, uh, I’m having a weird night, man. I mean, that’s nothing new, I have a lot of weird nights. You can kinda tell by looking at me. I’ve got a “throw cottage cheese at him out of nowhere” kind of face. A “got shit on by a pigeon during a first date” kind of vibe. If you see a bum following a guy for six blocks for no reason, then you see that he’s following me, you’re like, “Oh, that makes sense.” It’s a very specific look that I have.

All those examples are dead serious, by the way. See me after the show, buy me a drink, I might let you throw cottage cheese at me. I take it really well. Right on the chin. I’ve had some practice.

The one that people gloss over but that give me the best stories is the fact that I attract transients. I’m a bum magnet, man, which is an unfortunate thing to be in New York. The unhoused will seek me out in a crowd. It’s not like I’m overly generous with my cash or anything, but something about this face says “this guy needs to hear my theory about 9/11.”

The one time I was in Times Square, of all places, and the costumed characters are jumping around trying to get tourists’ money, you know, and right between Dollar Tree Batman and Pikachu with terrible unnamed stains all over him, I see this guy. You know how you can tell some people don’t smell the best from a distance? If not, don’t worry, it’s a basic survival skill in New York. Hang out here a week or two and you’ll develop it. In Mexico, it’s learning to ask where the bathroom is. In New York, you develop smell-o-vision whether you want to or not.

Anyway, this guy sees me from, like, two crosswalks away. Like, he has to wait for a light, then wait for another light, and then he gets to me, but I can tell, from the second my bum-sense starting tingling, that he’s coming, man. He is coming, and unless I abandon my plans and run in the other direction, the two of us are going to have a conversation. And this fucker, he cuts diagonally across the street to get to me like I was mother’s milk, like him talking to me is the thing that is going to get him a house and a shower and a job and a girlfriend and a blowjob and the keys to the city, and he’s pushing, you know, dick-shaped minions and Spider-Man who had a big lunch out of the way and tourists are flying off the sidewalk, and when he gets to me, he looks me in the eye and, out of breath, he says, “Man…man…I like your hat.”

So I gave him my hat. And later that day I went on a date and a pigeon shit on my head. True story.

Ah, enough of me. Let me tell you how this is going to work. Again, I’m Braden Bond, bum magnet. I’m one of two white guys you’ll see tonight, so don’t confuse me with the other one. We all look alike. Here’s how this works, my job is to “warm you up,” so I hope you’re feeling sufficiently warm and cozy, maybe ready for another drink, and I’m going to bring up our actual, professional stand-ups tonight, many

of whom you will recognize from the TVs and the YouTubes. We’re going to start off with the extremely funny Jerrod Seybourne, who you might recognize from all over the damn place. Jerrod is, what’s called in the business, the “opener.” Then we’ll move on to Jackie Carmichael, who you might have seen on the Showtime series The Dapper.

[crowd cheers]

Right, you know Jackie. Very, very funny lady. She is what’s called the “middle,” which is more a verb, such as, “I’m middling on a shitty show in north Manhattan tonight.” Finally, we’ll say What’s Happening to our closer and the host of What’s Happening on the FX network, Sammy Platter. He’s the other white guy. Plus, there are always special guests showing up, so please don’t be surprised if someone else is on the bill, so please, drink a ton, tip your waitresses because they’re working their asses off, and, if you end up in possession of some cottage cheese, please keep it to yourself.

Okay, our first comic tonight…

 

Chapter 1

The second Jaff lost control and bashed Calista’s head in with the printer from his office, the headache vanished.

The unearthly pain had started on Wednesday as he sat in his apartment upstairs from the club watching some bullshit on Netflix with Calista. As they had settled into late middle age after years and years together, energy seemed to drain out of them at a certain time of night and television was the unconscious routine in which they had settled. He didn’t even like most of the shit they watched, but his butt always ended up on the couch, the “love of his life” on the other side, scrolling on her phone. Being in your early fifties will sap your energy, as will being together for a couple of decades. They never married because saying things like, “It’s just a piece of paper, man,” and, “I don’t need to conform to society’s standards” is a lot easier than talking about deep-seated abandonment issues. If you didn’t mind missing out on a fairly significant tax break, it wasn’t that hard to get around. They were comfortable, they worked well together, and nothing needed to change, so it didn’t.

The show had ended and she had gone to bed, but he was antsy, which was not like him. Since he was a boy, Ronald Jaffee Maul had been rebellious first and lazy second. It wasn’t a very potent combination, which was why he had peaked at twenty-five, opening a comedy club just as the alt-comedy scene had exploded in the early ’90s. He was there to be one of the first clubs to book comedians like Dana Gould, Patton Oswalt, and David Cross to sold out shows in New York. There were pictures on the wall of his upstairs apartment of Jaff with a young John Stewart, a young Chris Rock, a bunch of the old Saturday Night Live cast, all sitting at the bar, smiling widely, their arms around each other. The money he inherited when his father died had bought him the life he had dreamed about way back when. That and naming his boy after Mad Magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee were the only two gifts his father had ever given him, but it had been enough. He’d been tied to The Square since the day it opened, never wanting or needing to do anything else. The question “what’s next” had been ignored and had rotted away on the vine.

Those early days had pulsed with energy, and Jaff had fed off it, staying up late, meeting people, making connections, and making mistakes. He was a terrible bar owner at first, but he put in the time and energy to get better and had worked hard enough to keep everything afloat. The club had endured, even though the popularity of live comedy came in peaks and valleys. Nowadays, over twenty years since starting the business, he relied on just a handful to bring in most of his revenue (two weekly podcast recordings, of all things, were the most popular ways to put butts in seats and sell drinks) and was glad to let comics play around or put together their own regular shows during the remaining nights of the week. Seeing a comic develop something, struggle, fail, regroup, then really knock it home during one of the smaller shows still gave him a little bit of that early juice. It was one of

the only things that did anymore.

Part of the issue was the comedy community could be egotistical, needy, and infuriating most of the time. The comics themselves were often moody and in need of some heavy-duty therapy (he was one to talk), but they were some of the funniest people Jaff had ever met. On a good night he laughed until his sides hurt and he started to sweat around the top of his receding hairline. Even on a bad night he was guaranteed a few chuckles from a well-executed joke or a well-timed riff. He had even gotten some media attention in those early days, with GQ doing an article about The Square, calling it a “bastion of alternative comedy.” It quoted Jaff as saying he wanted to “make some magic” in the club, and the phrase had stuck. He’d been using it ever since, more sparingly as of late as things had become more routine in one sense and more terrifying in others.

The comics had always been crazy in one way or another, but in the early days he had the patience to deal with it and there was less drama, or so it seemed. There were always those ones who were guaranteed to bring drama with them, be it alcoholism (a common one) or other addictions, mental illness, relationship problems, severe, debilitating need for approval, or a hundred other issues Jaff had fought with for the past two decades. But back then he loved it, and he stuck with it because he loved it. And where else was he going to go? He was very short in the marketable skills department.

As age caught up with him, Jaff had settled into an easy groove. Calista, who had been a waitress, then a lover, then a partner, had settled into that groove with him. They worked, they watched TV, they went out on occasion when time and money allowed. Every so often they were taken out and shown the high life by a comic whose career Jaff had seen blossom over time. Once every two or three years they took a big trip. Things were what they were. No health problems to speak of if you don’t count the five to ten drinks Jaff was likely to down on a daily basis, and that hadn’t caught up with him quite yet, though his doctor said he could see trouble from where he was standing. As it was now, he was a five-foot-eleven, two-hundred-ten-pound comedy club owner with a bit of a gut, a reputation for being solid, and debt that had been slowly mounting since around about 2008. Some days, it put him in a foul mood, but mostly, things were good.

But on that Wednesday, after they had watched whatever show they had watched, the headache started and wouldn’t leave Jaff alone. It wasn’t the unpleasant background kind or the “I drank too much” kind. It was a full fire from stem to stern one that burned in spite of two, then four, then six Advil and kept him from getting any sort of meaningful sleep that night. To make matters worse, the headache seemed to be fueling his legs. His fitness tracker said he usually took between 15,000 and 20,000 steps a day in the general business of keeping The Square up and running, but with his newfound, unwanted energy he was easily doing that at night as well, back and forth from the stage to the bar, back and forth from the bar to the green room in the basement, back and forth from the door to the end of the street and back. His feet and legs ached and shadows started dancing in strange ways along the walls of the apartment and the bar downstairs. He didn’t find it creepy. Quite the opposite. In the dead of night, as he paced and paced, he felt like he was almost at the precipice of something important, but every time his mind got close to whatever revelation lay in the dark, it flittered away, leaving him to pace and pace and pace some more.

Calista never asked what was wrong. She didn’t care. Had she ever?

She seemed to be a good stop for his anger brought on by the headache and pacing. The next morning, he snapped at her and she snapped back. The show on Thursday night was fine, it was one of the podcast recordings and people had shown up in droves and bought plenty of drinks. It was a good night, but it didn’t feel like it, and it was one of his regulars who finally noticed.

“You look like shit,” Bass Sherman said. Bass was a former radio personality who did a show once a week where he made fun of entertainment news. It wasn’t Jaff’s thing, but, again, it brought in the crowds.

“What?”

“Gaunt, man. You look skinny. Stretched. Like you haven’t been eating.”

“Same as always,” Jaff said, it only then occurring to him that he hadn’t eaten much of anything all day. “I don’t like that word.”

“What? Stretched? Not as bad as moist. Or lugubrious.”

“What the fuck is lugubrious?”

“It’s like gloomy,”

Bass said. “Like you right now.”

“How about ‘go over there for a while before I beat your ass.’ People like saying that?”

Bass ignored him. The comic part of his brain was working.

“Oh, how about squirt? Curd? Chunky?”

Jaff ignored him, but could have sworn some voice had whispered something terrible in his ear. He felt a brief urge to punch the comic, which was strange as Jaff had only punched four people in his entire life and each one of those had been in the service of running The Square. He remembered every punch vividly, from the anxiety of the wind up to the surprising joy of aggression to the pain in the hand afterward.

The fire continued raging in his head and Jaff left to go refill the ice containers from the machine next to one edge of the bar, grunting against the pain as he went. When he came back, Bass had moved on, but his constant headache companion hadn’t. And it persisted.

Later that night, Jaff had hoped sex might alleviate some of the pain, but Calista wasn’t in the mood. Though this was a frequent source of tension in their relationship, he found himself raging and screaming at her to the point where he had to sleep on the couch. He briefly considered a comedy bit where he would wonder, on stage, why men always had to sleep on the couch and what women were doing when they had the bed all to themselves, but then he remembered he hadn’t been on his own stage in front of a crowd in over a decade. He didn’t have the patience for it and had been around comedy long enough to know that he didn’t have the chops to ever make a serious run at comedy. Or so he told himself. He didn’t sleep much again that night and what sleep he had was plagued with images of fires, knives, and terrible things happening to people he didn’t recognize. In one flash that he remembered upon waking, he had punched someone at the bar and their head had split apart, thick, black and red goo splattering on Jaff’s arms and face. Instead of waking up and shaking it off, the images from his subconscious stuck with him long after breakfast.

The next day, Friday, Jaff couldn’t remember ever feeling so foul. His head was still on fire, sure, but his guts were starting to roil from the second he stood

up. Everything from the light streaming in his living room window to the constant sounds of cars and foot traffic outside pierced through whatever barriers he had put up over the years and penetrated like a spike into his brain. How had he ever lived in this city, much less for so long? The sounds were constant, the filth was everywhere, the rot too deep. How could this be his life?

Calista had run off to yoga or some such and even the pleasant thought of her in stretchy pants was soured by memories of last night and how she had, politely but firmly, turned him away and how he had, not politely and forcefully, called her terrible names because of it. He remembered briefly wanting to throw something at her. He would have done it had something been handy. Maybe he could still do that later on.

“Come on, Jaff,” he said to no one. “You’re not that guy.”

The words were swallowed by the empty apartment with its strange shadows, seemingly cast by nothing at all. He took another handful of Advil, emptying the bottle, and went to work.

Keeping the books, dealing with talent, and running a bar was more than enough work for one person, and Jaff had always prided himself in getting a lot done in a short period of time. Friday morning, he fell into a familiar groove – returning calls, prepping the bar, sending emails to the night’s talent, and paying bills. Everything had gone fine, the headache even receding a bit, until he opened two letters in a row, one from the electric company saying rates were going up and another from his wholesale alcohol distributor saying the same thing. He scanned the letters, reading words like “kilowatts per hour,” “tariffs,” “political climate,” and “glad to serve you,” and all of a sudden, without forethought, he spun around in his chair and punched the nearest wall.

He got all of the wall

(which didn’t budge) and expected to feel pain radiate through his body. Nothing came.

“How the FUCK,” he yelled, again to no one, “am I supposed to stay in business when I’m getting nickeled and fucking dimed to death every second I fucking turn around?”

No one answered, but it didn’t seem like he was yelling into the void. Far from it, as a matter of fact.

Truth was, business had been bad for a while. He had done his best to hide it from Calista, which wasn’t hard because she had no legal financial stake in the business and they both kept separate checking accounts, but the place was in bad financial shape. Part of it was the consistent, oppressive rise in all aspects of the business – taxes, booze, taxes, electricity, taxes, competition for help. Paying comics like shit for the right to get on a stage that had some mystique and still drew crowds was the only part of his business model that still worked. He had done that math and there was no way he could survive another year without serious changes. The Square was moderately famous for its one-drink minimum, which had been a calling card in the early days and was now an anchor dragging the place down.

As things stood, he’d be out of the business and on the street by the summer, which was a slow time anyway. He was in the endgame. His time at The Square was going to be over soon.

The numbers had been there for a while, but that afternoon, feeling foul and angry, was the first time it had ever really sunk in. Closing time was a long time coming and was barreling at him like a freight train on fire. In months, not years, he would be out on his ass, unqualified for any other work on the planet.

A kick to the bottom of his desk sent items rattling and falling around him, the loud bang echoing in his ears to the point he didn’t pick up immediately when the phone in front of him rang. When he did pick it up, his hand was shaking.

“Hello.”

“Jaff Maul.”

“Yes.”

“Please hold for Terry Stafford.”

There was a rustle 

and a sharp noise on the other end then the surprisingly deep voice of comic legend Terry Stafford crept across the line. He sounded slow and tired.

“Hello, Jaff?”

“Yeah, this is him. I’m here.”

“Hey, I’m in town doing a few sets and I’d like to come do some time.”

“Absolutely,” Jaff said, stumbling for his smart phone where he kept the evening’s schedule. “When do you think you’ll be here?”

“Between nine and ten,” Stafford said. “I don’t need to tell you this is not a promoted performance, right?”

“No, I…I got that,” Jaff said, the previous moment’s troubles melting away like butter on a hot skillet. “I know the drill.”

“Good man,” Stafford said. “See you tonight. You still with that skinny girl…what’s her name?”

“Calista. Yeah, still living above the club.”

“Keeping the light burning for us comics. Good on you. See you around nine.”

“Thanks for thinking of us.”

“Yeah. It’s been a while.”

And with that, one of the most influential stand-ups of the last forty years hung up. Of course Jaff had met Terry Stafford before. He had met damn near everyone, but Stafford was legendarily gregarious and had a politician’s gift for remembering names, faces, and venues. It had been at least a decade since he had last performed regularly and more than twenty years since his seminal comedy album Fartknocker, which was labeled as both revolutionary and the end of western civilization. The man could work blue, and when he got cooking, he could absolutely destroy a crowd, or at least he could twenty years ago. His career had given way to subpar movies and cancelled TV series. Either way, it was going to be an interesting night.

This was what he had gotten into the business for – crazy nights where crowds would leave with a story they’d never forget. For a second, he forgot how 

 lousy he felt and enjoyed the light buzz that came with having a secret.

He heard Calista come in and yelled for her. She did yoga wearing jewelry, big, jangly bracelets and necklaces that had some sort of mystical properties that Jaff neither understood nor wanted to understand. All that mysticism and “soul repose” bullshit was obnoxious to him in the extreme, but he tolerated it because…why had he tolerated it again?

“What?” she said, still sweaty from yoga.

“I just got off the phone with Terry Stafford. He’s stopping by tonight.”

Her mood lightened, as she had seemed ready for a fight.

“It’s been a while since he’s been on stage”

“Yeah,” Jaff said. “Hope he’s still got it.

“It’ll be nice to have some energy in here.”

Both the headache and the rotten gut made themselves known.

“What did you say?”

“I just said it’ll be nice to have big energy in here. It’s nice.”

“That’s not what you said. You said, ‘It’ll be nice to have some energy in here.’ Like there’s not any energy in here.”

“Jesus Christ.”

She walked away and he stood up to follow her.

“I’ve sunk every bit of energy I ever had into this place!” he yelled, but she was already well past the bar and opening the front door of the club, disappearing onto the street, presumably toward the entrance to their apartment.

“You’re tired,” she yelled back. “Get some sleep tonight.”

It was a popular refrain, the solution to whatever ailed him. He got cranky when he was tired, she would say. Get some sleep. Like he was a fucking toddler and she was the mommy.

“Bitch,” he muttered. In the back of his head, a small voice spoke up, objecting to the word and the sentiment lobbed at the woman with whom he shared his life. The pain quickly made too much noise for that voice to have any sort of impact and Jaff descended the steep concrete stairs to the basement where the green room was to lie down on one of the filthy couches. He was suddenly tired, and if he could grab a few minutes of sleep, it would be a blessing.

The green room was an oddity among clubs, or performance spaces, really, as far as Jaff could tell. When comics first walked into The Square, they walked past the bar into the seating area. The stage was at the front, the tiny office was off to one side, but the green room, where comics often hung out before, during, and after the show, was down a flight of stairs and down a very short concrete hallway, actually underneath where the audience was sitting. The staircase that went down there was a dank affair to the right of the stage. Realizing it was always going to be a dank room in a basement, Jaff had leaned into it, leaving a single, uncovered bulb leading down the stairs that made it seem downright scary if you were in the right headspace. If they wanted, comics could wait in the stairway to go on stage, but most waited in the back of the room which had closed-circuit cameras hooked up to a big television so everyone knew when to go on.

Over the years the green room had earned the name The F Pit. It had happened when a road comic by the name of John Rabbit, who often played up his legends of debauchery on the road, refused to go to the green room at any point, telling anyone who would listen, “I ain’t going down in that fucking pit.” Fucking Pit became Fuck Pit, which didn’t sound good and was unfriendly to female comics, so it was eventually shortened to F Pit. Jaff didn’t mind. It gave the place character, and it was cool in the summer and held heat surprisingly well in the winter. Besides, comics don’t need much to hang out. The Hang was one of the few perks of the gig.

Years ago, a comic named Matt Campbell, who had gotten on a hot streak and made a bunch of money, bought Jaff a big neon sign that said “F Pit” on it. It had naked, small light bulbs surrounded by thick wires and a plastic background, but it was heavy, and when it was the only light source, cast a rather lovely soft glow over the subterranean room. He stumbled down the stairs, swung the big wooden door (from what he could figure the room used to be a secure office of some sort), clicked the light on, and collapsed on the couch. Mercifully, sleep came quickly, sinking him deep, low, and empty.

His nap was dreamless, mercifully, and he felt pretty good when he awoke. He checked the phone, saw that it was 6 p.m. He had woken up at eleven,

meaning he had worked for three hours and slept for another four. This was not typical, nor acceptable if he was to be ready for tonight.

“Holy fuckballs,” he said, rolling his frame off the couch. Colorful and creative profanity had always been part of the gig at The Square, and most other comedy clubs. Jaff was always able to hang with the comics, at least a bit, in the green room after the show, to shoot the shit with the guys and girls after they got off stage. Most of the time he was no match for the rapid-fire jokes that comics tossed around like it was nothing, but on a good night, he enjoyed watching them go. At least, he had at one point. This was not going to be one of those nights, as he felt worse than he had before he took a nap.

On weary legs he made it up the stairs before his phone exploded. Either because of the underground locale or some other reason that Jaff honestly couldn’t care less about, cell phone signals were never able to penetrate into The F Pit. For some it was a feature, others a bug.

By the time he hit the top of the stairs he had twenty-two missed calls, thirty-two texts, and one pissed off common law wife working feverishly to prep the bar.

“You were down there?” she said, dumping ice into a bin. “What were you doing?”

“I…took a nap,” Jaff said, still shaking out the cobwebs. “Didn’t mean to sleep that long. Sorry. I’ll be there in a second.”

Calista didn’t say anything, but kept working. She was clearly pissed and had decided the cold shoulder would solve all her problems. The word “bitch” floated across Jaff’s mind again, a word he had railed against and tried never to use, and he swatted it away.

Calls and texts were from comics looking for time, distributors he assumed Calista had handled, his mother (again), and a few other calls he could ignore. He worked through them just in time to open the doors at seven for the show to start at eight. Even in his hyper annoyed state, he took 

a stab at making nice with Calista.

“I’m sorry about the, uh, the nap,” he said. “Not like me. Haven’t felt myself recently.”

“Yeah, what’s up with that?” Calista said, breaking her self-imposed silence.

“I don’t know. My head’s been pounding, my brain’s been all over the place…”

“Go see a doctor, maybe?” she said. Her body language was still distant and it was starting to piss him off.

“Not yet.”

“Okay,” she said “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Rage crashed over him, quicker and harder than before. It happened so fast and with such force he wasn’t able to stop it.

“It’s not a fucking contest,” he said. “You either care about me or you don’t, you passive aggressive cunt.”

Jaff had never used the C word in his life, ...