Puppet's Banquet

by Valkyrie Loughcrewe

Genres: Medical Thrillers; Horror

Synopsis

Married couple Celia and Martin are brutally attacked on their drive through the Irish countryside. The attack leaves Celia with a violent schism in her mind, seemingly existing in two places at once: one the “real” world, the other a howling maelstrom of abstract monstrosity.

Of her husband, there is no trace...until weeks later, when Martin is discovered in a hospital for rare and abnormal diseases, his body spliced together with that of an unknown woman.

And they are very pregnant.

PUPPET'S BANQUET is a “diseased Gothic”; a hallucinatory treatise on medical abuse; the systemic disease of colonialism and patriarchy; and the limits of human perception.

Cover art by Donna A. Black.

Interior illustrations by Trevor Henderson.

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Release date: May 14, 2025

Publisher: Tenebrous Press

Print pages: 132

Sample

There we are, coming back into the flesh.

Were you dreaming?

Still a bit groggy. That’s ok.

No, don’t try to speak, you might damage your tongue

Against the wire gauze, in your numbed state.

Follow the light. That’s it.

That’s it.

It is a very special thing to have you here

for you to be part of this procedure.

Unfortunately, however we—or you, rather, do not

have a lot of time before you begin to . . .

Well,

Let’s try and keep things pleasant for now.

I see you’re shifting a little in your bonds,

I do hope the restraints aren’t too tight.

Toxic shock would really interfere with what we’ve come to do here today.

I’m going to put something up on the screen now and I want you

to focus,

focus on the image, and the sound of my voice.

Some of it will be pre-recorded,

the rest of it will be alive,

in here with you.

With us.

And hopefully, once this ends,

you and I will finally understand

why all of this had to happen.

 

SLIDE 1:

Verminations in the carrion infinity

Humans were meant to exist in living tribes,

gathered around the fire, bustling nonstop

from sunrise through sunset and beyond

children were meant to sleep to the sound of

crackling fires, murmuring conversation

the tapping of drums and the flutters of music

memory is a network of nodes reaching out to

one another, connecting through story and song

when humans are separated, sorted into right-angled

living catacombs, a kind of decay that sets in

a decay of meaning

and memory

can you imagine the kind of things that

certain people might

get up to?

in their desperation

in search of a signal through the noise?

FIRST, WE MUST draw our attention back to a large, well-kept house nestled in the misty veils of the Irish countryside, as the last clink of cheap porcelain on a tray of expensive silver signalled the end of the evening.

It was followed by an exaggeratedly satisfied sigh, and an equally exaggerated rubbing of hands. It was not taken as obnoxious or unnecessary by the guests. The party had started at twelve in the day and it was approaching eight in the evening. The drinkers were drunk, the drivers were tired, and the gossip had long run dry.

Celia and Martin needed no excuse to be the first to filter out, though they did wait for a couple of the older family members to make their way out across the misty gravel driveway to their cars before they followed suit. They didn’t want to be rude, and it wasn’t as if they didn’t get on with Martin’s family, or his Uncle Paudy, whose birthday they had been celebrating.

There was, however, a kind of underlying tension to any sort of family gathering, on either side. They were from wealthy stock, our husband and wife, families with ties to heavy industry, real estate, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness and communications, ties to the twin dominant political parties which had robbed the countries blind for decades.

So where did the discomfort come from? Were dear Martin and delicate Celia, beneath it all, revolutionary socialists in the time-honored tradition of their ancestors, aghast at the rape of their beloved green isle? Of course not, the truth was far more banal—the pair had fallen on hard times, their mortgage getting out from under them. Their meagre jobs—Celia a schoolteacher, Martin a middle manager in a floundering infrastructure startup—were not quite cutting through the rolling

 waves of debt.

Being good Irish Catholics the pair of them, naturally they refused any offers of nepotism, plenary or partial, and by the point of the evening of Paudy Fitzmaurice’s seventy sixth birthday, the family had accepted their honourable stubbornness.

For the most part.

“Do you not think maybe you could take yer man a little more seriously?” Celia said, in a small voice as the car door shut behind her.

“Who now?” Martin asked, checking the rear-view mirror of his SUV to make sure there were no children standing behind it for him to reverse over.

For what it’s worth, if there had been, he wouldn’t have seen them.

“Sean’s brother—what was his name?”

“Hannon. Bit of an odd name.” Martin sniffed.

“It’s a good job he was offering. You’re well cut out for it.”

“He’ll have me doing nothing. Same as me father, sitting at a desk doing piss all while I rake in cash, it’s no way to live. I’d turn into a fat-berg and then shrivel up.”

Martin chuckled to himself as they pulled out of the driveway, heading down the country lane. The light was failing, the sunset lost to wispy layers of cloud, all stacked on top of each other, such as the otherwise gorgeous view from the Fitzmaurice house was lost to the darkening grey haze.

“A fat-berg?” Celia asked, sounding perturbed.

“Ah, you don’t want to know what that is, you’d be put off your dinner, sorry I said it.”

Celia would be put off making Martin’s dinner, more like. Inside her pale and pretty head, Celia weighed if she should wade into the thorny issue of the futility of Martin’s employment. She knew that eventually when the pay dried up completely, he would move on to something better, but his stubbornness, his insistence that the firm was going to have some kind of breakthrough success that would wipe their slate of debt clean.

was a menace.

Said debt was always ticking up, as far as Celia was concerned, Martin’s machismo was not only prolonging their suffering, but inflaming it. As far as Martin was concerned, the worse things seemed like they were about to get, the more satisfying it would be when the dam broke.

It would be damn near orgasmic, a hand delivered climax to his righteous suffering, eased into being by way of his diligent practice of prayer and Sunday worship. His faith was unshakable, unlike his wife’s confidence in her own assertions.

All this aside, to call their marriage unhappy would be disingenuous. Life can’t be measured in pennies and pounds, and the pair were known to make each other laugh on occasion. They still enjoyed the warmth of each other’s bodies as they drifted off to sleep at night, and their fruitless attempts at fertility were for the most part adequately pleasant experiences.

They were used to the deep, ...