Daniel Beauregard on His Story

“It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat.”

—H.P. Lovecraft from “The Cats of Ulthar”

Normally, I am loathe to add any pre or post-amble to my stories because I like the reader to take what I’ve written at face value, nor do I want to play any role in influencing their perceptions after the fact, preferring to imagine that these stories continue to fester and grow in the mind, expanding or contracting as they come into contact with the reader’s own perceptions of the world. In essence, I intend them to go well beyond the page; for me, personally, they’re not meant to be resolved, at least not in the traditional (literary) sense; the snake eats its own tail, etc. But when I submitted the piece to the editors of Cul-de-Sac of Blood, I mentioned this story was particularly difficult to write due to my love of cats, so they asked me to speak a little bit about its influences and the difficulty I had while writing it. I figured, what the hell…

For fans of Italian horror the main title of the story A Cat in the Brain will be easily recognized as the second to last movie directed by Lucio Fulci. Although not entirely inspired by the film, my piece does boast some compelling parallels, the most apt perhaps being the first scene depicting a cat tearing a brain apart to eat it. Aside from this grotesquerie, there are a variety of depictions of cannibalism, animals being fed body parts, a slow but prescient blurring of fiction and reality, and introspection on Fulci’s part (he plays himself) of his growing insanity. So it loosely inspired the main character’s loss of sanity and control, although I don’t address it as directly as Fulci does in his film. Also, it was a convenient title in which I could pay homage to one of the truly great masters of horror cinema. 

When I began writing A Cat in the Brain (or, Nine Lives, One Body), I intended to kill the cat nine times, having it return bearing the traces of the way in which it met its previous demise, compounding these afflictions like a macabre snowball until the very end. I quickly realized I had no desire to brainstorm and scrawl nine distinct cat deaths, nor was it necessary to do so. Hence, it became a body horror story also involving the killing of animals, wherein the animal comes back to haunt its antagonist/s. Although killing animals is hardly anything new in the horror genre (think Brian Evenson’s “Killing Cats” from Altmann’s Tongue; the scene from Dario Argento’s Inferno, where the antique dealer Kazanian tries to drown a sack full of cats in the East River, only to be subsequently attacked by rats and murdered by a line cook; and Poe’s exceptional story “The Black Cat”), I believe it’s still one of the things I truly find terrifying; think of how many little Bundys, Ridgeways, and Gacys are out there right now pulling the wings off flies and feeding dogs rat poison simply to watch their eyes glaze over. 

Anyhow, the story took a curve like a calico’s tail and that’s about the thick of it. Thanks for reading… and happy hunting, or whatever it is you do in your spare time. 

March 13, 2023