Bodies of Work: A Novella

At sixty-six years old, Winston Kemper has always been a nonentity. No one notices him. His simple existence barely registers for those who come into contact with him. Some call him feeble-minded. He is a janitor at the local church, a groundskeeper by default, and that’s it. No friends, no family. When he’s done with work, he returns home—a remote, single room apartment located above a garage—and that is where his true work begins.

Winston Kemper is a collector of voices, and his magnum opus—The Butterfly Girls—is a sprawling epic of untapped imagination. It has no single canvas, no particular frame. It is everywhere—scribbled on the walls, the floor, and countless notebooks.

Winston is creating a fantasia which exists in words, images and blood. As part of his ‘art’ he has been murdering forgotten women. Poor souls who slip through the cracks of society, who no one’s looking for. Mothers, sisters, daughters to someone, but no more.

Winston takes their lives, their voices. 

But now he can hear them. They whisper to him. They talk of revenge. 

Winston Kemper might not believe in ghosts, but he is about to learn they are very real. And they are very, very angry. 

A surreal and dreamlike novella about the ghosts of our past and the dangerous, obsessive pursuit of art, from the “true master of horror” (CJ Leede, Maeve Fly).