The Bitchfight

Sweet baby Jesus in bondage gear, Arnzen does it again. When the descriptor “weird fiction” was thought up and adopted by the horror genre, it was premonition of the work of Michael Arnzen. And he didn’t disappoint in The Bitchfight. Now just by the blurb on the back and the artwork on the front, you are somewhat prepared for the story for the first half of the story. But like all great stories, the first half just lulls you into a false sense of security . . . well as much as you can get in a Arnzen story. I mean, the basis of the story is about an underground fighting circuit that uses little girls. Do you feel safe?

Now you may be thinking, “Woah! W. D., how can you say that such an idea can make a good book?” Well, it’s really simple. Like Arnzen wrote in his afterword (as many people had the same thought about the idea behind the book that he wrote hilarious and eloquent defense), this is a story about something that happens in real life, only taken to the next level, or two, or five. Don’t believe me, look at all the YouTube videos of young girls beating each other senseless over a bad joke on Myspace. Read Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons. They will show you that women have the same impulses for dominance over others and are just as aggressive, if not more, as men. The creation of the underground fighting circuit is something that goes to the dark regions of the human condition: that we will, given the opportunity, control what we deem lesser for our own personal gain. So when you read this, remember: there is not only a method, but a meaning to the maddness. Take the risk, get uncomfortable, you’ll learn more about humans in these 73 pages than many 300 page novels ever written.

That is why Arnzen is a master of horror, because he is willing to stare into that Nietzschian darkness and laugh at it when it looks back and writes about how it scampered away in utter terror.

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