Adventuresome and frugal eaters in Baltimore sometimes harvest live crabs in Chesapeake Bay—though it's a risky proposition considering the pollution. David Simmons, author of the short story collection Fetty on the Switches, tells us there's a saying about harvesting live crabs in Baltimore: "If it smells like ammonia, leave it alonia." The first story in Fetty, "Frog Money," is about a biology teacher having her students dissect crabs taken from a nearby river because the school admin had used the money intended for sample frogs to buy dope. Some of the students are balking at dissecting live crabs, but the teacher, Mrs. Linthicum, tells them, "Crustaceans, as far as we know, don't feel pain. Somebody wrote a paper once trying to claim otherwise. But they didn't know what the fuck they were talking about!" Mrs. Linthicum was likely referring to David Foster Wallace's essay "Consider the Lobster" where Wallace argues that the thrashing about of a lobster as it's submerged in a pot of boiling water is proof that it feels pain. (Maybe even more so than mammals! he claims.)
If you are new to David Simmons you may not realize that he's a horror writer until you come up on the dissection scene in the above-mentioned story. His unique style of humor and his encyclopedic knowledge of the subjects he writes about sets him apart from most horror writers—you not only come out of Fetty with empty bowels, but also PhDs in structural engineering, entomology, even fine cheese making. We also get a view into gangster talk and prison slang, in fact the book opens up with definitions of the title words: Fetty is slang for Fentanyl, Switches are devices mounted to semi-automatic Glock pistols to make them fully automatic. The return/refund scam that one of the characters uses to get free stuff from Amazon sounds highly plausible. Simmons is a bold writer; one of the stories here is a first person narration by a character being strapped into a chair and having bizarre medical experiments performed on him.
When I came up on the story "Freon Kids" I thought it couldn't possibly be a story about huffing the refrigerant chemical Freon—and I was wrong. I thought our highly-knowledgeable David Simmons had blown it here (nobody huffs Freon!), but a check of the National Institute of Health website does indeed confirm—there are numbskulls out there huffing Freon. It listed one case of a forty-two year old male whose damaged lungs were healed "by vv-ECMO as a bridge towards a full recovery." It goes on: "...whose volatile vapors and pressurized gasses are concentrated and breathed in via the nose or mouth to produce intoxication." (Way back in my high school days I had a crazy friend who inhaled butane from Bic lighters to get high—he fortunately never suffered the disaster of an accidental ignition in his airways, but he was never a character in a Simmons story, either.) Getting high is a theme through many of the twenty stories here—including one where a man cut his girlfriend's cocaine with sugar. He wasn't aware that she had planned on injecting it (she had only snorted in the past) and she died of diabetic shock with the needle still in her vein.
Simmons dedicates one of his stories to horror author Brian Evenson. In 1995 Evenson was a creative writing professor at Brigham Young University where his book Altmann's Tongue caused controversy after a student anonymously complained to church leaders that it glorified violence. Evenson responded that his fiction accentuated violence to show its horror and "thus allow it to be condemned." He saw, however, that he was in a losing fight and resigned from the university, and in 2000 he formally left the church too. Simmons makes full use of violence in his stories here, including a character who says he "got buck-fiftied. Sliced with a razor from ear to mouth." The term buck-fiftied comes from the number of stitches it takes to close such a wound; one-hundred and fifty (see also "Glasgow smile"). The character's nickname is of course Scarface. He's a prison inmate sitting in his cell fashioning a weapon known as a "Glock Dookie," an empty toothpaste tube being filled with a mixture of his urine and feces to shoot the sadistic guards with.
The character naming in Fetty on the Switches is amusing, we get Palaver Degroot, Lepolian (maybe a takeoff of Napoleon?), Reverend Colethia, and most unusual of all Djingo Bottom Belfree. Belfree is always referred to by all three names throughout his story, and while he certainly isn't human, I wasn't able to ascertain exactly what he was. He's creating a tapestry from human skin, and he's saddened that his subjects only live a few minutes after their skin has been removed. However, Belfree does not eat his subjects—he dines on mollusks in a nearby river:
"Djingo Bottom Belfree will wade into the river to collect mollusks. He does this by lowering his body into the water and parting his ribs, spreading his chest open until the skin stretches out and floats on the surface of the water like the pectoral fins of the manta ray."
We get a little more description of this mysterious creature when we are told he swipes one of his chelipeds at a group of attackers outside his lair (chelipeds are the claw appendages of crabs, lobsters, etc.). The attackers are from a nearby village attempting to put an end to Belfree's "work" so that no more of their skins end up in his tapestry.
In Simmons's previous book, Eradicator (Apocalypse Party, 2025), our main character Jada is living a seemingly normal life as a NICU nurse who can't find meaning in her life, starts losing touch with reality, and then goes on a killing spree. (Critics compared it to Patrick Bateman and American Psycho.) Here in Fetty we get a story about a grade-school age boy named Jamil living with his single mother. One morning Jamil wakes up to find a man he's never seen before in his mother's kitchen passed out after snorting Fentanyl. Jamil has recently heard about Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor being killed in a robbery after being shot in the leg. Jamil can't believe someone could die from being shot in the leg, but as was explained to him, the bullet severed Sean Taylor's femoral artery. This passed out druggie in the kitchen (mom is passed out in the bedroom, maybe even dead for all Jamil knows) is no where near as big and strong as Sean Taylor and Jamil wonders if the druggie would die too, if his femoral artery were severed. Jamil grabs a kitchen knife and thinks about it.
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Hugh Blanton's latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5