Head Like a Hole: A Novel of Horror

Dean Henry gestured to the painting on the far right. “And here, Mr. Patel has recontextualized the subject through a Hindu lens. Skanda and his six severed heads replace Holofernes and his one. Tough work for the sword, except for six-armed Kali. Doesn’t she seem pleased with her vengeance?”

trauma of her suicide attempt and made the story of Holofernes her own.”

depicted as a newscaster, his heads repeating along a wall of TVs. The title: Self-Portrait (Sorry I’m Such a Mess). “It’s so… striking,” Megan said. “She updated it.” Megan recognized the woman depicting Judith and cutting her own throat. She’d passed her earlier by the restroom. Now she was talking with two others by a metal sculpture of a blue a

risks. Tell me what you see before you.” Megan’s eyes darted about the five canvases, the five variations on the same subject yet each radically different. She focused on the one in the middle, a mixed medium oil and newspaper collage intermixed with Polaroid pictures. Here, the sword-wielding Judith was a pudgy brunette, fully nude and raising the

sword across the general’s throat, the noble resolve upon her face, willing to do whatever it took to protect her city from destruction.” Megan nodded throughout it, familiar with the story. She found it empowering. She had even hoped to make her own someday, when she was a better artist and could do the subject justice. “My point—just so you don’t

“Judith beheading Holofernes,” Dean Henry continued. “The seductress-assassin who inspired countless brushes, from Botticelli to Caravaggio, from Goya to Klimt. A contrast of beauty and violence, youth and death. Some artists focus on the seducer, emphasizing her low-slung clothes, her breasts, her nude form. Others, her aggression, the slice of he

or hurt us or simply shared our life for a moment.

like to think we’re the sum total of all those who helped us

The little clues through which the truth can be triangulated, tracked down, and resurrected. Perhaps even punished. There is something here his listeners will devour. He can feel his mind pawing at them greedily. If only he can cut through her bullshit.