Head Like a Hole: A Novel of Horror

her fifth painting would be, certain only that she would discover it along the way like she had with the others.

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

Megan put her coffee on the stool, unsure what

“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

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

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

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.

that for two years and six months, they hadn’t come at all. And now they flooded her, too much to contain. Her only fear in this moment was that she might run out of paint.

She gave little thought to the stack of sketches she’d penciled lately. The snails chasing a scared dog. The car made of soft flesh sliding down a jagged cliff. And she gave little thought to these ideas and where they came from, only