Dear Fiend: July 16, 1975

Editor’s Note: After a long silence, editor Trent Yardles has sent us the latest sampling of his anthology-in-progress, Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum. In this installment, the good bastard Stoves has sent a letter to Tasty Yumyum that strives for oneuppance but instead only betrays the state of his own affairs. Mr. Yardles has included a newspaper excerpt for context.

For even deeper context, you might want to check out installments one, two and three of Dear Fiend.

Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum
Excerpt from Santa Clara Clarion, Written by Raul Ventura
July 16 1975

Local police were dispatched to the opulent residence of sugar baron Reginald Stoves last night in the city of Cienfeugos, in an attempt to quell a riot on the villa’s grounds. They arrived to find a veritable army of local residents brandishing shovels and machetes and milling about the mansions grounds, chanting and decrying its famous resident and laying siege to the property.

‘They came out of nowhere, just pouring over the hill and up through the gates. They broke through and killed the man at the door. They just went berserk, screaming and smashing whatever they could. We were overrun.’ said a member of the help who managed to escape the melee.

Reports state that about a dozen of them made their way into the lavish home where they proceeded to loot and destroy possessions found within the villa, including several works of art, precious artifacts of an unknown nature and antique furniture. A number of those present state that shortly after this breach occurred, the rioters were seen fleeing from the home, screaming in terror.

‘They came out shouting ‘The Devil is come! The horned prince will drag us to meet him in the flames!’’ a witness professed. It is claimed that P. Stoves himself was seen at that time in the doorway of the home, laughing maniacally and surrounded by the spreading fire, although this has yet to be confirmed by authorities.

It took firefighters over 3 hours to extinguish fires set by the rioters. The Stoves cane empire has been active in Cienfuegos since 1725, when it was acquired under mysterious circumstances from the Spanish crown. The ultimate fate of the estate’s owner or his family is at this time unknown. Damages are expected to be in the millions. —Cienfuegos, Cuba

Greetings YumYum, you foul little Nordic germ. I imagine you are just about in your glory, ensconced amid a bevy of blonde and buxom Swedish tarts, reclining somewhere in some steaming spring or perhaps a bog, in keeping with your tastes. I suppose I might as well offer you some congratulations, if not for your talent, which is negligible, then for your crass opportunism, which I am somewhat of an expert at myself. I have considered over the last several months that you carefully orchestrated this entire manoeuvre, crouched in the dirty hovel of your origin, sick to the very heart with jealousy at my accomplishments, both literary and carnal. How you must have seethed with inarticulate rage at your inability to obtain some degree of your own glory, outside of whatever petty accomplishments you were able to find in life before this incredible windfall of yours. I cannot say that I am unfamiliar with this feeling, as I certainly entertained notions of much the same sort when I was still a debutante, fresh from the sheltering tit of my family estate and yet to prove my incredible prowess to the world and womanhood at large. The difference however, is that the individuals whom I ruined on my way to the top of the heap were deserving of every ounce of disaster and defacement that they discovered at my hand. They were the lot of them a gaggle of conceited mummies, wizened by their own deep stagnation and irrelevancy, whereas I remain at this juncture a vital quantity whose best work has yet to be realized.

I’m certain that in between masturbatory readings of your own reviews and indiscreet rompings with the cousins who no doubt have flocked to your suddenly inflated bank account, you have come across one of the myriad accounts of my present situation, which I daresay never stray too far from fact. It is true that I have been dropped by my publisher amid an onslaught of ‘bad press,’ although to say that is to filigree the proverbial turd to an dismal degree. It is equally true that burnings of my catalogue have proliferated around the globe and I am verbally and physically accosted most places I go.

‘There he is, the monster!’ they shriek. ‘Usurper of morality!’ they cry. ‘Eat shit and die!’ they offer. Assuredly they, like millions of others, have read your licentious book and have believed every accursed word of it, despite the esteem of my reputation and that of my beloved family, which has been hard-won over the course of many generations, in opposition to yours, which has suddenly and falsely found itself raised high and flapping on the public’s unending hunger for vilification and tawdriness.

Perhaps you are aware that there is now in general manufacture a likeness of myself in the form of an unpleasant and offensive mask, intended for adults and children alike to wear during their Hallowe’en revels, designed to incite derisive laughter and ridicule at my own expense. I have even found to my utter dismay that this very article is fabricated at my grandfather’s own novelty and rubber goods concern, whose facilities I once managed in my salad days as a blue-collar drone. Can you conceive of the humiliation of this? Doubtless no, as you ooze from one garish public appearance to the next, smiling and gawking like a pale mongoloid at the literary and social platitudes you gluttonously swallow up. Well mark my words YumYum, your star is fleeting, only to descend and ultimately crash into an immense and fiery crater from which you will never emerge!

Eat shit.
HS.