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.

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Dear Fiend: February 29, 1975


Editor’s Note: Ah, now I see what these two are up to. Looks like Halton Stoves and Tasty Yumyum are doubleteaming NaNoWriMo this year. The forthcoming anthology Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum will undoubtedly be a joint work as its title suggests. In this installment, Halton replies to a fresh-penned young Tasty for the very first time. If you missed Tasty’s letter, check it out first.
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Dear Fiend: February 26, 1975


Editor’s Note: Tasty Yumyum recently introduced his new project, Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum. We’ve seen the tantalizing Editor’s Note, and now it’s time for the first letter in the collection. Here we meet a naive young Tasty, writing a friendly letter to Halton Stoves with no way of knowing the epic story he was setting in motion.
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Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum


Editor’s Note: Tasty Yumyum has checked in with his day one NaNoWriMo progress. Don’t worry: we aren’t going to be posting every single word we all write. Some days, no doubt, we’ll have nothing to share but a brief excerpt—and other days nothing worth sharing at all. But everyone loves a good intro, and this Editor’s Note sets the stage for Tasty’s new project: Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum. Later today, we’ll also be bringing you the inaugural installment in this epistolary anthology. Continue reading “Dear Fiend: The Letters of Stoves & Yumyum”

Stoves, from the Sky


Greetings constant reader, Stoves here. Woke up this morning with a ghastly jellied feeling behind the eyes & a dwarf in my parlor! Had her dismissed by the help and then helped myself to a little brandy breakfast. Hell of a good time at the Pink Oarsman last night disposing of what little money my driver was able to loan me. Can you believe the cost of a lapdance these days? Inflation was a problem in more ways than one!

The condominium is in terrible disrepair. Trying like hell to recall who I gave the keys to before being dragged off to the pokey, although judging by the graffito on the walls and furniture they didn’t harbor a great deal of appreciation for the gesture. How the mail has piled up! Most of it unreadable documents in legalese, however none more illegible than the inappropriately large number of taunts and jibes, mostly in the form of postcards, from our ‘dear fellow’ Tasty Yumyum. I will not attempt to describe the flowery prose with which the most depraved and unholy scenarios of his demented fancy were communicated. Suffice it to say that the nude photos of my ex-wife enclosed in several of them were quite fetching—I had only to tear his image from them to make them of some use, or else scratch his face from the emulsion with a dirty fork, which was in itself gratifying. Continue reading “Stoves, from the Sky”

Damn you, Halton Stoves….

…damn you right to hell.

Maybe some of you don’t know Halton Stoves. Consider yourself lucky. This man (and I use the term generously) once petitioned Webster’s to have his picture placed under (“or in the general vicinity”, his words) the definition of degenerate. Upon Webster’s refusing such an absurd request, Stoves was arrested in Booklore pasting wallet-sized photos of his ugly mug into dictionaries, encyclopedias and even in thesauruses (under the word “gadabout”, for the love of Mutt). His writing, while beautiful and thought-provoking, has been known to cause cerebral Herpes Zoster, or brain-shingles. I overheard him once in a bar calling himself a “modern day mix of J. P. Donleavy and the team who wrote for The Littlest Hobo“. While I couldn’t have put it better myself, I found it to be quite pretentious, especially when considering that he was talking to a gumball machine.
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