This is a 24,000 word horror novella about a morbid fascination: self-help.

It’s one of the 21st century’s phenomenons. It’s corruptible linguistically. One letter away from “sell-help”. Another letter away from “self-hell”. It’s corruptible in other ways, too. Scientology. James Arthur Ray. Jonestown. History is full of charismatic sociopaths with the solution to all your problems, so long as those problems are a heavy wallet, your sanity, and your life.

This book takes that idea, turns the dial to 11, and tears it off. Review copies are available. Hit me up at mail @ this website URL, with “Gateless Gate, Skyless Sky” as the subject line.

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“…Welcome to the program, Mr Zhang.”

What would you do to change your life?

What if you said ‘anything’…and meant it?

Jiro Zhang is a small-time criminal, steadily circling the drain. Then he meets Makassar, psychologist and founder of the Gateless Gate, Skyless Sky method.

This method is like nothing that has ever existed before. Its techniques are terrifying, illegal, and perhaps deadly. It can cure you of anything, even your humanity. It’s Zen Buddhism on steroids, crack cocaine, and Zyklon B. Jiro just has to sign the dotted line.

Under the guidance of the sinister Makassar, Jiro will walk a path to the edge of sanity, and then far, far beyond. He’s on the ultimate self-help journey…but he might look inside and find there’s no “self” left at the end.

Gateless Gate is a horror novella that mixes Buddhism, transhumanism, and ultra-violence. It’s the tale of a man who tears out the darkness in his soul and replaces it with something a thousand shades blacker.

[The Gate Opens Wide.]

If Metallica’s career was a movie narrated by Morgan Freeman, here’s the part where he says “…and that’s when it all started to go wrong.”

“It’s slow” is a common complaint lodged against Metallica’s 1991 self-titled release, but that’s not the true problem: a slow Metallica album might be actually interesting. Instead, what they did was take any possible extremity and…make it less extreme.

A few long songs became lots of short ones. Furious speed became a uptempo bounce. Droning slowness became a downtempo plod. Everything was smoothed out, graded even – this is an album so flat you can iron your clothes on it.

Pick out something you liked about 80s Metallica. Odds are, that element is now either gone or greatly reduced. It could have been career suicide, but unknown to everyone, they were positioned ride one of the biggest waves in popular music.

Nirvana’s Nevermind was sliding out of Seattle’s bomb bay doors, and rock music would be destroyed and rebuilt in a new, “alternative” image. Rock concerts became the new place to get bored out of your skull, and Metallica became the heavier version of the grunge rock craze. People seemed to dig their new lack of pretension. Playing too fast or too slow is trying, man. And trying isn’t cool.

Sometimes, The Black Album hits home. Other time, it’s my finger that hits home, on the skip button.

“Sad but True” is pedestrian and lacks energy. Hetfield’s riffs are weak and Ulrich’s drumming has a mechanical, overproduced quality. It almost seems to flop out of your speakers.

“Enter Sandman”…chronic overplay is an interesting phenomenon. Some songs survive it, other songs don’t. No further comment except that I neither want nor don’t want to hear “Sandman”: it inspires no reaction from me at all.

“Nothing Else Matters” is either the most commercial Metallica song ever or an fascinating fusion of genres. Apparently Hetfield wrote the first few bars while on the phone with his girlfriend, which is why the opening arpeggios can be played with one hand.

“Holier than Thou”, “Through the Never”, and “The Struggle Within” rock fairly hard and pull the album back a bit to a thrash metal sound. “Never” is the album standout, featuring one of Hetfield’s better vocal performances and an energized set of riffs.

The rest of the album is a crapshoot of commercial-sounding metal carefully calculated to not scare anyone wearing flannel and stonewashed jeans. Tracks like “Don’t Tread on Me”, “Of Wolf and Man, and “My Friend in Misery” are now heavily dated, especially if you believe metal should push against a boundary somewhere. None of it is offensive, but you want something more – more speed, more heaviness, more hooks, better developed ideas. Instead, these songs just show up, punch a clock, do their job, then leave. They’re the Teamsters of the metal world.

For all its failings, The Black Album is not grunge rock. But it’s infected with the grunge rock disease, a pretentious lack of pretension.

Sound contradictory? Welcome to the 90s. Rockstars pretending to be tortured, introverted loners while making millions of dollars. Pantera and Ministry conducting Stalinesque purges of their back catalog, lest anybody suspect they were capable of laughing or having fun. The whole decade sucked. Phony, fake, wrist-slashing garbage. Lyrically, Hetfield bows to changing times only once, writing a sob story about his upbringing in “The God that Failed”. Musically, he bent so much he turned into a pretzel.

I wish there was more contrast. It seems like it was written so that every song could be a potential radio hit, and it comes off like a plate of mashed potato – some hills and some valleys, but it’s still pile of mashed spud.

Dalip Prajeet was arguing with his supervisor at the call center.

“I tell you, the phone in my bay’s not ringing,” he said. “Nobody’s called in two hours. Normally I get one every few minutes.”

“Well, the phone’s definitely working,” his supervisor said. “I traced the lines and everything.”

“So what’s happening?”

“Beats me. Maybe the software that diverts the calls doesn’t like you.”

“Can I have another bay?”

“The center’s at maximum capacity. Look, sorry, you’ll just have to sit there and hope whatever’s wrong fixes itself. Conversation’s over, pal. I have a floor to run.”

Then the supervisor disappeared, leaving Dalip fuming. This was going to screw up his metrics for the day.

He tried to clear up his desk, so that at least he was doing something on company time.

Among the scattered papers, he found a 3.5” floppy disk.

On it were two words. STRANGE LOOP.

He couldn’t recall bringing this in to work.

Had the supervisor put the disk there, and he hadn’t noticed? Why would a supervisor at a major telecom company put anything on a floppy in 2016?

Bored and irritable, he inserted it into his computer.

Immediately, a batch file started to execute, running a program called STRANGELOOP.EXE

His screen flashed and was replaced with a computer-rendered image. A moment of panic, then he remembered that his cubicle was in the corner of the building – nobody could see what was on his screen unless they entered his bay.

He looked at the image more closely.

It looked like a computer game from the pre-CD era. The resolution was 320×240. The graphics were 16-color CGA. The neon hues almost burned his eyes.

It was a crude, pixelated image of a man sitting at a desk in front of a computer, with his back to the viewer.

At the bottom was an RPG-style inventory of items. It only had one thing in it: a floppy disk.

He had cursor input, and could move a disembodied hand around the screen with his mouse.

Curious, he clicked on the floppy disk item in the inventory.

The hand picked it up.

He dragged the cursor over to the desk, and clicked again. The floppy disk appeared on the desk.

The pixelated man looked across, saw the floppy disk, picked it up, and after a minute, put it into his computer.

Spellbound, Dalip tried to see what was happening on the computer inside the game. The screen was too small and the resolution too low. A line of text flashed in the empty inventory: PRESS + TO ZOOM.

He zoomed in, saw that the computer inside the game was running a batch file, and that it was launching a file called STRANGELOOP.EXE…

On the man’s screen there was now a digital image of another man sitting at a desk, in front of another computer, with another floppy disk.

The man inside the game started to play.

They’re like little Russian dolls… Dalip thought, zooming in even further to see what was on the screen.

He continued “playing” for the some time, going down iteration after iteration, watching game after game get installed on computer after computer, each one contained within the last.

Eventually, he was at least twenty levels deep, watching another man insert a floppy disk, run a game, use his cursor to place a floppy on a digital desk…

Are they really like Russian dolls? He thought. If I go down far enough, will I reach a final one? Or does it continue forever?

A buzzer beeped beside his head, shocking him back to earth like cold water to the face. He realised he was now at clock-off time.

And his phone still hadn’t rung once.

He no longer thought this was a coincidence.

He gathered his things together, and remembered that company policy forbid the installation of third party programs on the office computers.

Whatever STRANGELOOP.EXE was, he’d get in trouble if it was discovered.

He was about to hit ESC to close the game and then erase it from his system, when something new happened on the screen.

The man at the desk was turning around to look at him.

Hairs stood up on Dalip’s neck as he saw an expression of alarm and confusion resolve amongst the pixels.

He pressed the – key.

Started zooming out.

Another face, looking at him.

Then another.

He started reassembling the Russian doll, flying backwards through the generations.

In all of the games, the man had turned around and was looking towards the screen, as if staring his own creator. The faces stared outwards, like the endless reflections of two mirrors.

Finally, there were no more games-within-a-game, and Dalip was at the original one.

Or is that really true?

Am I really the first? How can I know?

Each of those digital copies thought he was the first, the original, the only.

And each of them were wrong.

Suddenly, Dalip felt a sensation that he did not like at all, the sensation of being watched.

It was on his back like the hand of a ghost. His nerve endings tingled.

He turned around to see what was behind him.