In releasing her second volume of short stories, Gutter Balls, Cindy Rosmus shows no mercy.
A writer of horror in what is called the hardboiled tradition, the Bayonne resident creates cutting-edge, risqué fiction that shocks as well as entertains. In her first book, Angel of Manslaughter, released last year, Rosmus said she selected material that could be considered mainstream.
This is not true with her new book.
“These stories aren’t for everybody,” she said.
A Bayonne resident for nearly 24 years, Rosmus said she has been writing since she was 5 years old. An editor of textbooks by day, she takes on a new identity as a writer of gritty, dark fiction during other hours. Though she once delved into writing pornography (which she claims is boring), she explores the darker aspects of the human character through her fictional stories.
Over the years, her work has appeared in diverse magazines from Oui and Just 18 to cult-like underground magazines such asHardboiled, Devil Blossoms, and Black Petals.
Taking on a writing genre normally associated with male writers, Rosmus is not shy in her depictions, often forcing characters into tough, no-nonsense situations from which there is no easy way out.
‘Even sicker’
“My new book has 15 stories that are even sicker than my last book,” she admitted. She noted that the story “Jet Fuel” inGutter Balls is the sequel to “Hangovers” from Angel of Manslaughter.
While Rosmus often sets her stories in places she has traveled, the stories are shaped out of her imagination, painting aspects of the world that many people choose not to see.
“There is graphic violence in some of these stories,” she says. “But some of them are tender, too.”
At least five of the stories are what she calls “psychological horror,” while the remaining stories cover other aspects of the horror landscape.
Rosmus claims her writing is, in some ways, a kind of revenge.
“All of these stories have a streak in them,” she says. “I’m not afraid to write anything, and I’m not shy about anything.”
While most of these stories come out of a fictional landscape that might be described as Bayonne-like, some stories take place elsewhere, such as one centered in Hollywood. Another is set in Atlantic City. But most of the stories are drawn from, as Rosmus puts it, “the deepest, darkest pits” of her mind – or, as a line in one story called “Touch Me” puts it, from the “bowels of my own soul.”
Structurally, the book starts out rough, even brutal, but ends with a tender story.
“You might say I’m expelling my own demons,” Rosmus said.
Born in Newark, Rosmus uses real-life situations in her stories but recreates the characters and twists the plot into original stories that no longer have a clear path back to what inspired them.
“A lot of people see themselves in my work, but I’m really not writing about them,” she said. “I draw stories from other people’s experiences, but I always change them in some way. If it happened to a man, I make the character a woman.”
One critic called Rosmus’s work “downright sick, twisted, dark, dirty, deranged, and just the way we love it.” This new collection features Satan-loving hubbies, pornmeisters, and an unsuspecting bridal party, each of who get their just desserts.
Published in several online publications, Rosmus also hosts her own magazine, Yellow Mama, in which you can find her original works.
Her books can be purchased online or at Unique Books between 21st and 22nd streets on Broadway in Bayonne.