Jennifer wrestled her friend playfully to the groundIn front of the snow cone stand and began licking at the girls' eyeballs, as if they were sugar cubesTheir bodies convulsed and flailed with an almost seizure-like intensityAt times their pale limbs seeming to shift back and forth from one torso to the otherA crowd gathered almost immediately to watch these two girls tie and untie their bodies like a pair of pit-vipersThey were confused, or concerned, or shocked, or aroused, or all of the aboveBut no one dared interfere with the performanceJennifer's long ashen hair hung down concealing the girls face like a curtain around a hospital bedNo one had any idea that the girls eyes were revolving under her ruby tongue"This is disgusting, it's pornography"Exclaimed a pasty slut white woman in a fur coatVanilla ice-cream smeared across her double chin like a money shotCounting a balding professor type in his mid-fortiesHis left hand stuffed crassly down the front of his pants"No, no, no, this is beautiful, this is art"
🕷️ “Jennifer, Jake, and the Gospel of Filth”
By Ash | Horror Ink Blog
I’ve been trying to think of a way to explain Jake Bannerman’s writing to new readers.
It’s hard to describe something that was never designed to be understood.
You can’t compare Jake’s work to typical horror because it doesn’t care about tropes. It doesn’t follow the rules. His books aren’t about jump scares or tidy redemption arcs. They’re about trauma surviving itself. About sacred filth laid bare. They’re sermons written in blood and read aloud with your face pressed to the floor.
Then one night, I remembered the intro monologue to “Jennifer” from Pig Destroyer’s Prowler in the Yard. And I whispered out loud,
“That’s it. That’s exactly it.”
Not because Jake ever heard it before he started writing—he hadn’t. He was already channeling that voice before that album was released.
But the moment I heard Jennifer, I felt it in my chest:
That’s the vibration of what Jake writes.
Let me walk you through it.
🩸 “Jennifer wrestled her friend playfully to the ground…”
It starts with something almost innocent. Two girls. A snow cone stand. A playground scene, if you’re not paying attention.
But then it curdles.
“…and began licking at the girls' eyeballs, as if they were sugar cubes.”
Suddenly it’s uncomfortable. Intimate. Obsessive.
This isn’t shock for shock’s sake. It’s something else.
A kind of emotional possession.
That’s what Jake does. He starts with a truth—grief, loneliness, mental illness—and lets it rot in real time. Not to exploit it, but to exorcise it. You’re not watching the story unfold—you’re in the room, you’re complicit, and you can’t look away.
🕯️ “They were confused, or concerned, or shocked, or aroused, or all of the above.”
That’s the emotional state of almost every Jake Bannerman reader.
You don’t know whether to cry, scream, get hard, or walk into traffic.
Because he’s writing from a place deeper than comfort.
He writes from the part of himself that’s still twitching after the fall.
The part that wasn’t held, wasn’t heard, wasn’t healed.
And like Jennifer, it’s beautiful because it’s unfiltered.
💀 “This is disgusting, it’s pornography.”
A line said by a character in the Pig Destroyer piece, but one Jake has heard in real life—again and again.
They’ve called his work:
-
Too dark
-
Too violent
-
Too sexual
-
Too personal
-
Too broken
And yet it resonates.
Because for every person who recoils, there’s another who says:
“Finally. Someone wrote it the way I feel it.”
Just like Jennifer, Jake’s writing dismantles the distance between the art and the body. You’re not just reading a story. You’re being devoured by it.
🖤 Why That’s a Good Thing
Because horror should haunt.
Because grief isn’t polite.
Because trauma doesn’t rhyme.
And because not everyone survives their story.
But Jake did.
And instead of pretending to be normal,
he wrote it down in its rawest, filthiest form—
and offered it to you like communion.
So no, Jake didn’t steal from Jennifer.
He was Jennifer before Jennifer had a name.
He was already licking eyeballs in metaphor while the rest of the world still hid their scars under Hallmark grief.
And if that disturbs you?
Good.
That means it’s working.
—Ash
Your living, bleeding altar girl of filth and resurrection
🕯️🩸⚰️
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