The Stink Ape: Ten Years Later
Reflections on self-publishing a “sex-negative” sasquatch story
On Valentine’s Day 2014 I unleashed The Stink Ape: An Erotic Ensemble upon the world. I released it as an eBook through Amazon, unabashedly self-publishing the work. I’ve been legitimately published multiple times since, often for much greater financial reward, but The Stink Ape stands as the work of which I’m most proud.
The Stink Ape could only exist as a self-published book. The most obvious reason for this is the obscene content. The book concerns, after all, the exploits of a maniacal sasquatch that kills human beings who have sex, all on account of an overdeveloped and genus-confused sense of smell. The titular cryptid plows through the small California college town of Heironimus (yes, that is a reference to the Patterson-Gimlin sasquatch footage), massacring the sexually active. I don’t feel bad about neglecting a spoiler alert for that synopsis, because reading The Stink Ape is more about enjoying the journey than the destination. Those who have read it — the full half-dozen of them — can attest as much.
Another reason no publisher big or small would touch The Stink Ape involves its repetitive content. The work is, quite literally, just a series of sex scenes interrupted by an incensed sasquatch who then kills the couple (or, in one case, trifecta) having the intercourse. The only semblance of a plot comes from a few interstitial chapters involving a local police officer who’s gradually piecing together the possibility that a cryptid could be responsible for the killings. This, I think, is why I labeled the work an “ensemble” rather than a novella or novel. That I had the audacity to refer to such a sexually explicit, relentlessly violent piece of writing via the elegant, Gallicized “ensemble” has consistently brought a smirk to my face over the past decade.
I got more smirks out of The Stink Ape than financial rewards. I make no bones about the fact that the eBook did not sell well. I suppose the cover picture featuring a human male in an obvious costume-rental ape suit (another Heironimus reference, by the way) didn’t do much to grab eBook enthusiasts looking for a new and exciting read. The summary, if said shoppers read it, did little more to convince them. Altogether, the project looked amateurish and unserious, no doubt. The concept of a cryptid killing people who had sex did not grip the masses.
Perhaps this pairing of horror and sex didn’t resonate with literate audiences accustomed to hearing about “sex-positivity.” Indeed, some among the select few who have read The Stink Ape have remarked that the book is overtly “sex-negative.” I find myself heartened by this interpretation. After years of hearing from Judeo-Christian sources about the evils of sex, Western progressives lashed back in the 1960s and onward by championing human sexuality. It wasn’t just okay to be sexual in whatever way you wished to express it, but it was good in a moral sense. As a progressive type myself, I’m all for people expressing their desire in whatever way it manifests. However, I will confess that I grew weary of hearing sex pundits and profiteers of all sorts (from educators to therapists to podcasters) talking endlessly about the “joy of sex.” Admittedly, their mantra vexed me all the more considering what little sex I was having. Again, I don’t begrudge anyone their sexual expressions, though I do get a bit tired of hearing people talk so volubly and idealistically about a biological function that’s ultimately rather banal and predictable. Sex-positivity sounded almost like secular theology. This strikes me as intellectually suspect. Sex is not deliverance. With The Stink Ape, either consciously or unconsciously, I think I tried to posit the heretical notion that perhaps sex isn’t always good. It can emotionally wreck the persons involved in any given encounter. After Weinstein, Cosby, and most recently McMahon, we’ve seen how complex edifices of power are built on evil sex. Perhaps every wave of sexual pleasure does teeter on the edge of mortality. The Stink Ape, then, makes subtext into text by wrecking every sexually aroused person in Heironimus.
More broadly, the union of brutality and sexuality has long been a pillar of the horror genre. This is especially common in the slasher subgenre, where “sex equals death” endures as a foundational cliché. The Stink Ape is my attempt, I suppose, to explain rationally why sex equals death in horror. In probing the solution to this equation, I felt it was necessary to transition slasher tropes into the monster subgenre. Finally, with this homicidal hominid I’d created, the link between sex and death was now biologically predicated. Thus, we have the overinvolved Psycho-esque explanation at the very end of the book, with the professor character laying out her hypothesis for the Stink Ape’s fury (which I’ll leave for potential buyers to read themselves).
The Stink Ape’s inspiration, however, does not come strictly from an urge to put forward arguments and reconcile genre tropes. Deeply personal artistic influences show through in The Stink Ape. Most notably, The Stink Ape marries two grindhouse movies that made a distinct impression on me: Night of the Demon and Invasion of the Bee Girls. The influence of the former is readily obvious, as the film involves a maniacal sasquatch that kills campers and hikers via sadistic means that go far beyond the capacities of a wild animal. Rather, the sadism of the titular “demon” ventures into distinctly human territory. Here we see castration of motorcyclists and brutalization of Girl Scouts. While I may not have attained to the sheer cruelty of Night of the Demon (and certainly avoided its sexual assault scenes and — spoiler alert — cult-related elements), I did attempt to inject at least some of its grimy, grindhouse mean-spiritedness into The Stink Ape. As for Invasion of the Bee Girls, this film tells the story of radiation-mutated women who’ve turned vespine, using sexual advances to lure men and then predate them. In a classic exploitation gambit, this concept allowed the filmmaker to build the plot around multiple sex scenes. This film, then, provided me with a template for laying out an assemblage of chapters that revolved heavily around explicit erotica. The Stink Ape is the lovechild of Night of the Demon and Attack of the Bee Girls. It’s a love-letter to ridiculously violent and sexually exploitative cinema plotlines.
Other creatives have attempted a similar synthesis in the years following The Stink Ape’s release. In 2016, independent filmmaker Shawn Burkett released Don’t F*** in the Woods, a film about a Black Lagoon-styled creature that attacks a group of sexually active twenty-something campers, seemingly on account of olfactory cues. What results is silly, amateurish, and (mercifully) not even feature-length. I’m biased, of course, but I feel my own sex-incensed cryptid would be far more worthy of filming than this stinker. I have no illusions that Burkett and his rag-tag cadre caught even the faintest whiff of The Stink Ape. Still, I’d like to reiterate that I was the first to plant my flag in the territory of cryptids infuriated by the smell of sex, beating Burkett et al. by two full years.
While I may have been a pioneer in sex-crazed cryptid literature, I was certainly not the first to write fiction about stink apes. The term “stink ape” is, of course, the less common designation for the malodorous “skunk ape” that supposedly lives in Florida, and 2014 saw an inexplicable boom in literature dedicated thereto. Just before the debut of my Erotic Ensemble, Fletcher Best released Sniffing out Stink Ape. Best’s book is a comical 60-page romp that follows a cryptozoologist through the Florida swamps as he tries to prove the existence of the eponymous bigfoot. Though Best’s book offers some undeniable PG-13 guffaws, it lacks the meanness, savagery, and carnality of An Erotic Ensemble, if I may say. In the subsequent years, Best has made a nice little career out of comedic eBook sales, and I congratulate him for his successes.
With the looming tenth anniversary of The Stink Ape, I contemplated releasing some kind of new edition. This could have been as simple as going through the original text and fixing some of the typographical errors that went uncaught. However, I’ve decided against this, as I feel the typos are like the grain in a grindhouse print, contributing to an unvarnished aesthetic that shouldn’t be replaced. (For those of you immediately presuming the text must be error-riddled beyond readability, worry not: the most frequent issue is the comma splice, which I personally think is sufferable.)
Over the past ten years, I’ve also toyed with the idea of a Stink Ape sequel. The prevailing idea involves an asexual CIA agent who marks the only person truly qualified to come in and clean house when a series of familiar-looking, sex-based murders begins again in Heironimus. But as fun as that might sound, there’s something satisfactory about The Stink Ape universe as it stands. For one thing, there’s a rollicking, uncompromising quality to An Erotic Ensemble’s prose that I don’t think I’ve ever been able to realize when writing for publication. I’ve never felt freer as a writer. Now that I’m older and more bound-up in editor’s expectations, I doubt I could recreate that kind of magic in writing The Stink Ape 2. All told, I’m content with the singular testament I’ve provided, and I don’t know that another installment needs to be delivered. As such, I consider The Stink Ape canon closed.
With that, I encourage you to venture into the deep woods and buy yourself a copy of the one and only Stink Ape. Shamelessly, I offer you the Amazon link here. The book costs only 99 cents at present, so you really don’t have anything to lose. If you’ve read this far, you can evidently tolerate my writing, and so you won’t have much trouble getting through any given chapter of the book. You needn’t even read it in full. Like the French literary theorist Paul Valéry said of Proust, you can turn to virtually any page and get the full thrust of the artist’s vision. While you may be unimpressed by my vision, I can almost guarantee that you will be appalled by the violence. You may even get turned on by the erotica — that is, until the inevitable Gigantopithecus interruptus and the beauteous brutality that follows.
