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That Very Human Fear
Viscera Varnish follows a Chicago artist who returns to a grisly private ritual after a humiliating gallery opening confirms his fears that the art world has lost faith in his work. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The story actually began as a short story concept. Toward the end of last year, I saw a publisher looking for submissions in the vein of The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt—stories where a character’s flaws ultimately lead to their downfall or where there’s a dark moral at the end. I outlined six different ideas with that theme in mind, intending to submit one to the anthology.
Ironically, Viscera Varnish was the one I almost threw away. Of the six concepts, it was probably my least favorite. Before scrapping it completely, I decided to revisit it one last time and realized the biggest problem was the main character. My original version of Daniel was far too cartoonish to be compelling.
Once I reimagined him as an artist desperately searching for inspiration, the story finally clicked. That idea came from a very real place. At the time, I was wrestling with my own creative process, trying to come up with ideas for future books and wondering where inspiration actually comes from. Daniel became an exaggerated reflection of that struggle. Thankfully, I don’t resort to the horrifying methods he does, but I took that very human fear of running out of ideas and pushed it to its darkest possible conclusion.
Daniel Virek is both repulsive and strangely compelling. How did you approach writing a protagonist whose inner logic remains believable despite his monstrous actions?
At his core, Daniel’s motivation is actually very relatable. He’s searching for inspiration, and I think anyone who works in a creative field—whether it’s writing, painting, filmmaking, or music—knows that feeling of desperately wanting to create something meaningful and wondering where the next great idea will come from. That part of him is rooted in my own experiences as a writer.
Where Daniel becomes frightening is in how far he’s willing to go. I enjoy exploring what happens when an ordinary human desire collides with someone who’s willing to cross a moral line that most people never would. That contrast is what makes him compelling to me. Readers may understand his frustration without ever condoning his choices.
My hope was that readers would find themselves following his logic for a while, even as they become increasingly uncomfortable with where it’s leading. Eventually there’s a point where you can no longer go along with him, but by then you’re invested enough to see how it all ends. I also wanted his ultimate fate to feel earned—a conclusion that reinforces the consequences of the choices he makes throughout the story.
The novella gradually shifts from psychological horror into something more supernatural and metaphysical. Did you always intend to widen the story in that direction?
Yes, absolutely. I always intended the story to expand in that direction. Most of my creative influences come from film, television, and books that embrace the paranormal, the supernatural, and the cosmic. I’ve often described my work as what might happen if David Lynch and H.P. Lovecraft were somehow merged together, and that’s still probably the simplest way to explain my approach.
What I enjoy most is starting with something ordinary and grounded. I like stories that feel believable, even mundane, before gradually allowing the impossible to seep into them. I think the supernatural is far more effective when it intrudes on everyday life rather than existing in a world that’s already fantastical.
To me, that contrast is what makes the strange feel believable. If the world around the characters feels authentic, then when reality begins to fracture, it invites readers to wonder if the impossible might be lurking just beneath the surface of their own lives. That’s the feeling I always hope to create—the sense that maybe there really are monsters under the bed after all.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m currently working on my next novel, The Day the Sky Died, a work of cosmic horror wrapped in an archaeological mystery. If I had to describe it in one sentence, I’d say it’s what you might get if H.P. Lovecraft wrote and directed an episode of The X-Files.
The story follows an archaeologist who uncovers evidence tied to a decades-old mystery, only to discover that some things buried beneath the earth were never meant to be unearthed. Like much of my work, it starts from a grounded premise before gradually descending into something far stranger and more unsettling.
I’m aiming to release it either late this summer or very early fall in time for Halloween season, though I haven’t announced a firm release date just yet. I’m working with the great Matthew Wildasin for the cover art. He did a great job on Viscera Varnish and I know what he comes up with for this one will be good too.
After that’s finalized, I’m all in on writing a sequel to my first book Reflections in the Dark.
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Now he’s fading—creatively, spiritually… and dangerously.
As critics turn cold and inspiration dries up, Daniel becomes obsessed with reclaiming the raw, visceral power that once made his work undeniable. His search leads him away from galleries and into the city’s forgotten spaces—where desperation, suffering, and whispered promises begin to take shape.
What starts as a desperate pursuit of artistic truth becomes something far more unsettling.
Something that doesn’t just demand creation…
but transformation.
Viscera Varnish is a psychological horror novella about art, identity, and the cost of creation—where genius rots, obsession festers, and the line between artist and medium begins to dissolve.
Viscera Varnish: A Novella
Viscera Varnish, by Jason Garman, is a horror novella about Daniel Virek, a celebrated Chicago artist whose talent has begun to curdle into repetition, panic, and desperation. After a humiliating gallery opening confirms that the art world is losing faith in him, Daniel returns to the grisly private ritual that once made his work feel alive: murder as medium, the body as pigment, suffering as process. What begins as a portrait of artistic decay soon slips into stranger territory, where guilt, ambition, and something occultly bureaucratic gather around him like wet paint refusing to dry.
I liked how confidently the novella marries the grotesque with the mundane. Garman does not treat Daniel like a mythic monster at first; he lets him move through apartments, galleries, fast food bags, traffic, bad parking, and petty professional humiliations. That ordinariness makes the horror feel less theatrical and more contaminating. The violence is extreme, but the more unsettling element is Daniel’s almost clerical calm. He has turned atrocity into workflow, and the book keeps asking whether the world around him is horrified by that or merely waiting to see if the result sells.
What I appreciated most was the way the book skewers the appetite of the art scene without flattening it into parody. The gallery patrons, managers, and critics are ridiculous, but they are not harmless; their hunger for genius gives Daniel’s monstrosity a market. The prose has a slick, nasty elegance when it wants to, especially in the descriptions of canvases that seem less painted than coagulated. I also liked the late turn toward the uncanny, where the story stops being only about a killer artist and becomes something more metaphysical: a grim little fable about inspiration, extraction, and the cost of being “special.”
Readers drawn to horror novellas, psychological horror, body horror, supernatural horror, occult and dark art thrillers will find plenty to admire here, especially if they like their nightmares intimate, bloody, and morally rancid. Fans of Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart may recognize a similar fascination with the border between ecstasy, creation, and mutilation, though Garman’s voice is grimier, more contemporary, and sharpened by satire of artistic prestige. Viscera Varnish is a savage little gallery of ambition and appetite, where the masterpiece is never as frightening as the price paid to make it.
Pages: 131 | ASIN : B0H1DSB67X
