By Victor Greto
MILLSBORO — Eric Enck told his wife Johnna he wanted to give himself a break this summer.
After three years of churning out a stream of short stories and novels — mostly horror tales as gaggingly gory as Jack the Ripper’s chapped gums — he thought he needed some downtime.
He couldn’t do it.
“Life just bores the hell out of me,” said Enck, 31, from the comfort of his huge light-coffee-brown vinyl chair.
He’s sitting in the spooky semidarkness of the living room in the horror poster-cluttered apartment he shares with Johnna, 27, their two children, Mason, 7, and Mallory, nearly 2, and Johnna’s father, a retired truck driver.
“I can’t be like these beach sheep,” Enck says, referring to Sussex County summer tourists. “Going out and laying on sand to burn their skin.”
Who knows, though.
An image like that to Eric Enck (pronounced like the “ank” in “bank”) is fodder for another book: Perhaps mottled green hands with long fingernails — bits of flesh hanging from them, of course — will bore themselves up from the sand and pull the unsuspecting beach sheep down under.
It works like that, you know.
From one idea or situation or book radiates four more, says Enck, whose amenable exterior perfectly contains an imaginative flow of gruesome brutality.
Enck is a writer who effectively tames and channels childhood demons from his mind through his fingers to the spongy taps of the computer keyboard.
Just about everyday, Enck cuts an artery, and the words — often clumsy, ungrammatical, over-the-top absurd, but as forceful, bloody and relentless as an automatic weapon — pour out.
The sky remained slashed open with a murdered sun and left no remorse for the twilight to follow, reads a sentence from the first page of his recently published novel, “The Reckoning.”
A handful of pages later: She cut his throat open with a pair of scissors just to see what it was like, although he’d been dead for several minutes from the Rat Killer. She remembers his eyes. They were listless orbs of what used to be. They were the eggs of ignorance. They were closed windows to a wrecked soul and a torn dream.
In the next year, Enck will be coming out with nearly a dozen works, from horror novels and a film to a graphic novel and short stories contained in anthologies.
“I have so many ideas,” he says. “I don’t want to do anything but write. I don’t believe in writer’s block. A book is never done. You can go off and create a new world about anything.”
“What impresses me so much about Eric’s writing, besides the fact that he is so prolific, is the execution of his ideas,” says Jane Timm Baxter, who is collaborating with Enck on a horror novel called “Fishers of Children.”
“He weaves a picture with words just like a movie or a holodeck experience from ‘Star Trek,’ so that all of your senses are involved. You can smell the blood as well as see it. You can feel the emotions in his work. It is very visceral.”
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Enck’s childhood seems to have been as visceral as they come.
“I was born coke-addicted,” he says, to parents in Lancaster, Pa., who gave him up soon after.
He was unofficially adopted by a man and woman living in nearby Ephrata, where he lived through high school.
In that household, he says, he received a good beating once a month, some so harsh the imprint of the belt buckle his old man used remained impressed on his skin for days.
But the incident that seems to initially have set the course of his life concerned his dog Strada, a black Mastiff-Labrador mix.
“He was a puppy when I was an infant,” Enck recalls.
By the time they both reached 15, the dog was sick and old.
“My dad made me kill it,” he says.
Enck vividly remembers the dog on the back porch of their home in the mountains. He shot at it with a shotgun. Blood splattered on the cedar shingles.
“I blew the top of its head off, and it just whimpered and crawled away,” Enck says.
It traumatized the teen so much he saw a school therapist, who gave him a piece of advice Enck has carried with him since: “Whenever you have bad feelings about life, write them down.”
He hasn’t stopped.
“When I write fiction and I’m physically crying, I know it’s working,” he says.
The violence of his youth showed him, he says, that it’s only in terrible situations where people either prove their mettle or show their true colors.
“All the emotions I feel I give to my characters.”
In person, however, Enck exudes both confidence and calm.
“Sometimes I say to him, ‘I can’t believe you thought of that,’” Johnna says of the more graphic serial killer descriptions oozing from her husband’s novels.
Enck wrote his first successful novel, “Tell Me Your Name,” while Johnna was pregnant with Mason.
“It’s about a serial killer who kills only pregnant women,” Enck says.
Johnna shrugs.
“I’m used to it,” she says. “I’ve been with him a long time.”
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Aside from writing down his morbid thoughts, Enck read a lot as a teen.
He learned from Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” — it has ghosts — and William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” — that icky scene with the pig and its intimations about the bestiality inherent in human nature.
But it was Stephen King’s “The Shining” that affected him the most.
“That to me was about my dad, an alcoholic,” Enck says.
As he wrote, however, Enck discovered he never wrote directly about the horror of his own life.
“If I wrote about my past, it would be all [screwed] up,” he says. “I like having my demons there. It feeds my imagination.”
After Enck graduated from high school in 1992, he took a series of jobs, the longest of which was at a Conestoga wood factory.
Within a year, 1995, Enck married and divorced a woman he met at a dance at the Ephrata Recreation Center.
Reluctant to go into details, Enck’s penchant for hyperbole seems almost muted when he renders his final verdict on her: “She was a psycho.”
Enck met Johnna in 1999 after he moved to Millsboro where her stepmother lived. He had moved into his mom’s garage-apartment and took a job as a security guard.
Johnna worked as a clerk at Wawa’s, and she pursued him. He used to come in to order a turkey hoagie and buy a pack of Marlboro Lights.
“I thought he was cute,” Johnna says. She asked him out, and their first date was at a local McDonald’s.
When they went to their first movie together, they got food, and Johnna hung several napkins over the backs of the seats in front of them.
“When she did that, I knew I’d love her forever,” Enck says.
Three weeks later she moved in with him. They married in 2004, with their child Mason as ring bearer.
Among the poster clutter of his home hangs a frilly white plate on which is written his wedding vows to Johnna. “It’s the best thing I ever wrote,” Enck says.
Enck also credits Johnna for pushing him to believe in himself and to begin writing full-length novels.
“I want to be a writer so bad,” Enck told Johnna soon after they started living together.
“I think you already are,” Johnna replied.
“That did it,” Enck says.
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Enck’s home is full of haunting paraphernalia, some of which he has gotten from his “nut fans.”
These include bottles of “Vampire” and “Werewolf” wine, imported from Romania (Transylvania), a charming rubber skull with one eye, and from the same fan who sent him the skull, a series of illustrations imagined from “The Reckoning.”
His posters include “Night of the Living Dead, “Halloween” and “Psycho” movie images, as well as smaller ones and covers of horror comics and posters advertising his own book signings.
Incense burns on a countertop that separates the kitchen from the living room, near a large, black laptop computer. A black desktop computer also hums nearby.
As he continues to write, Enck finds himself “ramping up” the graphic horror, the grisly details.
“People are numb to a lot of horror,” he says. “So I have to keep going further, into different, more secret chambers of the reader’s mind.”
His new collaborators, including Jane Timm Baxter, who lives in Georgia, and Adam Huber, who lives in Sussex County, say that that “ramping up” is part of a collegial competition, of who can write or think up more horrible situations.
“When you’re working with Eric, those sorts of ideas come out,” says Huber, 24. “Everyone’s got a few sick twisted ideas in them, and Eric’s got more than others.”
More of a crime novel than horror, Huber and Enck say, their coming novel, “Snuff,” may be forced underground because of the nature of its plot and the scenes within it.
The plot centers on an out-of-work actor and his friend, an amateur pornographer, who film custom “snuff porn” for high-paying clients.
“It certainly gets pretty rough and graphic,” Huber says.
But Enck is the mentor in this relationship.
“What he writes inspires me,” Huber says. Although Huber says it’s not a competition, in terms of the detailed horror, “We sort of want to outdo the other person.”
The same is true for Baxter, who “met” Enck online, and their coming novel, “Fishers of Children,” about a family of cannibals that abuse and then eat a suburban neighborhood’s children.
“I had written a blog about my desire to collaborate with someone, and he just sort of popped up and said ‘Let’s do it!’” Baxter says. “It was very surreal.”
Certainly no more surreal than the subject and graphic contents of their book.
As with Huber, Baxter and Enck traded off grislier and grislier chapters.
“It felt like a race with Eric, a contest to see who could gross each other out the most,” she says. “He would write something that would make my stomach turn. and I’d think, ‘Oh yeah, Well, take this!’ and write something as equally disturbing.”
Like Enck, Baxter says her compulsion to write horror comes from an abusive childhood and the nightmares she still dreams because of it.
“I wanted [‘Fishers of Children’] to be true to the revulsion I felt during the nightmares I had, so I had to turn it up a notch in my writing,” Baxter says. “The why? Because that’s what I do. I reveal the horror in fiction that comes from the horror of life and what can happen in it.”
Enck’s nightmares also seem as visceral as his childhood memories.
Recently, he dreamed his apartment was on fire. He charged upstairs through the flames and found his wife and one of his children burned and melted together.
But that wasn’t the worst part, he says.
“What was really tragic, I wanted to pull them apart, and I couldn’t,” he says. “I wanted to save them, separate out their bodies. It was awful.”
That may be akin to Enck’s attempts to tease out his personal demons through an increasingly grisly fiction.
He’s recently been trying to wean himself off the horror genre.
A couple of his coming works will be classified as “crime novels,” including his work with Huber, as well as his own novel, “Bullets Don’t Lie.”
But no matter how hard he tries, there’s going to be hell to pay in his books.
This seems clear in Enck’s remark about his desire to write a children’s book.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t,” he says.
“Someone would have to die.”