Hieronymous Bosch And the Gunslinger Sweet Belladonna

[Robert Crisman]

Bosch winked off the mountain and into fantasia made hard urban landscape at Halloween midnight, with sex backed by murder and all the appropriate drumbeats.

He walked up a street with cafes and juke joints and other low dives, and it seemed that he'd lived here forever with people he'd known, like Richard McKenny, the Man Of 10,000 Moves, who popped out of ether and lit up his pipe and started to walk alongside him.

Bosch knew McKenny alright, as a domino player who'd clipped him one night in an Amsterdam teahouse and then bought him breakfast and brought out a fine drug pastiche, the bomb that sent him right into a triptych he'd paint some years later, The Garden Of Earthly Delights.

Ah, boogie nights... In the Garden Bosch learned there are two kinds of women that ply downtown hells: doormats for love and those who wax colder than dry ice and blackmail, with wind chill thrown in.

And now on this street--a garden of sorts--Bosch saw Belladonna headed his way, smoking and smiling and licking her lips, her eyes fixed dead on him, her miniskirt slit to her gunbelt; McKenny laughed and stepped into nothing, and Bosch stood there dreaming the dream we all dream of--and knowing he'd just lost his last chance to lay Hell to rest...

[Bill Floyd]

Fantastic.  Delirious and deeply imagined yet historically grounded: a new earth ripe for tilling.   

[Angela]

So fine, my friend.  Loved the drumbeats, the dry ice and blackmail, and the gunbelt.

[Brad Rose]

As usual, this piece is suffused with enviable descriptive pyrotechnics and stunning phantasmagoria. Not to mention,"her miniskirt slit to her gunbelt." My kind of woman. Gulp!