Wanted Dead or Aleve
Michael A. Arnzen

"All Day Strong, All Day Long." The pain reliever as work ethic fantasy — not a wish for "a leave" of absence or an escape from the pain of labor, but a dream for its exact opposite: infinite productivity, and therefore re-productivity. 24-hours, strong and long: this is the bald dream-wish of the impotent and the dysfunctionally erect. They beat Viagra to the slogan. It's no surprise that the root of "Aleve" echoes the "lev" in levitate, lever, Levitra. "Aleve" — in perfect consonant rhyme with "Alive" — staves off the omnipresence of Death with a pill, that symbol of all commodification. Behind Eros, Thanatos lurks, haunched with back pain, but still getting the job done.

Michael A. Arnzen was born in Amityville, NY — hometown of the infamous horror house. After a brief stint in the U.S. Army overseas, where he began writing horror stories to entertain his fellow soldiers, he moved to Colorado where he launched his career in publishing to much success. By the mid-nineties he received the coveted Bram Stoker Award — the highest accolade in the horror genre — for his first novel, Grave Markings. Shortly thereafter, he went on to earn a Master's degree while working on his second novel, soon followed by his Ph.D. in English at the University of Oregon, where he studied the role of horror and nostalgia in 20th century culture in a dissertation called The Popular Uncanny. Arnzen now lives near Pittsburgh with his wife and cats. He is an Associate Professor of English at Seton Hill University, where he teaches in an innovative Master's degree program in Writing Popular Fiction. Visit him at his official website GORELETS.