Weaponized

Brian Shaugnessy was born in Framingham Massachusetts during the blizzard of 78’. His interest in the arts and in art as a means to shape the world was likewise born in Framingham.

As a writer and visual artist his work has appeared in several now defunct magazines dealing with the strange and esoteric. His work has also appeared in the anthologies ‘The Best Of Konton Magazine’,  ‘Magick On The Edge’ , and FoolishPeople’s ‘Terra: Extremitas’. His photography has been featured in a travel guide for the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.  

One third of the art collective Cell 144, he also maintains a web archive of their work at flowerofkairos.com.

Believing that an artist’s influences are discovered in childhood he lists his primary influence as the semi-feral tribe of latch key kids, anti-authoritarians, artists, and hooligans that helped to raise him, and describes his work as mostly a paean to them.  Guided by the belief that the focus of the artist should be sacrifice for and devotion to their art, rather than enshrining the artist as an individual he endeavors to create art which invites immersion rather than passive consumption, which provokes confrontation with the numinous while retaining the vital sense of humor  which prevents the profound from becoming the ponderous. 

Accordingly while he hates writing straightforward autobiographies, especially in the third person, he has been known to acquiesce when asked nicely.

Books

Harmony Hill - Published by Weaponized - Date TBA 
Frustrated by an inability to move his life forward from self destructive impulses Samm Hain searches for escape in the hallucinatory disassociation of sleep deprivation. Waking from a microsleep after a two week long sleep deprivation he discovers a manila envelope baring the name of the street he grew up on, Harmony Hill. 

Inside the envelope are several objects: a box of matches, seven picture cards all marked with the same strange symbol, a key and a cassette tape. 

The first voice on the tape is that of a young girl begging him to find her. Listening to her pleading Samm comes to a horrible realization: the voice is that of his first love who had gone missing when they were children. A flood of half forgotten memories threatens to overwhelm him until a second voice on the tape cuts silences his mind. It is his own present day voice explaining that she is being held by a mysterious a cult which can only be located using the objects found in the envelope. Before the tape cuts off he is given a warning: He has six days to find her and in doing so earn a chance at the only key to his prison cell existence. Should he fail the dawn of the seventh day will leave her beyond the reach of anyone and find him trapped by its twenty four hours, forever.

Based on an alchemical blueprint and spanning across the waking world, the dream world, and the badlands that separate them art and prose take both the reader and Sam on a six day race to the heart of the mystery waiting at Harmony Hill.


Authors Sites
brianshaughnessy.tumblr.com 
flowerofkairos.com

Photography by Katrina M. McCrory.