David Simmons Revives Baltimore’s Hallowed Horror Genre—With a Twist

The first piece of fiction David Simmons wrote “was about a dealer who sells heroin in exchange for cheese,” says the 41-year old author. When he shared the short story with his wife back in 2020, she was impressed and entertained. She also had one question: “What are you trying to do with it?

So the D.C.-area-born, Baltimore-based Simmons submitted that darkly comic story, “The Wheel of San Geronimo,” to the literary journal Snarl (their tagline: “literature and art that bites back”). It was accepted. He even made a few bucks on it. Since then, Simmons’ hardboiled horror has afforded him cult status among local literary types and Internet gorehounds alike.

His first two novels, Ghosts of East Baltimore, which came out in 2022, and its sequel, Ghosts of West Baltimore, released in 2023, tie the city’s notorious history of segregation to a cosmic drug conspiracy. Last year’s Eradicator follows a young woman losing her mind, thanks to too many pills, too much Internet, and a grim gig at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Simmons, a former drug dealer, rapper, optician, and electrical estimator, writes on his phone at home in Pikesville while taking care of his three daughters. He often crafts a killer opening line with one hand while holding his youngest in the other. Then and now, Baltimore’s idiosyncrasy is his muse.

“I’m influenced by living in Baltimore and the things you see and experience out here,” says Simmons, whose latest book, Fetty on the Switches, collects that first story and 18 other macabre tales mostly set in and around Baltimore. In “Glock Dookie,” a gigantic, incarcerated wasp is brutalized by guards. “Whole Time” is about a man so lead-poisoned he’s impervious to bullets.

In each story, Simmons’ lived-in details about the illegal economy and the lives of the working poor ground these otherwise outrageous scenarios, evoking a hallucinatory reality that also feels distinctly Baltimore. This is, after all, the city where the Ouija board was invented, and, at the same time, where every few years some captive animal makes a glorious, viral run for it.

Simmons’ sea of slang and minutiae recall legendary crime novelist (and occasional The Wire writer) Richard Price’s Clockers, paired with the kind of perverse imagination and visceral terror that Edgar Allan Poe all but invented.

But at readings, Simmons doesn’t really have a corollary. When he gets in front of a crowd at Fadensonnen or Bird in Hand, he turns his disturbing, often funny works into something closer to a one-man show, adopting voices for characters, shouting, and gesticulating wildly.

And he pushes back against those who might label him as a simple horror writer, too, noting that his work mixes gritty street fiction with creeping dread.

“I wouldn’t say my writing is as much strictly horror as it is horrifying.”