I’m not a computer person. There’s people here who can make magic with them and know all about them. But this one we use is in the top floor of the cupola with black lights and bats flying around and disorganized electrical cables shaking across the floor like tentacles coming out of mutant dogs in The Thing. In the summertime, on really hot days, the humidity in this room upstairs is like being teabagged by a Sasquatch. And the computer looks like if you cracked it open it would have coked-up hamsters running on wheels inside it.

I need the computer to conduct an interview with Joe Bielecki who is a podcaster who interviews people himself, writers from a certain subset of indie lit. I booked a few hours using the computer a while back, but using the community computer in the attic creeps me out. It probably has something to do with the two shrunken heads sitting on the desk.

No one will tell me where they came from. They’re each about the size of a softball, with greasy long black hair, and what’s fucked up is that somebody has taken a small pair of scissors and cut the threads some witch doctor had long ago used to see their lips closed. This was a major mistake because now they speak all the time. I wish they would keep their mouths shut. I’ve tried to throw them away, put them in a plastic bag and thrown it into the swamp, but somebody here is very attached to them and keeps retrieving them. I’ve asked everybody and no one knows where they came from and no one seems to be in a hurry to remove the cursed objects.

“What are you doing,” the one on the left asks me as I sit down to conduct the interview. It’s named Boko and the other one is called Wontu, I have discovered over my short time here.

“Nothing, Boko,” I say. “I’m just conducting an interview via Google docs.”

“Who are you interviewing?”

“Joe Bielecki. He has a podcast on Apple Podcasts called Writing the Rapids. I thought it might be good to interview the interviewer, turn the tables.”

Boko licks his lips, then spits out the loose strands of dangling thread piercing his lips. “Who has he interviewed?”

“Oh, Mike Corrao, John Trefry, Grant Maierhofer,” I say. “Pretty big people.”

“Never heard of them,” Boko says. “Sounds pretty niche and uninteresting.”

“Well they might be obscure to you, Boko,” I say, “but I think they’re worth hearing from because they are doing some cutting edge things with publishing.”

“Have you heard of Sam Pink? Zac Smith?” Wontu interjects. His voice is more bubbly like he has a toad in his throat, which is weird because his throat isn’t there.

“Oh I love them!” Boko says, changing his tune. “That sounds gnarly.”

“He’s also talked to Graham Irvin and Cavin Bryce Gonzalez,” I add. “B.R. Yeager.”

Boko is excited. “That sounds dope, I’m interested in those people. I’d like to hear this. How does this Joe Bielecki lock down these guests?”

Wontu pipes up. “I listened a few times. I guess Bielecki will only have a guest writer on if a prior guest has recommended them. It’s sort of exclusive, a little like a speakeasy where you need to know a secret knock.”

“Yeah,” I say, “from what I hear Joe has to turn people away who send him DMs and emails asking to be on the show to sling their new book. It lends a certain integrity of sorts.”

Wontu, ever helpful, adds, “He’s had about seventy episodes to date. It’s been going since 2018 I think. That’s pretty robust for a podcast of this type.”

Boko looks confused. “How have you heard it?”

“I listen when you’re catching z’s.”

“I never knew that about you, Wontu.”

“You never ask. You only think about yourself.”

“Ok, pipe down, you two,” I say. “I need to concentrate to do this interview with Joe.”

“Could we watch a movie on your phone?” Boko asks.

“We’ll put it on mute, so you won’t hear a thing.”

“Ok,” I say, using a manila folder to push the two disembodied heads so they’re looking in the same direction. Then I prop my phone up against a thick phone book for Mobile, Alabama. “What do you want to watch?”

“Let’s watch Xanadu,” Wontu says. “I love Olivia Newton John. She’s so fierce and real. RIP.”

“That’s pretty gay,” Boko says.

“Tell you what, you can watch Xanadu for a while, then I’ll switch it to Mad Max: Fury Road when I take a break. But please don’t talk.”

“Alright,” Boko says.

Joe, how did you come to start your podcast, and did you know the type of person you’d be interviewing before you started? Like how well did you know John Trefry, Mike Corrao, Grant Maierhofer? The method you describe on your podcast is you talk to people who were mentioned by previous guests. How does one start that chain?

The initial idea came from being somewhat dissatisfied with the writing podcasts I had listened to in the past. I’d been into podcasts since I was in late middle school/early high school thanks to typing “world of warcraft” into the itunes store to see what would come up. Eventually I found a group of podcasts called PodCastle, EscapePod, and PseudoPod which are genre lit mags in audio form. I eventually followed some of the people associated with those shows and began listening to their writing podcasts. One I enjoyed was called something like I Should Be Writing. It was by a woman who is successful in the fantasy/sci-fi writing genres and was largely about her being a mother and a writer and finding time to do both adequately. And while it was good, and I wish I had internalized more of the ideas she shared now that I’m a work from home dad of a small child, it was largely what I considered to be introductory. As I branched out to find other writing podcasts I felt like most writing podcasts were of the same type. Answering the questions of “how do I start,” “how do I beat writer’s block,” “how do I quiet my editor voice so I can actually complete a draft,” and so on. I do think that kind of thing is needed, but when I found myself wanting to do a podcast about writing, I knew I wanted to do something different.

I’ve always loved interviews. When I was a kid in the early days of YouTube I used to type in “[band I like] interview” and exhaust the offerings. It was part idol worship, but mostly it was trying to understand how they made their music. In college the David Foster Wallace bug bit me (thanks depression) and I watched lots of his interviews as well. But it wasn’t until I watched the Ed Harris movie Pollock that I got the idea for Writing the Rapids. 

As a side bar: the name Writing the Rapids comes from a segment I did on the local NPR affiliate I work for (I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan). I was working as the producer of the morning show at the time, and the host said I could do a segment every now and again, so I set to finding local people to talk to about writing. It was fun, but I wanted to do something else with it.

Pollock has a scene pretty early on with a handful of artists sitting in a smoky bar arguing about Picasso. I can’t easily explain what about it that I found so inspiring, maybe the looseness of the conversation, the friendly argument, the energy. Something like that. I tweeted that I wanted to do an interview podcast where I talk to writers about writing as if it was a capital A art. B.R. Yeager was following me on twitter and liked the tweet, so I figured he would be down, and emailed him shortly after.

I had been writing and publishing flash fiction a lot around that time, so I had amassed a handful of writer followers from that, which is probably how he came to follow me, or maybe it was because I had said something nice about Amygdalatropolis, which is still one of my favorite books. 

I found this corner of the writing world by way of Blake Butler’s There Is No Year. I read it late in college and in a way mirroring my childhood YouTube usage googled every interview he gave and all the Vice articles he wrote. I think that’s how I found Schism press. 

So after I had B.R. Yeager on the show I asked him for a handful of names, which is how I found out about Mike Kleine. To answer your question directly, I did not know him or really anyone else at all before emailing them. I’m pretty sure I’d been aware of Inside the Castle before talking to John, but I’d never heard of Mike before getting his name from B.R. It’s a bit different now that I’ve been around and paying attention for a few years, but I still often get names of people I’ve never heard of.

Which, if I’m being honest, was the Quiet Part of starting the show. I wanted to meet and learn about writers doing things similar to what I thought I was doing with my own writing. Everything you read about finding a publisher or agent for your book says to start by looking at the books you like, but at that time I was completely new to indie writing. Most of the books on my shelf were fantasy novels or classics I hadn’t read, or stuff from college. It was clear nothing I was reading was anything like what I was writing. I still don’t feel that I write like what I read, but at least that gives me comfort when I get rejection letters.

JH: You mentioned B.R. Yeager, and I just want to get into this idea of genre. It seems like two things are happening: 1) that a lot of the writing you discuss on your podcast seems to take place at this sweet spot where genre, specifically horror, meets with experimental literary writing, and 2) we’ve just heard that Apocalypse Party divulged that B.R. Yeager’s novel Negative Space has sold 10,000 copies, which is a phenomenal volume of book sales in indie lit land. Is horror something that is jumping off right now? Recently Jeff Schneider of Pig Roast Publishing, who is a Gen X guy like me, was talking about how there was a very specific moment in the early 1990s where people were into Guns ‘n’ Roses and hair metal and that kind of thing, then over a weekend it all shifted to Nirvana and grunge, and you could almost compare what people were wearing on a Friday to how they were dressing that next Monday to see the massive rapid change. This signaled a transformation that got a lot of people’s attention because it demonstrated this perhaps in terms of dollars and cents. And Jeff talked about how he felt the same kind of thing could be imminent in indie “outsider” lit. Is B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space the “Nirvana moment” for this kind of writing? And conversely, do you feel like the more important developments are happening at these smaller more niche presses like Schism and Inside the Castle who were here before the trend arrived? 

I have wrestled with the “why is experimental writing so dark?” question on the podcast a few times. And I think part of it is having guys like Butler and Yeager as my entry point. As I spiral out from them, I find a lot of dark stuff, which is easily morphed into more traditional horror. The specter of House of Leaves haunts both me and the show as well. I think in a genre like horror, it’s easier to morph the text into something unusual because the audience is already expecting something strange and unsettling. Keep in mind, I only barely knew what concrete poetry was when the show started, and only then because we talked about it in a graphic design class I took in high school. 

I think a lot of people who are readers experience experimentation like is seen in ItC type books through books like House of Leaves and S. Right now M.J. Gette’s book Majority Reef comes to mind as an “experimental” work that isn’t horror. But, still, I feel like that book is a mix of creative nonfiction/essay, poetics, and collage. It’s not a prose forward type of book. Same thing with Douglas Luman’s The F Text, which is essentially erasure poetry, but more. So coming at experimentation through prose rather than poetics, or more academic backed avant garde just leaves horror, dark, and transgressive prose as the doorway.

As for a Nirvana Moment, I can’t say. I’m definitely not tuned into the market or anything. I remember going on reddit all the time during the height of the pandemic lockdowns and recommending Negative Space on every relevant r/suggestmeabook type thread I could find. I see BookTubers like CriminOlly or Plagued By Visions, who cover darker lit stuff doing pretty good BookTube numbers as far as I can tell. There seems to be a big split in readers right now between people who want just the most wretched book they can stand to read, and people who want the most cozy thing ever. Makes sense when you think about the rise of zombie media in the wake of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis. 

I think Negative Space is so successful because it’s simply that good. I love indie books, obviously, but I can tell when I’m reading something that has been put out through an indie and something that went through a more traditional publishing process. Yeager mentioned at one point on twitter that Elle Nash worked as an editor for Negative Space, and I think her influence on the book probably did a lot to set it apart from everything else that came out that year. Looking at her website, she worked on Maggie Siebert’s Bonding, and Elizabeth Aldrich’s Ruthless Little Things, two other books that have received a lot of really high praise from what I can tell. It seems silly to posit that the difference between a good indie book and a great indie book is a good editor, but when so many indie presses are one or two people trying their best to just stay afloat, that one change can make all the difference. 

For the last part of your question, I think so. Innovation in art seems like a really difficult thing to cultivate sustainably. So the fact that Schism and ItC have been around as long as they have without imploding says something about the people running those presses, the way they work with their writers, and the work that they’re putting out. I know reading work from those presses has influenced how and what I write quite a lot. 

I forget who I was talking to about Inside the Castle at the time, but near the beginning of the podcast I was talking to a writer about ItC and wondering how he found so many writers to publish such weird stuff with the press, and whoever I was talking to said something along the lines of “well those people have always been writing like that.” And I think that is what makes some of these more niche presses successful, is not that they’re trying to make something new, but rather bringing to light something that’s always been there and hasn’t been given the chance to be seen by enough, or the right people yet.

Two questions: 1) how do you make a successful podcast, about any subject, and get it on a paying basis? And 2) what books or writers are you excited to see in 2023 and beyond? Is there some new direction or press that you feel like is going somewhere different that what you’ve seen in 2021 and 2022? I’m trying to be careful not to try to bait you into some kind of fake poppy “trend-watcher” angle in spite of what I was just saying about “Nirvana moments” and whatever above. I’m not that craven or shallow, I’m just genuinely curious about what else is out there. That’s part of why I have really liked your show, learning about some other facets of writing communities that exist beyond the normal-strength radar I’m capable of on Twitter. Another thing is, I like to listen to the voices of podcast interviewees and ask myself, “Am I into this writer just based on their voice alone, do I trust them to do what they do? Do I feel like I hear artistry and intelligence in their voice, and respect where they’re coming from, and would they hypothetically respect me as a reader? Or do they sound like doofuses and jerks?” That’s a lot of things to talk about, sorry.

I think having a strong concept helps a lot. I’ve made different attempts at podcasts in the past and the ones that last the longest always have some sort of gimmick or hook. Writing the Rapids’ limitation of having a set pool of potential guests based on previous guests is interesting for the listener (I think) and useful for me. It’s a bummer to have someone DM or email me and ask to be on the show and have to be like “sorry that’s not how this works and you’re not on my list,” but it keeps me from being beholden to people who are better at self marketing than others. I think it helps keep the show fresh because I’m forced to read outside what I might normally read. 

Consistency is important too. You have to just keep pumping out shows on a schedule as best you can so people can make you part of their routine. 

Also, something I heard a long time ago that I think about often is a quote about doing streaming and dealing with trolls, “you get the Chatroom you deserve.” There’s common advice that you should know who your audience is when you make something. In TV and radio they make a sort of D&D style character sheet about who their target consumer looks like. That’s mostly for advertising, but it helps drive the content. The advice I mentioned goes beyond that, though. What type of person do you want? So many Internet personalities flame out because they attract an adversarial audience. There’s no one to stand up for them when the inevitable trolls show up. It also helps with the kinds of conversations you want to have. If you have an audience that wants to explore your topic, is curious and open, your show will go in a way different direction than if you have one that wants hot takes and dunking or whatever. I’m not making a value judgment by the way, my preference is to build a space like a library, not a colosseum, but both have their place. 

As for why people subscribe to my patreon, or how to encourage people to do so, I’m not sure. The getting money part of this process is something I haven’t spent enough time or effort working out yet. I started the patreon pretty quick after I started Writing the Rapids because I knew if I waited until I felt like it was warranted, I’d never do it at all. So far it’s been nice to get some book money every month, and even better it’s nice to know people value the show enough to throw cash at me. 

As a final point, I’m not sure if I’d consider Writing the Rapids successful. It certainly has done good things for my life, I’ve made good friends, read good books, exposed people to books they might never have even heard of and so on. But I don’t know how much being on my show moves the needle sales/fans wise for my guests. I’d love for it to be a big deal. I’d love to have a sizeable group of listeners who aren’t already writers. There are more things to do. I’m pleased that I’ve made a space where people can talk about the craft of writing in a way even an untrained, and not super well read guy like me can understand and take something away from. There’s a lot more work to do. 

This year I’m excited to do some exploration of indie lit outside of the show. I’ll admit I feel very intimidated by the amount of unread books my wife and I have piled up in our bedroom at the moment, and doing more than catching up to my level of purchasing feels impossible, especially with an infant at home. But I also want to make an effort to read at least one book a month from a press I’ve not previously read from. I know that’s not a direct answer to the question, but that’s where I’m at. Thanks to Writing the Rapids, I’m pretty close to all my favorite writers who are working today. If anyone has a book coming out this year, they’ll probably let me know. I really want to dig into the world of indie horror. I want to read more indie poetry. Penteract Press has been on my radar lately as they’ve been so transparent about how tough it is to run a press right now. I have many small presses that I follow on Twitter that I’ve never read, I really want to change that. 

Your comment about listening to writers and trying to figure them out is interesting. It might be hypocritical of me, but I rarely listen to an interview with someone who’s work I’m not at least a little familiar with. I think that’s partly why I try to do a more conversational style of show. Trying to get people to come for the writer they know, and then stay for me. It feels gross to say that, I’m really not that egocentric, but it was a barrier to long term listening that I anticipated based on my own experience. 

I’m curious to know if you’ve found yourself surprised by what you’ve heard versus what you’ve read.

I guess to clarify I will just say, I don’t have a lot of money to spend on exploring new writers but discovering a vast, unknown body of podcast interviews with writers out there was, to me, a good first step in learning about writers that was free, to put it bluntly. And the theory is that from that knowledge base of listening to interviews I will have more information about who to maybe go ahead and spend money on reading. A good example is Logan Berry. I’d been really interested in trying to read him but then after your interview with him, I liked his voice and the sorts of things he talked about enough to take the plunge and buy Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake. Coincidentally 11:11 Press said they only had seven copies left just as this was happening so I felt like I got there just at the right time. That’s an example of how it kind of worked. Maybe it’s wrong to judge interviewees like this. I treat their interviews a little like I might see interviews with celebrities on late night talk shows and feel like “Huh, that person seems cool, maybe I’ll check out their movie.” As opposed to having seen all their movies, then seeing the interview and having my prior favorable or unfavorable feelings confirmed. Two more questions: 1) do you get hooked up with books from this group of authors for free? And 2) do you see your podcast as being a sort of “craft of writing show” and not just a place for people to plug their latest book? I see it that way, in a way, in spite of what I might have just been implying. I’m thinking specifically of a kind of panel discussion episode you had a while back with John Trefry from Inside the Castle, Mike Kleine, I can’t remember who else was there, but you all were talking about the moniker “experimental writing,” and the limitations of that kind of terminology perhaps. Your show often goes way beyond people just hyping their new books and into some more theoretical directions that are interesting on a cerebral level, maybe just because many of the writers you speak to are doing stuff in that kind of alternative, unique mental space. And it truly is underground type shit that is so valuable to expose, even if we’re hating on the term “experimental.” 

That makes total sense to me, I’m of the mind that it’s easier to get people into a book if it’s first presented in a non-text medium. At least that’s how it works for me. 

I do sometimes. I feel pretty weird about asking people for free physical books and have to stop myself from declining offers sometimes. Sometimes if my recent spending has been a little much, or if time requires me to move quickly I’ll ask for a pdf. The patreon money helps offset the costs and keeps me from having to overcome my social anxiety so it all works out. 

Yes I definitely see the show as a craft of writing show, first. Reading your question helps bring into focus what I mean when I say I want to talk about writing like it’s a capital A art. I don’t often pick people just because they’re having a book coming out around time of episode release. I kind of scope them out and see if they can help continue whatever thought threads I’ve been having, or if they’ll be a left turn to keep the show from getting mired in the same themes. I do have the mini “rejoinder” episodes for guests to come back on the show to plug something new. So I guess the show does both, or has room for both. I think they’re intertwined in a way. 

I think it goes back to what you’re talking about, how the show can act as a sort of try it before you buy it space. Guests often do read from their most recent book at the end of an episode. In these types of spaces I think it’s helpful to know where people are coming from with regard to their writing. It can help to know how seriously to take their writing, or if it’s supposed to be just funny, or ethereal, or something else. 

That roundtable episode is one of the higher points of the show because of what you’re talking about. The type of stuff I get exposed to through the show is exciting, but it’s all so diverse and most of these writers are so outside the system that they’ve created their own genre or practice or method, and getting an inside look into how they think about things is similarly exciting. Especially considering we all tend to use the same vocabulary. Having a group of us together defining terms and doing that work makes everything feel more Real to me.

Ok, Joe, I think I should start bringing this to a close. But before we go, I just wanted to quickly expand what we’re talking about or transfer it to another context so that perhaps readers of this interview can have another means of locating these ideas and these aesthetic concepts. I’m also just really curious what kinds of music you listen to or movies you watch that could replicate or mirror the kinds of writing we’ve been talking about. I don’t know where exactly I’ve picked up this strange notion that there is a lot of heavy metal being played; maybe I’ve been aware of John Trefry’s thing for black metal as he has tried to straighten me out by recommending some really arcane bands to me. Are you into that too? A bigger, more organized question: do the horror vibes I am picking up in the writing, rightly or wrongly, manifest to you in other media?  

I do watch a lot of movies, but I’m not sure how I’d link what I like to watch to what’s covered on the show. I like David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, and Terry Gilliam movies a lot. I did talk with David Leo Rice and Chris Kelso about the David Cronenberg book they put together. I know there’s a lot more experimental film out there that I’m not acquainted with, so I’d be interested to see what connections other people make. 

Lately I’ve been on a nearly constant Horror Punk tear when it comes to music listening. Bands like Blitzkid, The Rosedales, The Misfits, and so on. In that same vein I love Pyschobilly as well, the Cramps, Batmobile, The Meteors, Deadbolt. That kind of thing. 

I’ve also been digging into the prog rock revival that happened in the 00s with bands like Coheed and Cambria (a lifetime favorite of mine), The Dear Hunter and so on. 

As far as metal, I do like some black metal, Wolves in the Throne Room, Krallice, Feminazgul. I like the spacey and ethereal “black gaze” stuff too. Lately I’ve been poking around into what Spotify calls “blackened deathcore” which has an element of fetishism around the different types of screams the human voice can sustainably do that I find really fascinating.  I tend to listen to metal only when I’m in a certain mood. 

So I think you’re definitely picking up on something that’s there. The horror vibes I like are filled with a lot of camp. I love really disturbing shit, but it’s not a constant thing for me. After my kid was born I told my wife I wanted to be Goth Mr. Rogers. I think that kind of sums up how I’ve been approaching things lately, both in terms of production and consumption.

A Goth Mr. Rogers. Well, thanks for chatting with me, neighbor.

***

When I end the interview, I look up to see the two shrunken heads have somehow gotten themselves turned around and are looking directly at me. Behind them, Mad Max: Fury Road is playing on mute on the little theater I set up with my phone.

“That was funny, about a Goth Mr. Rogers,” Boko says. It’s skin-crawling to hear his voice after all that silence. Rudy Johnson needs the computer in fifteen minutes to make some animation for the Last Estate about being trapped in hell. Of all the people here, Rudy is the one you want to cross the least.

Boko smiles at me, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “Jesse, I like you just the way you are.”

When a brand-new press comes out with their first book without much publicity, it’s risky for them and for the reader. There is little to no context, not much to go on to judge it out the gate, and also, frankly, little real incentive to take the plunge and go into the world of this new book: it doesn’t take anything away from you to just overlook the work before it ever gets started. You won’t miss it. There’s an ocean of new books coming out all the time from more established outfits. Why should this one be special? Why not instead go with a book from a press that has at least some kind of seasoned apparatus of buzz and established reputation?

I’m not a long-time experienced book reviewer, but in moving through the literary culture of Twitterland I am starting to gain a finer-toothed appreciation for what the real authentic shit is, where the rewarding experiences as a reader can come from. There’s hundreds of presses of all shapes and sizes out there, but there’s something exciting about the feeling of “getting in on the ground floor” when an unknown, untested press puts out a first book that really delivers something promising and sets an optimistic tone amidst the cacophony of sharp-elbowed indie lit publishing that values making a lot of noise way ahead of publication day. I had only heard of DFL Lit through their unassuming, unflashy website that posts a selection of fiction, interviews, poetry, and other writing from a small, exclusive corner of the vast metropolis of indie writers in Twitterland, including Stephanie Yue Duhem, Stuart Ross, Rus Khomutoff, and others.. The acronym DFL, I was told, stands for Dead Fucking Last, a nod in the direction of the racing, mythical bike messenger experiences he and his cohort had in the past in some city: could be Chicago, could be New York City where Clemente currently resides, according to his bio. Full disclosure: they published three poems of mine in an early iteration of their website. I had no idea they were doing books until I was asked in a typically humble, quiet way if I would take a look at their maiden voyage, the novel Martin & Hannah by Nicholas Clemente.

Within the first ten pages, it becomes clear that this is a book about college life, which for some readers might send up red flags. A well-known anecdote has the novelist David Foster Wallace admonishing his creative writing students at the University of Illinois at Bloomington-Normal to avoid writing campus romances: scenarios where two hapless searchers find each other at the same party and “their eyes met over the keg.” As if to say, “Leave the mawkish fumbling of students alone; they’re not fit for fictional treatment.” Perhaps there’s something too universal or easy about writing such stories.

Not so fast, Saint Dave. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the overall college enrollment rate for 18-to-24-year-olds was 40% in 2020, with approximately 19 million students. Surely even those who haven’t been to higher education must concede that within that collective student body there must be some stories worth telling, especially the Bildungsromantic tales of aimless youth emerging from their cocoons to be struck down by the harsh lessons of existence, lessons that are often the tortured result of the students’ own hasty, flawed decision trees. Your mother is not here to clean up after you, students are told, and some snap to attention and some implode.

The red flags are, so to speak, false ones, not in the “deceptive psy-op” sense, but in the sense that they should be overlooked by those seeking to read a good book that just happens to be about the lives of college students. Clemente’s polished, well-constructed novel about university life in Chicago skillfully delves into the interiors of men and woman who mostly don’t want to be there:squatters and anarchists living in gutted apartments, looking for love, drugs, and what in the 1960s might have been called “kicks.” Isaac, Topher, Cordelia, Ravi, Julia, and other university students careen from party to party, trekking through masterfully-described frozen city streets. The snow, ice, cold, and night of the outdoor scenes are detailed in ways so fresh that you can feel your fingertips numb and the sweat around your collar turn to uncomfortable chill. Comparisons to the “Whole Sick Crew” of Pynchon’s first novel V., aimless young party-goers on the social circuit, are clear as this mass of characters align, realign, and seek each other in the “periphery of campus where the university made clumsy overtures to the real world and the real world attempted to siphon what profit it could from the university.” Anybody who has ever tried to keep up with the shifting locations of the party—who will be where when, and how to get into their oh so important company against the tide of social avoidance, exclusivity, and studied rejection—will recognize these patterns and their dissatisfactions in Martin & Hannah.

In Clemente’s hands, sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll have evolved into blue balls, designer hallucinogenic pharmaceuticals, and “power electronics.” According to the most cursory research Wikipedia has to offer, this genre of noise music is derived from industrial music and involves static, screeching electronics, bass pulses, and shrieking vocals. The titular Martin of the novel (not the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as I originally thought might be the allusion) is Martin Hightower, a university professor who was secretly part of a marginally successful power electronics outfit called Total Mobilization which is being resurrected in this collegiate party scene. Martin is trying to keep this grim musical dalliance a secret from his colleagues at the university because its “ironic far-right” political edge might be misapprehended by the dulled irony detectors of the administration. Martin, who is married with a handicapped child, also has a wandering eye he’d like to keep a secret as he takes an extracurricular interest in a floundering student named Hannah. Again, this is not, as far as my allusion-detecting radar can tell, an analogue to Martin Heidegger’s sometime main squeeze Hannah Arendt, although analogues can be slippery: we don’t know all of Clemente’s intellectual game of references, and if he has one, to our relief, he doesn’t hit us over the head with it as you might expect from a first novel about college.

Likewise, perhaps no parallels with Pynchon’s Whole Sick Crew were intended by Clemente, and similarly unverifiable comparisons may not exist between Hannah and the world-historical female cipher V. sought by fascinated men on symbolic quests from Pynchon’s novel. However, in Chicago’s university milieu Hannah is one of those singular, beautiful women who all men, romantic spelunkers strapping on explorer’s gear, think they can find things in even though she in fact contains nothing, a void. She is a source of frustration and a motivator of inescapable jealousy among her fellow students and, crucially, Martin the professor as well as a devious trickster of a TA.

This first DFL Lit production wowed me by taking what might have been a pretty pedestrian subject for a novel—young people searching for meaning either in each other or in mind-altering substances, older man wishing to return to youth in a young woman’s arms—and turning it into a propulsive, engaging, satisfying story that pulled me along through an easy reading experience over about four or five days, a perfect length to read a book. This is a novel you like to progress through with a crucial middle section that deepens and differentiates the cast of characters rather than making them a stale merry-go-round of simplistic personalities and tiresome problems you want to get off.

For a debut novel, it’s strikingly assured, and moving, too. Isaac, the closest thing to a protagonist in the multi-POV clamor of the book, desires Hannah as much as the rest of the males, and invites her up onto a rooftop in the cold for a quiet place to talk while the white noise and sonic destruction of a noise-art performance occurs downstairs:

But the time came to consider his next move. He didn’t know why. He was happy where he was. Or if not happy then close enough; closer than he had been in a long time. But it was a voice that came from outside him, the received wisdom of a thousand generations of men. Guy, Topher, everyone but Cordelia, and maybe her too, would say the same thing. Though Hannah’s back was turned to him, he could feel his cheeks grow hot with the pressure. He didn’t want to break the stillness, but knew already that he would. And in the seconds before he acted took some time to mourn the passing of the moment. His voice was strained and artificial, hitting only wrong notes:

 

“You should get new gloves.”

 

She didn’t respond. He half suspected that she knew what was coming and was doing what she could to delay it. Her fingers were poised on the ledge as if preparing to strike a chord on a piano. Like she was orchestrating the silence, playing it, and at her command it would cease and everything would go back to normal, as loud and fast and meaningless as the tumult downstairs. Her hands went slack and slid back from the edge. Isaac pounced before they disappeared from sight: put his hand on hers and felt it wriggle warmly underneath, pliant, assenting at first. But it drew back in an instant, collapsing like a cat that didn’t want to be held, and then her hands were hidden safely in the pockets of her coat.

 

“Not you too, Isaac,” she said without looking at him…Isaac stayed on the roof for a long time after she left.

The novel Martin & Hannah beautifully etches the outlines of urban life among a certain generation of Americans: how people are always looking for each other across cities, always pinpointing addresses and calculating cab fare to the places where something important and momentous is happening,the places you have to get to, in spite of the nasty weather between point A and point B. I enjoyed trudging through the frozen slush with my collar turned up against the blast. There’s always some next place to go, where the company is warm even if the tunes are harsh and atonal and the drama is thick. It’s a cliché to say, at the end of a review of a first book, “I look forward to seeing what Nicholas Clemente and DFL Lit will publish next.” It is my pleasure as a reviewer to prove the cliché to be not a shopworn contraption, but an earnest, personal verity.

Artwork by Igor Hofbauer

A man gets a prostitute who is half skeleton. He takes her to a seedy room where they commence to have sex that is shown in cutaway so you can see his penis graphically represented inside her. Shown from multiple angles, they fuck with pistols in their hands and, right at the moment of simultaneous orgasm, they blow each other’s brains out. 

Artwork by Igor Hofbauer

All this is told in a vivid colorful illustration that is without panels yet still has a multidirectional sequential flow as your eyes scan to all the corners of the page and gather visual information. The artist is Igor Hofbauer, and his art seems to all have the printmaker’s eye for bold colors and fields. Research shows Hofbauer is from Croatia, and his artwork is some of the best in the new anthology of comics and illustration known as Freak Buck, oozed out from Providence, RI publishers Pig Roast Publishing.

The anthology is 250 pages long, and even if you hadn’t flipped through it to get a quick voyeur’s look at the pages, you would quickly get the picture: this is a hallucinatory, colorful, racy, grindy collection of comics from international sources that you could say is for kids if the kids were the kind to hang out huffing paint thinner in a filthy alleyway in Mexico City post nuclear strike.

I’ve been away from reading underground comics for years. It’s such a suck on the wallet. But for a while I dabbled in reading the classic shit like Bijou Funnies, Zap Comix, Robert Williams’ own technically proficient and damned comics, Skip Williamson’s stoner countercultural cartoons, and others. There’s nothing like the forbidden, retina-robbing visuals of underground comics, the stories and subject matter your mind recoils from in fascinated, ambivalent horror, and with this collection, publisher Jeff Schneider and editor Alexi Zeren have put together a kinetic, sinful, diverse collection.

Artwork by Sylvain Labourayre

The book, along with Schneider’s raucous, hilarious band memoir Psychiatric Tissues and other Pig Roast Publishing productions, showed up at my PO box one day not too long ago after being bought and paid for by shadowy benefactors at the Last Estate, and it had that mystical, forbidden aura which is the miasma of something truly underground. You can tell by the wavy lines of illness and authenticity coming off the pages that there’s something not right about it, and it’s not right in all the right ways. As with much of what Pig Roast Publishing gets involved with, the underground pedigree and resources of everything to be found in the pages of Freak Buck are thick—it’s refreshing to see, on paper, the bugs squirming under the rock you feel that you helped overturn, as opposed to online where it’s all quickly overturned rocks and there’s a blurred, overwhelming lack of distinction to the insectile life that’s everywhere you look. Online, searching through online stores in some sectors, everything can come to have that underground feeling, therefore nothing’s truly underground anymore.  

There’s a nostalgic dimension to this feeling of discovery of hidden treasure; as a Generation X throwback, whose patterns of consumption were set in crystal before the Internet came about and made the satisfying ease of consumption only one frictionless click away, I place a high value on the experience of finding the gold bullion in the wreckage of the derelict galleon on the seafloor. I remember as a kid looking through the back pages of my brother’s Thrasher magazines at the music catalogs where you could order 7” records of DRI, Rudimentary Peni, Dead Kennedys, Stormtroopers of Death. Used bookstores where you could find that rare volume did not disappear with the advent of the Internet, of course, and neither did the music shop where your fingers went on glorious muscle-memory autopilot flipping through the bins of physical media—but it may as well all be gone. It’s not physical anymore, not in the same way. Somebody has been summoned into motion by the guilty click of your Internet shopping, to traipse down the aisles of sorted books or CDs and find your selection and package it for you, or a print-on-demand robot has been awakened to unholy life to spit out that one copy of your book. It’s not physically demanding in that fun hunter-gatherer way. That era, for most of us, is dead. But some analogues can be found. The throwback aesthetic of Pig Roast Publishing’s product, the comics zine texture, the DIY work ethic, and the questing curation of content evident on each page, make it a special artifact that feels “out of time”: not in a “time’s up” way but in an “Ark of the Covenant relic that belongs in a museum” way. Treasure hunters sit up and pay attention.

***

But what about the book? Freak Buck is truly psychotic, and as someone with a diagnosis I use such language very sparingly and only when I feel like it is the only available descriptor. But it’s really a rip. The book can be plotted along the extrapolated lay line of the Zap Comix of old: underground comics that not only push the envelope of good taste but run it through the shredder and burn the remains in a furnace a la publishers like Last Gasp and Fantagraphics. 

Artwork by Marti. [Editor’s note: Only one third of the Last Estate editorial team felt it was appropriate to include this image, so we’re only including one third of the image.]

The endpapers reveal that part of the book was originally published in Barcelona, Spain by Ediciones La Cúpula, an international comics publisher which in addition to a plethora of Spanish comics takes on Spanish editions of Charles Burns’ Black Hole and the Fabulous Freak Brothers. These sections were, according to Schneider, the ones drawn by Spanish cartoonist Marti, and had to be translated into English by Luis Roldan Torquemada, exclusively for Freak Buck. Marti’s comics are as fucking dirty as a down-and-out Barcelona hooker’s mattress and insane: one draws heavily from Lynch’s disturbing industrial landscapes in Eraserhead and the other, “The Son of El Cid,” is a nasty chronicle of the citizens of a Spanish town, including a perverse patriarch who forces the mother of his child to give birth in a bullring so that the blood of the afterbirth will mix with the sand. Schneider: “[Marti] did a wonderful comic named The Cabbie that was published by the famous Fantagraphics and was in RAW a magazine edited by Art Speigelman (Maus etc.)  We obtained the rights to some of Marti’s comics and translated it for the first time in English.”

Another comic by Abraham Diaz is clever in that you need to piece together the interlacing jigsaw sequence of the panels, which isn’t immediately clear, and once you do the thing comes together. Jake Pyne (Cumpug) has a whole layout which is just mainly line drawings of dudes blowing each other. The general tone of the entire book veers well into the pornographic territory at times.

Artwork by Emily V. Brown [Editor’s note: Is that you, Josh?]

It’s not all perfect. Some of the art is less driven than the other more narrative features in the book, kind

of shapeless and flat as illustrations that don’t rise above the typical garden variety Juxtapoz illustrations (Juxtapoz the magazine started by underground painter/comics artist Robert Williams). The level of technical skill widely varies: some comics or drawings are polished and refined while other work, like Emily V. Brown’s, looks primitive and earnest and done with a rich palette of recklessly stolen markers, like something the clever but troubled girl who stays after school to hang out in the art room might draw. Sandwiched in the middle of the book is a lengthy interview with “Longmont Potion Castle” which is the moniker of a sound artist/cartoonist who has an ironclad underground following. He did intricate prank calls, “phonework,” that sounded full of psychopathic derring-do including calling the late Alex Trebek’s home phone number.

I asked Schneider some questions about the book and about Pig Roast Publishing overall.

JH: How old is Pig Roast Publishing and what was the impulse to start a press, where did that come from?

JS: I started the press in 2017. I published a book I liked titled A Little Privacy, Please by a gent named Christopher Feltner. He had spent many years documenting “bathroom graffiti” and we turned this into a nice coffee table art book. Then I did the Kickstarter campaign for my memoir Psychiatric Tissues about my band Arab On Radar. The impulse was to transition out of music and into literature for better or worse. I think Rock n Roll lived from 1959 until 2009 and the project completed. This pisses people off, but I think Rock music is dead for the most part…what followed is larping as Rock more as a simulation than authentic.

JH: Do you have other comics publications on the horizon, would you do it again? In other words, would you make this a regular thing?

JS: I am attempting to solicit a book with the reclusive and mysterious Al Columbia but for various reasons that hasn’t materialized yet. He is an amazing artist. I hope it happens some day…The Al Columbia thing is very tentative and probably (because of his personality) would scare him away. I don’t have him under contract or anything. Perhaps it could be phrased better as a wish and something I’d like to publish if he would do it. That is more accurate to the reality of that situation…But overall [comics] will not be regular, my next two contracted books coming up are novels.

Artwork by Sylvain Labourayre

JH: Where have you been promoting the book, who are you talking to in order to try to promote it?

JS: I am DiY and do ads on social media but haven’t had luck with promotion and I ask a lot of people for help, few respond….When Alexi and I both met up [at the Philly Comics Expo] a few weeks back we were lamenting the fact that it has gotten very little press or care from the usual people who review comics. It is quite a different scene from indie-lit (or whatever it is called now post Alt-Lit? lol) Fantagraphics is a total institution and seem to grab most new talent and publish books of the quality of Freak Buck. I think it was surprising to many in the comics community that this book was published in such hi quality, by an expensive pressing plant, Prolific, who are the best. I am not sure people wrap their head around that yet. Also, having multi-genre book, there is the Longmont interview which has nothing to do with comics. Also there is the coin art by Dylan Languell which is not comics obviously. Our hope was that people have an open enough mind and appreciation to pull them into cool stuff like that rather than a tight comics only book. I hope the smorgasbord approach works! lol But yeah, I hope people don’t think I am rich or anything, I just went crazy and cashed out my meager retirement stocks and put it all into this book because I felt it had to be made. Totally insane move, not advised, but I don’t regret it either. 

JH: Do you know any of the artists?

JS: I don’t know many. Alexi’s work and his partner Marina I know. I have known Corinne Halbert from back in the Arab On Radar days because she worked at Quimby’s in Chicago a great comics shop. I am on the same record label (Skin Graft Records) as Gregory Jacobsen who also is a musician in a great band (check ‘em out) named Lovely Little Girls. But I think that is all. I might meet Longmont Potion Castle but with him you never know!

***

Artwork by S. R. Arnold

Books are for shopping. Music is for shopping. T-shirts too. People are not for shopping. But the joy of discovering other real heads in this strange labyrinth of online literature (cyberwriting, indie lit, indie publishing, however you want to slice it), other people toiling in the underground, who with their work might invite you to other deeper levels through a hidden passageway—that pleasure of connection is something that echoes the furtive lost world of mail art and tape-trading and xerox-and-staple zines, before email and chat rooms and social media came along and flattened the world. Who knows who will write the microhistories of how we came to know each other, how we found each other in the dark and said, “Hey, you want to read something really underground?”

I need something lurid, something alight with feverish imagination to slip sideways into the familiar annex of erotic storytelling: between the cracks, that’s what really makes money on Amazon. I pace around my cell, looking through seed catalogs strewn around the floor, casting my mind into its darkest recesses for anything sexual to write about. But anybody can write about sex; it’s the situations, the starting gun you need. The environment, the setting. Something extra, something with that tried-and-true seedy vibe. I pray to the pulp gods, invoking the name of Jim Thompson, the famous alcoholic pulp writer who didn’t hit it bigtime until the afterlife with novels like The Killer Inside Me, The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet, among many others. Then, it hits me — to write about my time as a hotel detective patrolling the hallways at the Iroquois Resort Hotel in the late ‘oughts. 

Since human behavior in the wee hours has a way of descending into the netherworld, hotels are notorious for their flimsy morality. A hotel detective is an anachronism from Thompson’s era, the ‘40s and ‘50s; a plain clothes guy who monitors the security of a hotel to make sure nobody is breaking any of the rules, assuring there’s no drugs or prostitution. But I was more a glorified security guard or night watchman than a hotel detective proper. Hired by the maintenance department at the Iroquois Resort Hotel, I walked its halls “checking to make sure everything was ok” — mainly listening for freezing water pipes, smelling for smoke in case of fire. The only ash I’d ever detect was the powerful odor of burning marijuana, but nobody’s vices got aired out on my watch. 

Like a vampire I worked 11:30 pm to 7:30 am, during the off-season winter months when the Iroquois was all but shut down. To maximize its revenue stream during slow season, the hotel overbooked itself: corporate getaways, golf packages, banquets, ballroom weddings; charging thousands to rent unused portions. But I preferred the hotel completely empty of people, when it came easier to cultivate an air of unruffled authority in the job, something like the security on a casino floor; the guy with the cattle prod who quietly jabs the cheater under the armpit and walks away, sending him tumbling to the floor with the guise of a heart attack before other heavies scoop him up and take him to a back room to fuck him up. The truth is, I wasn’t too imposing. The dining room wait staff and the barbacks cackled at me: What are you gonna do if there’s a real problem?

But I had real problems — being a hotel detective to a locked, vacant, ancient building during the bitter winter offered the peace I needed. Nobody knew this, but just prior to accepting the night watchman position, I had taken a couple weeks to implode at a mental hospital from depression and the relentless stress from the hotel during its busy season. Now, diagnosed with a severe mental illness, I kept it quiet when I showed up for this new patrolling duty. All they told me was that I needed a shave.

Three other hotel detectives I’d rotate with: Carlos was always dressed in a tan trench coat, a baseball cap over his moustache; the merciless staff called him Inspector Gadget. Barry was a short, swarthy, wily, vampiric wise guy in his fifties, the greasy look of an aging gearhead; always smirking, chewing a toothpick, a downstate accent in a leather jacket (years later, he’d be inspiration for the hitman character Gartner in my novel Blood Trip). Finally, there was Bill, a much older guy, an ex-cop in a crew cut. Like me, he wore a suit and tie. Bill had a side job in animal control, the one you call when a rabid animal comes on your property. Forever spinning yarns about shooting animals dead, he brought his firearm collection to the maintenance building. In the basement, he showed me several items from his historic gun collection, including black powder rifles. When an employee whips out guns at work the only thing you can do is just lock eyes with them, nod, act interested, and wait for them to leave. But before I could, we discovered one was loaded —no bullet, just the powder—and he set it off: the loudest sound I’d ever heard. 

Wandering eight hours in the graveyard shift around a vast empty building with hundreds of rooms while adjusting to a cocktail of psych meds was like surrendering to a beautiful isolation tank decorated with ferns and old paintings — mind-bending. With subzero temperatures outside, I drove through blizzards to relieve Carlos or Barry on second shift. I read tons of books, wrote lots of poetry. I chased down bats that had penetrated the hotel through occulted cracks in the masonry. When no one was looking I brought an electric typewriter, set it up on the heavy polished wooden table in the elegant Oak Room, and filled the first floor with clacking noise: typing a novel about a smart aleck kid who pretends he’s working class, only to fall in love with a rich girl who dooms him. In Room 300 I’d watch a late-night TV shows with all the lights out, go for a walk, then finish watching the show in the cafeteria in the opposite end of the hotel. The Drinky Crow Show and Xavier: Renegade Angel matched the inner sensation of holding on by the tips of my psychiatric fingers. 

I stayed active but with boredom dragging at my mind, I’d compulsively wander. In the dark empty dining room, I’d approach the baby grand piano, positioned up on a riser in the blackness. It centered me as my flashlight navigated the ominous cells of the circular tables, each with its uniform, tentacular lace of black chair legs reaching out to trip me. Setting down the sparkle of my key ring, then propping up the flashlight so that I could see the keys, I’d sit at the piano after and play Trent Reznor’s “A Warm Place,” the only simple melody I knew how to play. 

One night I smoked a joint before work and found myself in a random hotel room in the old servant’s quarters watching TV. When a horror movie trailer came on, a terrifying poltergeist face came out of the TV, spooking me so chilly that I stayed away from hotel rooms and sequestered myself in the lobby. People often asked, “Was it like The Shining?” wandering around an empty hotel rumored to be haunted. One of those silly “Ghost Hunter” TV shows came to the Iroquois to film with their night vision cameras and hokey narration. I told them that if there’s ghosts in the Iroquois, they would only make themselves known to somebody who was alone in the building, not a whole a circus of actors, camera crews and sound guy. To prove it to myself I went around the hotel with my own video camera, watching through the lens as I went from ballroom to lobby to cavernous kitchen, unnerved as I watched the video later for details I’d missed.

All the lights in the hotel were kept on, except for the floors that for some maintenance reason were kept in darkness. I patrolled these inky black spaces by flashlight, shining it into all the open doors of the hotel rooms. One night, in the darkened eastern wing, I came around a corner, walking down the hall to complete my round. Like a child descending into a basement then hurrying back up the steps, I imagined something behind me. Instead, in front of me: at the end of the corridor, somebody was there, with a flashlight. 

“Who’s there?” I said. No answer. 

“I’m gonna call the cops,” I warned. I took a few steps toward the stranger; he stepped towards me. Was it someone from the maintenance dept here really late at night? Why was he shining his flashlight in my face? I got closer; he got closer. 

This was the lesson of the haunted hotel: no one was there. I realized where this apparition came from — a mirror just inside the door to a luxury suite had bounced my flashlight back at me. The noises you make as you walk down the hall make you stop when you hear something, and the sound stops when you do, only re-manifested when you’re making noise again. The cascade of periphery-reflections you set in motion in mirrors and glass as you pass, darting out of sight when you whip around to look. The wide veranda facing the frozen lake pops and snaps in the pre-dawn subzero air—an immense sleeping dragon who shifts and ripples irritated wings, only frightening because you’re there to hear it. 

From the outside, the century-old hotel is an elaborate cake with half its candles blown out. Looking out a high window, in the ice-haloed moonlight, I can see that my footsteps in the snow of the back lawn end where I must have just remembered something—a book, a key, my life—and turned back.

In Room 213 a TV’s on, yet no one’s been in there for weeks. I creep into the periwinkle dark to turn it off. Ghosts like C-SPAN—or perhaps lament they have no fingers to turn to something racier, something more embodied, like Survivor.

When it’s 3am and your elevator breaks, you can’t radio for help. That’s why I preferred the stairs; where I saw a shade dart away on one of the glass-encased landings. Another view, out another window: in the hotel parking lot, a crispy leaf scurries up a snowdrift and clings to a wrought-iron fence. And, with shadows for swords, the full moon and the orange streetlamp fence all night long, until my shift ends.

I stumble out to my car in the lot, feeling the caffeine swell for the dream-drive home, when something makes me pause. Something ancient clutches my shoulder. I turn around just in time to witness a hot pink smear of winter sunrise above the hotel, appearing behind the western turret.

“I say we feed this motherfucker to the gators,” Jake Blackwood says. “Shorty and Lucinda haven’t had writer meat in, I don’t know, months.” He’s taller than I had even imagined him. He’s wearing firing range eye protection and a Ruger GP100 on his hip. He looks like he could rip a copy of Ducks, Newburyport in half with his bare hands.

“Remember that investigative reporter who came around wanting to do a story on the disappearances?” Sybil Rain says. She’s done up in a cherry red cheerleader outfit and sucks on a blue lollipop, and her hair has matching streaks of azure in it.

“How much money do you have on you?” Derek Maine asks me. He’s sitting in a scraped-up wooden chair that is backwards, like he’s a corrupt cop four hours into a weary interrogation. 

“I’ve got about $45 in my wallet,” I say. “You can have it.” I hold out the wallet to Maine. He snatches it out of my hand and begins thumbing through the contents. “Plus there’s a gift card to Southside Mall Cinemas that has about $25 dollars left on it,” I add, my voice quaking.

“I’ll take that, thank you very much.” Sybil Rain strides forward and plucks the card out of Derek’s fingers. “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is coming out and I love me some Milk Duds.”

“What are you going to do with me?” I say. 

“See you later, alligator,” Stuart Buck says. His eyes look more cruel and malign than they did on the screen. 

“After a while, crocodile,” Sybil Rain says after taking out her lollipop, finishing the sing song. 

All of their expressions look more cruel and malign. They look like a cross between the family in those horror movies where Instagram influencers go off the beaten path looking for quaint locales to shoot photos in and find chainsaw death, that and Mad Max supporting characters who in a chaotic laughing frenzy would rape and murder fleeing citizens, civilization crumbling at the edges of mankind. The Last Estate plantation is near a swamp that is notorious for tourists getting lost in, no cell signal. Later skeletons turn up with bones clean of all meat, “swamp accidents,” they say.

Minutes later I find myself in a specially made harness dangling upside down above a gator pit. Gators lash the dark water underneath me with their tails, impatient. I have to think fast. I can’t believe I’m going to buy it in the power-grip jaws of some monster reptiles. 

“What’s going on here?” I hear a voice above me inquiring, bored. It’s William Duryea and he looks down at me squirming for my life. “Oh, another one.”

“What do you need, right now?” I shout.

“What we need is a whole lot of money,” Jake Blackwood says. 

“I can get it to you,” I say.

“Start talking.”

I’ve always been a lousy salesman, can’t close the deal, can’t even get people to look my way. But now I had to tap into the inner car dealer inside me, because I was wheeling and dealing for my life.

“I know a sure-fire way to make some easy money,” I say.

“Let’s hear it,” Gabriel Hart says. Each one sounds more bored and less troubled at the thought of lowering a man into a pit of death than the last. “And make it fast, I have to write 3,000 words on mic placement in Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston’s 1989 collab album It’s Spooky.”

“Amazon,” I say. 

“What about it? We hate Amazon.”

“Do you know a guy named Peter Rook?” I say.

“Never heard of him,” says William Duryea.¹

“Well you should. He’s an outsider writer from Canada and he taught me some secrets of how to punk Amazon in self-publishing.” I had interviewed Rook months before, since I had some half-assed idea about writing a book about writers in “outsider lit” in the Twittersphere, but then like most things with me the book had an ambitious first few chapters, moderate applause, quotation on Radio Panik 105.4 FM out of Brussels, then collapsed into confused mumbling. Now Rook could be my ticket out of this mess. I hope he doesn’t mind.

“What did he say?” Sybil Rain asks. She sounds slightly curious but like it would just take one boring reply from me for her to lose interest and toss me fully to the reptiles.

“Get me away from these alligators and I’ll tell you.”

They all look at each other, weighing the options. They decide to haul me up and toss me into a chair with the harness still on me, a stark reminder that I could be right back down there in an instant. Blackwood, sending a clear signal, sits down across from me at a table and puts his Ruger down on it with a clunk. The silent inquisitor. “Start talking.”

I gulp. “Ok, Rook told me about his experiences writing niche erotica and manipulating the Algorithm at Amazon to maximize sales. He didn’t tell me any of his pen names, and I didn’t push him. He told me about how you could analyze the sales rank information of erotic novels and stories in various niche and sub-niche markets, figure out what keywords were visible on the covers and in the titles and blurbs of these best-selling novels—their sales page—and exploit those. He said, ‘I geared everything I did, not just towards cramming those keywords in, but finding out which ones had the most visibility in search engines.’ He told me he had a background in studying formal logic and computer sciences at university, and that he used this in studying the sales of books on Amazon. Ever heard of hucows?”

Before anyone speaks Blackwood nods and says: “Hucows, oh yeah, lemme tell you. Milk of a different ilk? It’s lactation erotica. Ulrika Udderson, Sinistre Ange. Hucow BDSM, ‘how I became a hucow at the farm.’ That’s pure 100% sexual calcium, boy. Hard bones.”

“Rook said that some of these hucow books would sell two or three copies every day,” I say. “He said he would examine the sales rank of books that had the keyword ‘hucow’ in the title and compare it with another book of the same genre, maybe with the big breasts on the cover, but without the keyword in the title, to conclude what it was about the first book that was selling vs. the second book.”

During our phone interview Rook had said that Amazon’s search engine at the time had been like the “ancient pre-Panda Google SEO,” and now Amazon’s search engine is more closely like Google’s in that the best spots are now sponsored ads. There had been a perturbation of the Algorithm, like to that caused by Google’s new filtering system of 2011 to combat content farms. “The Algorithm”: a supernatural entity which people speak about as if it is a cross between Adam Smith’s invisible hand and the oppressive, omnipotent eyes of Quetzalcoatl’s techno-shaman elite, in need of propitiating human sacrifices.

“There’s even gay lactation fantasies like Henry the Hucow,” I go on, “which boggles the mind, but somebody is paying for that. Rook told me that he had gotten into this strategy to phreak Amazon via Something Awful.” 

Here as I sit in the chair I feel the floor slipping out from under me to a degree. I know next to nothing about any of this Internet history, I’m just talking to keep a last fingertip’s grip on life. Something Awful started out as a comedy website for nerds in 1999 but eventually became a larger-than-life Internet phenomenon with bustling forums full of nefarious activity. In 2018, Gizmodo ranked Something Awful as 89th in its “Top 100 Websites That Shaped The Internet As We Know It.” The forums at Something Awful spawned, among other things, Weird Twitter, 4chan, and the Slender Man urban legend that those poor girls believed was true which led to murder. It was at a Something Awful forum on business and careers that Rook told me he had gotten wind of a woman who had been selling erotica on Amazon, and he got hooked up with a community of people who were exchanging notes and best practices for publishing it—critiques, encouragement, project management. He told me about how writers were selling off whole catalogues of erotica stories to each other for ten cents on the dollar, selling the worldwide rights, which the buyers would repackage and change a few things, like cover design, then republish. 

“Another example of this niche erotica is Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica,” I say. “Arrogant domineering millionaires turned into infants by dominating ‘mommy figures’ who literally put them in diapers. Rook didn’t tell me about this one, I learned it from Mark McGurl in his book Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, where he highlighted this subgenre as an example of the way Amazon acts as a sophisticated mechanism to serve highly specified genre fiction up to consumers. ABDL is just another example of this phenomenon. And authors are making bank. I guess people like reading about guys in diapers.”

“That’s sick,” Stuart Buck says.

“Yeah,” I say. “But Amazon is selling these novels like Snickers bars, and you could too!”

William Duryea, clearly the alpha male in the room, waves his hands as if to silence the room. “Who says we need money?”

“Well, by the looks of it…,” I say, turning my head to look at the dicey surroundings. 

“We don’t need interior decorator advice from you,” Blackwood says, picking up the Ruger and calmly rotating the seven-bullet cylinder. 

“I’m just saying, if you ever wanted to pick up a few extra bucks, you could turn this place into a factory for smut. You’ve got some writers here, no?”

Derek Maine and Gabriel Hart look at each other. Just then I hear a loud creak and a door opens. Everyone’s heads turn to look. A large object rolls into the room, what I can only describe as an archaic wheelchair running off steam power, with a figure dressed in black sitting in it. Its head is obscured by a cube of black glass; it looks like a person with a head inside an aquarium full of black water is sitting there. 

William Duryea looks terrified. It’s destabilizing because like I said, this is the alpha male of the group. If he’s scared, what does that spell for the rest of us? 

“Rudy, I hope we didn’t wake you up,” William says. 

The figure in the wheelchair, like a 3rd stage Guild Navigator in a royal court, takes a microphone from its armrest, holds it up to the black aquarium head and speaks into it garbled static which the microphone translates as the sentence: “There’s writing for money, and then there’s writing for money.”

There’s a tense pause. I figure I’m dead anyway so I just say, “Oh I agree. I know it’s beneath a lot of people. This was part of my conversation with Rook. He talked about how he would rather be completely invisible and unknown and be able to pay the rent, than to go for Twitter followers. In fact, he implied to me that writers who avoided the grubbiness of things like commercially viable genre fiction were showing a form of ‘privilege.’ He also told me that social media such as Twitter does not sell books at all, that a newsletter sent out to people who’ve already bought one of your books is a better form of promotion since that group has already demonstrated an interest and a willingness to spend money on your writing. Ross was a goldmine of advice on matters literary and commercial that I would love to share more of with you.”

Rudy waits for the others to show some sign of life, which they do, nervously, so he takes up his microphone and says, static translated into an imperial decree, “Take a vote. Get rid of him—or put the trespasser to work for us, writing erotica and pulling in the dollars.”

The votes on my fate, some of which they get from other hidden rooms at the Last Estate and via text, were chilling:

William Duryea – die

Gabriel Hart – die

Derek Maine – die

Jake Blackwood – die

Stuart Buck – live

Sybil Rain – live

Miss Unity – live

Pat Dry – live

Rudy Johnson – live

Sofia Haugen – die

It’s a tie. It’s decided by a flipping a coin — a wooden nickel marked “Redeemable at the [REDACTED] Mississippi Homecoming July 1973” — that I am to live. 

Like the bursting hucow hooked up to the teat cups of the milking machine, I am here connected to this iPhone and this laptop. I’m handcuffed to this desk in the basement of the Last Estate, ever aware of Shorty and Lucinda the alligators, caught between my captors and Jeff Bezos, cranking out the words. I write erotica and other Kindle Publishing fare to benefit the Last Estate coffers.

One last note on the subject of money and literature: The Romantic poet Lord Byron insisted that he was a Gentleman and that Gentlemen do not accept payment for their poetry. Centuries later some certain analogous prejudices still linger in various subtle forms: “Gentlemen do not do business with Amazon.” Even before I was under the care of the Last Estate, with its gulag-quality room and board, I was on disability. I was on food stamps and did the EBT dance at the supermarket checkout lane, jumped through bureaucratic hoops to qualify. I don’t know Peter Rook that well but I might say that Rook and I have this in common: we are not Gentleman authors, and that unlike some of the literati on Twitter we must sully our fingers with tacky banknotes, filthy lucre, the ink of commerce. Such is the reality of the Algorithm, the Big Algorithm which governs material life on this planet.

A review of:
DRAGON DAY by Matthew Pegas. Terror House. 2021. 136 pp.

DOX by Alex Beaumais. Tragickal Books. 2021. 225 pp.

Fiction exploring political violence has been a gymnasium of the mind to safely lift heavy matters since Dostoyevsky’s novel critiquing nihilism and political revolution, Demons. Novels treating the current political scene, and in particular the resurgent world of right-wing ideology as it plays out online—the alt-right—provide gym equipment much in demand for strengthening muscles long-neglected by the left’s supposed stranglehold on the arts. Two new novels by Matt Pegas and Alex Beaumais nobly follow the rightward intellectual excursions of young male characters, but the extractions, the settlings, the fearful warnings that result in the two works differ greatly in quality and literary merit. 

Matthew Pegas’ slight, buzzy novel Dragon Day is an academic thriller disguising a bizarre political treatise. Why do I say bizarre? Because I can’t quite say with certainty where it ends up, or if to the contrary it is meant to be a kind of sampler of political philosophy as it exists in 2021. The environment that the novel explores is the hotbed of political ideas and idealism begging to run rampant that is the contemporary college campus, where minds are for the most part free from economic concerns to run to whatever fanciful destination they can. In the most extreme case, as this is, it explores what motivations can there be for political violence.

Everyone wants to know why the school shooter does what he does, why the incel mass murderer does what he does, why people on the fringes resort to extreme acts to express themselves. A void is created after the dust settles that no amount of CNN talking heads and analysts and investigative journalists can fill. Media speculation in the aftermath feels so dissatisfying. It still feels that way after reading Dragon Day, but at least someone has attempted to use the scope of fiction to examine it.

The novel is, technically, spoilable so I will resist the urge to spill all the beans here, should you want to support the author and Terror House by purchasing it. It’s a thriller and it does have some credible twists like much genre fiction. We’re informed from the very beginning that this is a chronicle speculating on what could have led a college freshman, Toby Sharpe, to set off a bomb at “Dragon Day,” an annual parade at the very progressive Lockden University in Pennsylvania, an hour west of New York City, killing Toby and 22 other people and wounding dozens more. The point of view from which the writing is done is more than a little blurry; we’re told that the book is written by Charles Jason, a PhD candidate at Lockden U. who knew Toby for a short time before the bombing. Uptight MFA students who can’t abide inexplicable POV shifts: stay away.

Who was Toby Sharpe? Somebody who didn’t fit in, somebody who was not too swift with the ladies or with anybody for that matter, and, in one very early and very shocking scene that sets up a good deal of tension for the rest of the novel’s 136 pages, a victim. The characterization is there: Toby is a romantic wet squib having a misfire with a girl named Zoe who must spell out her lack of interest to him and give him the old “I don’t think I should be dating anybody right now, I’m at college” line, which never fails to be misinterpreted by the dumpee.

The amount of interest we have in the so-called ideological content of an incel manifesto might be limited. For people who have been living on Neptune, or maybe just have been living lives where (bless them) such exotic nomenclature was not necessary, incels means “involuntary celibates,” young men—let’s be real—who can’t convince anybody to have sex with them. The truncated self-inflicted terminology tells you all you really need to know about the brainpower of the unlucky in love: intelligent, taxonomy-obsessed, needing to reduce a common phenomenon of life (most people aren’t getting laid) to a specific label from which to launch an attack on society. Toby never calls himself an incel, but that’s besides the point. His sexual rejection is presented as a crucial ingredient for his apparent anti-social outrage.

As a satire of academia and the intricate gobbledygook that is foisted on young minds by the ivory tower, Dragon Day is not quite successful. It’s too perfunctory to be a useful dissection of the life of the mind; perhaps had the novel been thicker we could have marinated in the intellectual stockpot for longer, allowing the ideas to penetrate and the laughter to be richer and more skewering. Toby falls under the spell of a popular young English professor named Wallingford who tries to indoctrinate the boy into Derridean theories about the connection between a writer’s prose style and his penile dimensions. Research funds are set aside to solicit info from writers about their peckers in tandem with their writing abilities. Much is made of the “phalgorithm” that gets used to measure a writer’s syntax. Charles, the PhD student who was working with Wallingford on these theories, gets booted out in favor of Toby, who is thought to be more malleable for Wallingford’s true intellectual aims: taking literary phalology to the next level. During a visit from Toby during office hours, Wallingford begins massaging the student’s shoulders and giving him the inside scoop:

“The truth is, I’ve exhausted the limits of what can be accomplished using penis measurements and writing samples,” Wallingford said. “I want to continue the study of male sexuality started by literary phalology, but now I want to hone in on an exhaustive study of one young man, and, well, Toby, I want that young man to be you.”

“What?” said Toby, jerking forward.

“Just relax, bud,” said Wallingford. “You’re so tight, I can’t imagine carrying around all this stress is good for you.” Toby tried to take the professor’s advice, squeezing his eyes shut. Relaxing had never been something that came easily to him, especially not around people he wanted to like him.

“Now that Charles is out of the picture,” said Wallingford, close behind Toby’s ear, “I think I’ll be able to speak much more frankly with you about what my work is really about.”

What would an academic thriller be without a nefarious professor pulling the strings behind the scenes? Spoiler doctrine forbids me from telling everything; suffice it to say, the faux-Marxist professor has raised the stakes beyond mere dialectical materialism or Critiques of the Gotha Programme. As befits a thriller we’re talking about the future of Western civilization. Strap in for some crypto-fascist accelerationist chaos magick tug of war between the extreme left and extreme right. “Wallingford’s idea,” Pegas writes, “was that by sowing chaos, feeding into either side of the supposed debate, he was bringing the whole system down.”

The political thrust of the novel gets a little murky and might be easy to make fun of if it weren’t unsettlingly like what you would find broadcasted in an incel terrorist’s over-thinking blog post. Those interested in the finer points of what Pegas is trying to say about the current disruptive promises of the alt-right—and there is a lot to be chewed on there—are encouraged to read the book. Perhaps one of the greatest resonances is that a Nietzschean “transcendence of morality” mainly appeals to little men swimming in excess sexual pneuma, but that is threat enough when bullets, bombs, and out-of-control vehicles are readily available. God is, as usual in indie lit productions, totally absent from the proceedings.

Bombing a college campus, to the bomber’s chagrin had he lived, carries consequences which the reader of Pegas’ novel must contend with. A fallout less dramatic and handled with more skill and literary value is the “doxxing” at the heart of Alex Beaumais’ novel Dox. On November 22nd, 2021, the day I finished reading Beaumais’ debut novel, reports came in about photos being published of trans activists in front of JK Rowling’s house. It was decried as doxxing, or publishing the home address of someone as retaliation for their politically objectionable opinions. In Rowling’s case her doxx-able offenses were her now-famous objections to trans rights and their mangling definition of what constitutes a woman. Rowling has for several years occupied, in the minds of many people, the role of transphobic, out-of-touch celebrity betraying a generation of sensitive readers. Quickly people on Twitter, out for Rowling’s blood, chimed in that the photos could hardly be called doxxing as Rowling’s address in Edinburgh is well-known to anybody consulting a tourism website; people take photos there all the time.

There is, at least apparently, no such ambiguity to the doxxing experienced by Rick Speer in Beaumais’ novel: in his portrayal it is a frightening, career-ending, reputation-destroying act of disruption that may as well spell the end of one’s life. Speer, a libertarian blogger who has amassed a small fortune in Bitcoin and who has more than flirted with far-right politics online, is being exposed and blackmailed by volatile antifa types who come to his house, throw rocks through his window, and film themselves having an altercation with him in the parking lot of his Toronto condo. In a frenzy Speer shuffles through his options, which include fleeing to other countries, paying off the doxxers, and suicide. The novel is about other things, as well, but this experience lies at the center of the narrative and propels the plot forward.

In the author’s very capable hands, Toronto, Canada is portrayed as a choke point of globally conscious, highly educated urban youth seeking meaning in 21st century culture wars, a more interesting battleground than Pegas’ university campus. Politics is ever present and ever-important; the online universe, for this class of tapped-in young city-dwellers, is a whetstone of political philosophy against which to grind many ideological axe blades. The novel’s landscape is of a tense, fearful place, and the social media environment inhabited by the characters is one saturated with opinions and, in the constantly watching eyes of the Internet, a thirst for accountability. We know this from watching the news, or more specifically by hearing of the crushing spectacles of denunciation performed by online mobs seeking vengeance in a hyper-mediated biosphere of unforgiving political correctness. Beaumais dramatizes this phenomenon, highlighting the fears of very public revelations felt by people trapped by their own actions and utterances as recorded by the eternal posterity of the Internet.

The most remarkable aspect of the novel as I read it was its intelligent and bewildering prose style, studded with au courant political and cultural jargon, a whirlwind encyclopedia of refined political positions as examined under a fearless 2021 microscope. Rick Speer reflects to himself upon the arrival at his worldview vis-a-vis the trolls of the right wing:

At some point between indulging these people and wishing he could delete them like his Internet history, Rick had to admit that, though he hated anarcho-capitalists, PUAs, 1488ers, trad-Christians, accelerationists, NEETs, and Nazbols—he hated them half a degree less than the general population. It was just too easy for normies to believe falsehoods and become human shields for consumerism…You could see the cognitive dissonance in genetic-testing kits, which revealed your separateness down to whether you carried a Neanderthal allele for sneezing after dark chocolate but whose commercials showed everyone as octo-racial, with freckles, an epicanthic fold, a flat nose, a copper afro.

The portrait of Rick Speer as a man seduced by alt-right ideas and yet a sympathetic victim of mass bullying is a risky one, but Beaumais wins our indulgence by putting Rick through an ordeal that in some ways has little to do with culture wars. The doxxing central to the novel is bookended by a beginning and ending having to do with a Polish man and his three daughters, the Ogóreks, and Rick’s encounters with them. Bela, one of the daughters, is dating Rick while her very uptight sister Ariel looks on with extreme displeasure, because as right-wing (he would say libertarian) as Rick is, Ariel is ultra-left and driven by left-wing grievances and struggles with her own white privilege. The sections where Ariel and Rick debate politics around the dinner table are, unfortunately, weak spots in the novel, where the veneer over the “novel of ideas” is at its thinnest. Beaumais and Pegas struggle to extricate their novels from this “novel of ideas” rubric with varying degrees of success: Beaumais’ chassis shows strain while Pegas’ wheels almost come completely off the cart. Beaumais excels at narrating the inner workings of his characters’ minds and is slightly less assured at this outward dialogue of bickering, educated strivers. At the dinner table when Rick first meets the Ogóreks, the political scrimmage is set as European history is quickly invoked:

Rick said, “Are you guys Polish?”

“Yes,” Ariel said. “What are you?”

“Kraut-Anglo. My father was born in Germany.”

“I’ll trade you Szydło if you give us Merkel,” Ariel said, smiling at her formulation.

“Deal.”

Ariel smiled and then thought about this: “What?”

…

Rick looked surprised. “Germany is always in the middle of outside forces. I guess kind of like Poland, but we actually, well, nevermind. It just seems like Germans are always marching too hard in some direction.”

“Maybe you’d like our history instead, of being invaded and dismembered by foreign powers?”

“Um, sorry.”

“It’s not like you did it,” she sneered. 

The portrayal of Ariel as an unpleasantly PC, essay-writing shrew is perhaps meant to strike a satirical tone; she “prioritizes finding allyship over determining whether someone’s apartment got morning sunlight,” concocting an acronym “JILEBAFIRG” as a scorecard of issues: justice, immigration, labor, environment, banking, abortion, feminism, inequality, race, and gay rights. Rick falls short of Ariel’s estimation: “[H]is dog-whistles on race and immigration cast him in the reject pile. And that wasn’t even counting the money he was giving Bela or the militancy of his haircut.”

Whatever faults of characterization exist are minor enough to be lost in the panorama. Dox is a great book for readers wanting to visit the world of the present day and engage with intricate ideas and politics of the moment. It is not an escape from a politics-drenched media environment but a thorough, satisfying diving-into.

Highlights of the novel include the middle section dealing with the doxxing and a section nearer the beginning where Bela and Rick inadvertently drink a water bottle laced with MDMA and go to a nightclub. The elucidation of the two uncertain lovers’ intoxicated thoughts and actions while in a crowded place full of sensory stimuli was wonderful. The right-wing “Thinking Man” is given three-dimensions, relationships, activity, relatable failings, so that the going askew means something to us later.

Indie lit, writing accessed through Twitter, “cyberwriting,” is countercultural, and in the pandemic years this has its share of political manifestations perhaps surprising to the artistically minded. In reading and exploring the scene, I have felt the neoreactionary spider’s web vibrate but have never really come face to face with the spider itself. Maybe the spider metaphor is all wrong—too many Shelob associations, not enough Attenborough, spiders being, like neoreactionaries, just a part of the natural world we live in now.