In a leisurely, and might I add gentle, skiff ride across Acheron from this life into the next, MF Korn contemplates his navel. And finds more than a stinking grey wad of belly-button fluff. Hertzan Chimera takes on the role of Charon, the hooded boatswain.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: You are a delight to read, Mister Korn. Oh, yes, I have read your work, on and off, for a number of years. I even brought a little compilation P.O.D. of great twenty first century writers with me to work (pats the pocket of his damp cloak) and you are in it. Before my Master roasts you on the eternal spit, can you leave us with a few anal nuggets of nostalgia.

MF KORN: Maybe I write like Rachmaninoff composed melancholic music augmented by his depressive nature. I write like Malcolm Lowry under the volcano of his melancholia. I write with a nod to Jim Thompson's gritty, gloomy, bleak prose, too. I'd say I relish the melancholia in my prose style. I am influenced by Malcolm Lowry, and Poe and depressive writers like Jim Thompson, and Bukowski. So, the main sticking point is the depressing nature of my work, and to further confuse the issue, sometimes the bizarre style I have turns out to be a bit baroque. Some people can't stand it, others seem to like it. So the main point is my take on the great loser writers and how I worship them. Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, all the stumbling drunks that puked on their way to deliver their Nobel prize speech. Jim Thompson was a loser. Malcolm Lowry was a total loser.
Tranquilizers were primitive starting in the twenties on up. It's too bad that Lowry and Hemingway didn't have Prozac when they needed it, instead of phenobarbitol and shock treatment. Rachmaninoff was so depressed that he had to be hypnotized by an autosuggestionist, Dr. Nicoli Dahl. Instead of composing a religious oratorio, Rachmaninoff set Edgar Allan Poe's THE BELLS to music. And he wrote a famous piece called ISLE OF THE DEAD based on a German Expressionist painting by Arnold Bocklin, of the Isle of the Dead, Hades. Sergei Rachmaninoff seemed obsessed with the darker side. He had a fondness for using the famous Dies Irae musical theme in some of his works.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: You know Mister Korn, the thing I like about my job here in Hades is it's nice and warm all year round just like the Southern States of America. Can't you feel the good vibration?

MF KORN: Yes. I'm from Louisiana. But to answer your question about my own personal Hades, I gleefully wallow in melancholia, or I used to. That's my ticket. My prose was dripping with it. The bleakness, the hopelessness. The phrases are dripping with sadness and melancholia. I don't seek to change too much. Forget the self help books. Who would have wanted a well-adjusted Hemingway? I am totally happy in my melancholia. What more could God give me? When Malcolm Lowry was deep down in Mexico in Cuernavaca, they found him in the dingiest places. He drank in a damn little Mexican grocery store as if to say, "I'm in hell, I know I am in hell, what more can God give me?" James Dickey, author of Deliverance was a loser drunk too. I try not to do too much drinking anymore, because it can kill you, but a lot of my body of work over the last eighteen or twenty years had been created because I sometimes got the muse that fell from the laps of the Gods, through a bottle of bourbon. Those days are gone. James Dickey showed up drunk at a literary event here in Louisiana, and said a few curse words in his drunkenness and this old man and his wife told him right to his face, "Shut your trap! Your dirty trap!", and Dickey just took it like the loser that he was. He was drunk and he was in his own hell. But the trick is to survive the wondrous hell, like Bukowski did. Jim Thompson was in his own personal Hell, all the way to the end. But look at the body of work these men made! They end up broken hollow shells of men, but their body of work survives.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: You can go back and start all over again, Mister Korn. I have the ability to grant you that wish. What happens when YOU become famous and happy with your lot? Don't you lose your EDGE?

MF KORN: Nah. But I'm much more well-adjusted now. The cool thing is, I woke up one day years ago and saw that I had two piles of novel and other mss stacked almost two foot high each-Eleven novels, two hundred short stories, a screenplay and eleven volumes of epistolary discourse. And all the angst that went into them may still be in them, although I'm much happier now. Years ago, I used to put the mss next to my bed with my previous two cats, sleeping while I typed a novel mss lazily laying prone. I had heard Twain used to write in bed, longhand obviously. I got tired of sitting in a chair typing away. I used to work computer operator night shifts, and that was depressing. I ended up for about seven years as an operator, working nights. On weekends I would put on "BladeRunner" or old "Outer Limits" episodes, or "Dunwich Horror." I would be up all night, drinking bourbon and furiously pounding out novel after novel like my life depended on it. When you are a computer operator, you wake up at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, sometimes you don't even see daylight, and you might go for a week or two at a time without seeing other human beings. Now that really didn't help me out back then. Never be a computer operator. But I am the sum total of my piles of novels and short stories. My body of work is my whole life. With each novel and story I wrote and got published, my self esteem grew a notch or two. By the way, the drinking bouts are no longer.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: It's like you are erasing yourself slowly into your books leaf by leaf.

MF KORN: In one of my stories, "Murder at the Wal-mart", I turned a Wal-mart into an allegory right out of Dante. Even with the furies of the soul and the unfurling banners of Faith Hope and Charity, and Virgil's guide, a muse, Beatrice, who was a fine little cutey babe walking around Wal-mart. At one point, just like Dante, she presents him with roses, and that is where he descends. There's even a crossdresser in the story that the protagonist is trying to avoid, from his neighbourhood. It's a good creepy story. There are a group of persons with Downs Syndrome in the story, and they represent the furies of his soul. We're all Ghod's children.
Oh yes, I've written a whole lot about being guided to the Isle of the Dead, the city of Hades and you are as good and solid-armed a ferryman as one so condemned could hope for, if I may be so bold.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: I almost wish I wasn't your escort, sir. You are (honestly) one of the funniest writers I have ever read, you have original spark and wit - I always see you with your feet in a cynical bucket of Hades rather than a morbid resident.

MF KORN: Yes! Great! It's not just the physical place of Hades or Hell, but the Hell in a man's heart. The melancholia in a man's heart. That is from Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholia" from Democritus to the Reader. Most people just think of Hell as a location when it really is from within. Malcolm Lowry, one of the biggest loser-writers I admire, who wrote one of the towering novels of the Twentieth century, he chose his hell gladly, and lived his life that way. But I don't want to sound too gloomy. I have some degree of wit and humour as well. James Dickey wrote about Malcolm Lowry's hidden sense of humour in his writing while Lowry casually strolled through his own hellishness. James Dickey followed Malcolm Lowry years later into that same pit of Hell. Yes, I think I do have a fairly good sense of humour. I don't seem to dwell on the melancholia too much anymore. Those early days, I don't want to bring back, from 20 years ago. Too much drink. Night shifts. So I don't want to give the impression I've got the perpetual gloom of a mortician or something. I've been know to make a few people laugh at times, but producers aren't knocking on my door to give me my own HBO special.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Mister Korn, sir, you are so close to realising how to get out of this contract. Until you realise there is a way out, tell me about the companies you have destroyed by your wicked submissions, I heard it was five or six publishing houses that perished under your relentless onslaught of manuscripts.

MF KORN: After never selling a novel, but coming close once, in the mid nineties I had about seven novel sales in a row, in some cases, the same novel sold again after the first collapse of publisher. In every instance the publisher crumbled. Two novels to Tanjen, Baziat Literary Agency in Russia, Papercapers, Gargadillo, etc. I began to think I was cursed. I still wonder sometimes. But now that I've had a few paperbacks out, I don't feel too cursed anymore. I'm collabing or have collabed on tons of short stories with various chaps, all of whom hail from Britain (including the interviewer of this piece, which is you, and Dave Mathew and DF Lewis), and have a collaborative horror novel going with Dave Mathew, which would be novel number twelve for me. (I must admit, some of these eleven novels are just under the wire for short novels, others are much larger). By the way, I can't tell you how many dozens of short stories got accepted and then the magazine would fold. For instance, I sold a story to Britain's FEAR and it collapsed right before my story would have appeared.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Care to talk about your transition from music to writing while we dock?

MF KORN: A friend of mine once asked me, "Why do you have such an orthodox taste in music?" I stick to classical music but like Jazz pianists like the great Art Tatum. I told him, "It must be music school that did it." I had to memorize numerous Schubert and Beethoven sonatas, Bach preludes and fugues, and everything else. I mean, how many people my age listen to requiems and late romantic symphonies? I don't know anything about rock and roll. I started off with piano lessons in the second grade. Fine, this is interesting, I thought at the time. Then when ragtime came back into fashion in early 1970's, I found what would keep me from quitting piano lessons. I must have bought and memorized every ragtime piece ever composed. Then I discovered George Gershwin. I memorized the Rhapsody in Blue and mimicked Andre Watt's rendition of it. I learned a lot of other pieces by him, including his concerto. With a bit of prodding by a fraternity brother (of a fraternity I ultimately never joined officially), I left engineering school and enrolled in music school at another university. I practiced like a maniac, hours upon endless hours. Then came Rachmaninoff, whose Second Piano Concerto I memorized, and a movement of the Third Concerto as well, along with a bunch of other stuff by him. I wasn't interested in writing like the fiend I later turned out to be. Then, right before a senior recital and graduation, having upped the piano practice time to fourteen hours a day, I thought I was starting to crack up. I quit music school. That depressive bout suddenly made me give up piano and take up writing seriously. It was 1981 or 1982, and Stephen King was big. In late 1983, I set off to write my own similar horror novel, and that was RACHMANINOFF'S GHOST. Rachmaninoff was an extremely depressed person. He was right up there with Oscar Levant. But he was a great composer and considered one of the greatest pianist of the twentieth century. So I wrote this thick novel and used my music school experience and professors and friends as characters, and finished the second draft in 1986. I developed the habit of typing the first draft on an electric typewriter, and then had to go about getting it into the computer, as primitive as they were then. I fondly remember this Coronamatic typewriter. I banged out novels on this typewriter until one day in 1994 after about my fifth novel and 50th short story and a few volumes of discourse, I turned the typewriter on and it literally fell to pieces, much like an old automobile in a Laurel and Hardy skit. I had literally murdered this typewriter with overwork and abuse. I know that my prose style gets me into trouble sometimes. Some editors used to say, "Your prose style gets in the way...". Other people, upon reading a story by MF Korn guessed that MF Korn was a female writer. I didn't know what to make of that. I'm here today to say I am a six foot four inch tall man. I've collected all my rejection and acceptance letters. Two huge volumes of them. I used to tape the acceptance letters to my apartment walls back in the old days. I don't know why. My science fiction novels are a sort of result from my collecting and voracious reading of Philip K Dick novels in the eighties on up. I devoured all of Ray Bradbury's stories as a teenager, Heinlein's novels too, and then all read with glee all the work of Harlan Ellison in the early eighties.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Where did you lurk in your mortal time?

MF Korn: Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In my house, I have a great collection of rare letters/signed books, and a library of several thousand books. My studio piano is paid off, and I have two cats and a little dog, where once were my daughter and wife. She moved on to husband number four and took my daughter with her. My daughter, Savannah, thinks I'm very funny and likes that I dedicate my books to her, and my ex wife uses my books in her English classes that she teaches.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: We are here, Mister Korn - welcome to Hell.

MF KORN: This has been a cheery conversation, hasn't it, Charon? Hey, Charon, can you give me a ride back?

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Upon my soul, mortal, no!