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THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HERTZAN CHIMERA
David L Tamarin interviews Mike Philbin for Red Scream Magazine.
Why did you decide to kill Hertzan Chimera?
Will the writing of Mike Philbin be different from the writing of Hertzan Chimera?
First the death of Hertzan Chimera, now the end of Horror Quarterly. How come?
Horror Quarterly/ Terror Tales was one of the few publications that published innovative and original, on the edge fiction. Who will the replace the void left by the demise of Horror Quarterly?
Do you think there are any other publications that produce quality innovative and non-mainstream horror?
Which small press publishers have done the best job in promoting your writing and who are you working with now?
Is there a market at all for surrealist fiction, other than to label it is as horror?
Are Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard big influences on your writing?
Who do you like to read?
Do you think the small press market is providing enough quality subversive and surreal literature?
What is the future of Chimeraworld? Will there be a number three and if so what will it be called?
How will the second Chimeraworld be different from the first one?
You were working on a project with Alex Severin, Planet Fuckstar. What happened with that? Is it going to be released in book or chapbook form at all?
Why do like to write with other writers and what do you get out of collaborating?
What was it like to work with Wrath James White?
Are you working on anything now with Alex Severin or are you involved in any collaborations right now?
Is it possible to faithfully adapt Dick’s A Scanner Darkly to the big screen?
What are some films you have seen recently that you liked?
What do you think of the films of David Cronenberg and David Lynch?
Does Hollywood still produce movies worth seeing?
Are some things difficult for you to write about?
What scares you? What disturbs you? What angers you?
Do you do research for your stories and if so what kind?
Have you ever received a submission that you thought was too extreme, too violent, or too depraved?
Do you think your writing is amoral and depraved?
Has the Marquis de Sade been an influence at all on your writing?
Has H.P. Lovecraft been an influence at all on your writing?
Have you had any encounters with censorship?
Do you have to self-censor your writing ever to avoid offending people?
Was it exciting being involved with the publication Brutal Tales, which definitely took everything to extremes?
Do you worry about offending people?
Should literature be an assault on the reader, a deliberate confrontation?
Is your writing confrontational?
Is your writing pornography?
Do we need to put limits on free speech to protect society?
The first time I read a story by you it made me think of the Japanese surrealist gore industrial film Tetsuo: The Iron Man- what do you think of that film and of modern Japanese film and literature in general?
How is your work received differently in England as opposed to America?
What are you working on now and when can we expect to see more of your work?
Are you primarily writing or do you also do a lot of illustration and design?
I’m currently exploring a few 3D game ideas. I have a couple programmers who I can get to mock-up demos and see if the concept has any legs. I go for small projects that are a) easy to prototype and b) innovative and adult when needs be. This is something I’ve only recently got into but I will definitely be doing a lot more of in the future. I love 3D. I think in 3D. And I think I have a lot to offer the market. Let’s see if I choke like a turkey or soar like a swan.
Are there any philosophers whose work you read?
Is all of reality just an illusion?
Thanks for your time and for putting up with my questions, Mike!
He was an asshole. He just went too far in all directions. He got too big for his boots. Nobody understood a fucking word he was saying, or why he was saying it. Literally. I think a lot of people (especially my peers in the so-called horror market) took it all too seriously, especially things like the Dinosaur Sex in B.F.G.S. and the Daughter Sex in ANIMAL INSTINCTS. They just didn’t get it at all. They didn’t understand. Or maybe they just couldn’t empathise with the strangeness of the HC world. It’s all about irony and levity. Not fuck-wittery and ass-lickery.
You bet - it’s actually readable. The problem (it’s only a problem if it gets in the way) is that I REALLY enjoy playing games with language. For me, language has an eroto-maniac life of its own. I don’t give a shit about structure, it’s me and Kerouac on the road to insanity and I’s the Hitcher who don’t take no prisoners, narratively. The Hertzan Chimera style was all about trying too hard to be clever; rewriting the rules. The Mike Philbin output is not much different in tone or level of nightmare, just in presentation - it adheres to more of the standard conventions like punctuation, sentence structure and grammar. It’s much more down to earth surrealism (if that makes sense). There seems to be lots more first-person perspective in my new work, I’m very happy writing first person - it gives the reader increased authenticity.
Death is part of the creative process. If your arm starts to fester, chop it off. As I’ve said in Question1, that Hertzan Chimera writing persona really got its hooks into me. It started to take control of the way my brain worked. It called all the literary shots. It even demanded that I talk about 'him' in the third person. People couldn’t tell if it was me or my press agent. I have a radical approach to marketing and this HC side of me was the nastiest worst element of that. Why did Horror Quarterly die? I couldn’t give that all-important 5-10 cents per word for each accepted story? I dunno what it was, but I do now you can’t live off 5-10 cents per word. I can’t hold the writer’s hand. If he has an extreme venue like Horror Quarterly and he doesn’t use it to the fullest, it’s his loss - the death of his true creativity. I didn’t censor anything remember, just helped the story sit better in it’s own shit. Another Horror Quarterly will not come along this century. Not with such a rich mix of 'Fuck You' with every tasty new issue.
Who cares, it was the fault of the writer that it failed. Sure there were quite a lot of fuck ups with the old editor (who still wanted to use the name Terror Tales for his totally unconnected paperback anthologies meaning the title change to Horror Quarterly), with the site server (which was unreliable and weakly supported), and all sorts of other ‘fun’ stuff. It was a lesson in what was important in (my) life. I couldn’t keep chasing up folk to submit their worst nightmare. I just have better things (creatively) to do.
Not really. I think horror is a dying pack-pony that has carried too many shit writers for too long. You can’t sue me for that belief but it is (obviously) not very palatable to those me-too horror authors who wanna milk the franchise dry.
I’m not sure ANY small press publishers can get any of their writers the exposure they need - it seems to be a closed shop. You need money to get the ads together for the mainstream publications, and (in the case of BFGS) Massacre Publishing couldn’t even promote the book because of many aspects of this controversial title. I’ve worked with Eraserhead Press, Double Dragon Press and Cyber Pulp and it’s always hard to get the word out - I’m sure my million readers are out there wondering where all the crazy-as-fuck books are but it’s such a big wide world. This year, Cyber Pulp are gonna bring out CHIERAWORLD2 and THE (autobiographical) LIFE AND DEATH OF HERTZAN CHIMERA.
Surrealist fiction? Nobody knows about it. Only that they do. And it’s certainly NOT called either horror or surrealist fiction. It goes by A-Z on the book shelves. And THAT’s a real hard nut to crack. Imagine the millions of corporate dollar that’s pumped into mainstream A-Z every year. You gotta die young like James Dean and at least show some potential to be taken on by a mainstream publisher it seems these days.
Nope. I don’t really tend to get influenced by writers, if I’m writing. I don’t really tend to get influenced by painters, if I’m painting. I’m the sort of creative type who thinks it’s really important to be inspired from outside the constrictions of one’s 'genre'. I don’t really have a recognised genre anyway. I just write the things I’d like to read. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be done? I did really enjoyed the early ‘horror’ books of Clive Barker, right up until The Great And Secret Show. I prefer sci-fi to horror, given a choice. I do like William Burroughs, though more for his performance of his words than the books themselves - he’s a real funny reader of his own work. And as you’ll see with the Wrath James White question, I really rate that in a writer.
I hardly ever read mainstream horror - that grey franchised product just bores me. I have all Haruki Murakami’s novels (that’s a Japanese writer in translation), I love Philip K Dick more as an older person (I really couldn’t get into his shit as a teen) my theory is you have to have actually lived on life’s sickening rollercoaster a bit to truly appreciate what the hell a Dick book is trying to tell you. It’s not the action adventure of Hollywood. It’s about failure - a quality sorely lacking from most feel-good narratives. I like Octavia Butler - especially her XENOGENESIS trilogy. I like Nick Cave’s one novel AND THE ASS SAW THE ANGEL. William Gibson, Jeff Noon and Cordwainer Smith are real literary heroes and more recently Greg Iles (yes, that’s odd, innit?).
It is but nobody knows it exists. Who gives a fuck if 2,000 people turn up at a convention? The mainstream in New York never go near those kiss-ass events. They don’t know who’s in town. They don’t care that someone won a poxy award from some of his genre mates. The whole small press genre has no credence in the real world. it doesn’t exist.
You know, some idiot actually had the gall to publicly ask me (on the Shocklines horror forum) if I was gonna call it PhilbinWorld as I’d recently killed off “Hertzan” as this half-brain continued to call me until only recently. I’m still trying to get ChimeraWorld2 finalised. Well, I say finalised, it’s actually been finished for about two months, just waiting for the typeset galley to come back from Cyber Pulp (I hate waiting). There will be a number three but I’m not gonna think about that until CW2 is actually on the e-shelves in paperback format. I have no plans yet for the content of CW3 but be assured it’ll be like nothing that’s ever gone before. A total literary revolution.
If CW1 was balls-out hatchet-attack grand guignol, then CW2 is a razor blade moving across a pulsing wrist an inch an hour - blood will flow, but there’s torture before, lots of torture. To say that CW2 is softer than CW1 is a gross misunderstanding of what I’m trying to do with the follow-up. It’s not as screamy, shrieky ass-fuckery as its predecessor but it’s still nasty - maybe it’s more of a reflection of me than it is of the contributors. I’m a very hands-on editor and if something lets the story down, I’m more likely to get involved to reshape the story, hack lumps off it, combine characters and generally mould it to a CW story than to lazily reject it like other weaker editors.
Nah, Alex was only a guest writer on a couple stories. FUCK STAR was devised and executed (in the main) by myself and a Louisiana writer called Mike Korn. We had this idea for a 'Stations of the Cross' 12-episode trawl through all the sex joints and cybererotica of the future, with a mech-enhanced anti-hero called Eli-X. It’s pure hardcore + sci-fi and it’s still playing on the Apocalypse Fiction website. There are plans to bring it out in oversized format fully-illustrated paperback (like I did with ANIMAL INSTINCTS) but I’m in no rush to fuck it up with the wrong outfit.
It’s like stepping into a new mind with every story. You never know where it’s gonna go. You never know what traps another writer’s gonna set for you and your hoped for narrative drives and character traits. It’s freeform and funky. And I love it.
I don’t think Wrath and I get on well as writers. He’s a nice (big) guy, so I’d better watch what I say here, but Wrath likes to shoot his mouth off, in that I mean he’s a lovely performer, but I’m not convinced you can mutually collaborate with him. He likes to hear his own voice in a story. He writes far too much when it’s his go. He’s a bit of a story fascist. I wouldn’t write with him again, even though I did enjoy the final product. It always felt like I was filling in bits of his story. There was no common ground. What do I know? He’s probably the best writer there is on the SEX-HORROR small press right now. He’s certainly the sexiest performer at readings and what have you - ladies are actually throwing their knickers up on stage. He shines when he performs, but as a collaborator? Not for me.
Nope. Since BFGS ended, we went our separate ways. She did do some great webguying for Horror Quarterly, she really put her gruesome, creative heart and soul into it. But we didn’t collab on anything of a story of novel nature since those 20-odd totally sick-making BFGS stories. I believe she’s moving to the States in a couple weeks time (she might be there already) so her thousands of American fans can track her down in the night and suck her blood. I am involved in no collaborations right now, although I have already pencilled in collabs with Nicholas Tillemans and John B Ford (two writers I really respect).
If anybody can, Linklater can.
AUDITION - a Japanese film by a director called Miike Takashi. I’ve got this real thing for Japan and Japanese film, books you name it, recently. Call it a fetish. I’ll recommend a comedy film called A WEATHER WOMAN and a couple of French films, SEX IS COMEDY and BAISE MOI. One of the best films of all time (apart from Driller Killer) is the Belgian film 'C’est Arrivé Pres De Chez Vous' otherwise known as MAN BITES DOG. BUNDY was a much better film than I expected.
Cronenberg and Lynch are modern masters who will be remembered millennia from now when the films of Spielberg and Scorsese have been long forgotten. Dead Ringers is such an under-rated film. Dune is such an under-rated film. These are the equivalent of BLADE RUNNER ( a film that was damned to hell on its release and has yet been voted the world’s most influential film after 2001 by a consensus of modern scientists)
Maybe - there’s not been very many good horror films recently, put it that way. I like the films of Charlie Kaufman. I like the films of Darren Aronofsky - favourites are PI and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.
THE LAST SAMURAI, RAIN MAN, THE COLOR OF MONEY and COLLATERAL are all Tom Cruise films I’d see again. Don’t know why so many critics diss’ Tom, maybe it’s just jealousy - though even I can’t forgive him for EYES WIDE SHUT.
PULP FICTION still ranks as one of the greatest recent Hollywood movies of all time.
Nope - when I write I have NO boundaries.
Who cares?
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.
You mean for CHIMERAWORLD or HORROR QUARTERLY R.I.P.? Nope. That’s not the point. You can have a submission that’s totally off-guidelines. So far away from what you’re after that it doesn’t matter what your personal preferences are as an editor, it’ll just stick out like a sore thumb were you to include it in your anthology. For me, unity of vision is more important than censorship.
That’s for priests and judges to decide.
Not one jot, there’s nothing much clever about The Marquis’ writing other than the gymnastic appeal of his orchestrated gang bangs and the sadism of his deflowerings. His political tracts go right over my head (no pun intended).
I must admit, I’ve never understood the fascination with HP’s craft. I certainly don’t get as hot-to-trot on it as it seems the rest of the genre writers do. Him and Algernon Blackwood. I’m neither a religious or spiritual person so stories about ghosts or hauntings or THE PARANORMAL have never really entertained me in the least - though William Peter Blatty kicks ass!
To quote Taffy Lewis (in the blade runner bar scene), 'All the time, pal.'
Fuck them. Fuck the reader. Fuck the censors. They have no idea what they want. It’s the writer’s duty to set the new standards of what is acceptable, what is art. I don’t care for writers who say, "when a writer starts talking about his art, then he’s finished." Fuck that caveman attitude. You are a writer. You are (whether you believe it or not) transcribing the intimate details your only life on planet earth. It’s all in the subtext. For it to be relevant to HISTORY it has to break a few conventions. It has to stand up from the back ground noise. It has to be personal. And if it’s horror it fucking better well be a little bit disgusting nasty and subversive, or else call it fluff.
I don’t remember. No, on rereading, yes, I do remember. Another good idea that fell by the wayside. There really are so few subversive horror sites/publication out there now – let’s hope Red Scream holds a proud banner for longer than those others.
That’s not my role.
Well, if you’re writing Period or Costume Drama then definitely not. If you’re writing to an angry teen to 30’s audience who wanna get involved in a socio-political pitched battle of the sense, then hell, yes. Kick ‘em where it hurts and fuck the consequences. Otherwise, what’s the point? They can go pick up some mediocre fat-one in airport and have their senses soothed by the competent and dulcet tones of yet another million seller. It’s their own bag - whatever they do, it’s all they deserve.
For my writing to be intentionally confrontational implies that I give a shit who’s reading it. I write because I enjoy it. They read it of their own volition. Anything else is unimportant.
Ask a priest or a judge.
We need to educate society that it’s being brainwashed into buying the latest Nike trainers, driving world-polluting cars, taking out personal loans for new homes they can’t afford and voting the latest useless politicians into positions of global power. I have a mentor in Bill Hicks who really taught me how to see the light. That man was a genius. What a waste of a life. The earth needs MORE radical elements who tell it the way it is - pulls the wool from all our eyes.
I love TETSUO 2, I found that first film a bit too homo-erotic. You saying I write like a gay?
Nobody knows about me in UK. I have only been print-published in America or Canada. Massacre Publishing (who brought out BFGS) are technically a Scottish outfit, and they were never too keen to let the British press get hold of it, there was some fear about litigation. The English hate their own home-grown talent anyway, especially idiots like me who refuse to toe the party line.
I have reworked, rejiigged and expanded the original 1990 novel RED HEDZ into the 70,000 word JANE’S GAME and that’s been requested by a subversive publisher after they really liked the synopsis and first three chapters. I got two other novellas FREELANCER and PLANET OF THE OWLS (40,000 words) out to another publisher. And as I’ve already said, there’s the CW2 and TLADOHC to come out through Cyber Pulp before too long.
I recently got back into painting. It’s been like ten years since I did any painting. That fucked up one-man show at the Galerie Erotique in Amsterdam depressed me more than I understood. In 1995 I finally took an axe to all those over-sized oil paintings. They were too much luggage. Are we seeing a pattern here? I don’t like luggage. Can you see that? I can be quite ruthless when it comes to letting go.
Nope. Though I did recently read an Oxford Very Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and it was quite an eye opener.
Depends who you ask.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Hellbound Books, Spring 2006
Plus six other short novels (approx 40,000 words each) that I'm looking to publish in a special 6-pack.
