Untitled (Christian’s Birthday), 2023 by Gerald Lovell (b. 1992)
The pic above doesn’t really show how massive Heaven & Hellhound is. This 800 pager is by the pseudonymous B. Authentick, and purports to be a “tale of metaphysical realism.” You can learn more about the book (and download it for free) at its website. Blurb:
Heaven & Hellhound is a work of dark literary fiction that weaves together the occult, esoteric philosophy and the eternal struggle between light and shadow. Volume One – The Page of Wands – breaches the eternal threshold where ancient mysteries collide with modern consciousness. Drawn from that liminal space, what divides the sacred from the profane dissolves into something unspeakably horrifying. But for the lantern’s light, the dark night of the soul enshrouds.
Written by B. Authentick, inspired by the engravings of Gustave Doré and the ferocious vision of Vincent van Gogh, this tome is more than a book – it is a talisman, a portal and a companion for those who dare to peer through the veil.
A Trans-Atlantic tale set in 1964 in England and California, the tale channels the esoteric traditions of the Western mystery schools through the lens of Metaphysical Realism, a novel literary mode. It affords a means to storytelling in which the occult is not decoration but physics, the muse is not metaphor but visitor, and the body’s toll is commensurate to the malediction which afflicts its soul. Heaven & Hellhound is a work of literary innovation, published as the foundational text of Metaphysical Realism.
A page from Inner City Romance #3 by Guy Colwell, Last Gasp, 1977. Reprinted by Fantagraphics, 2015.
A Passion Like No Other, 2012 by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (b. 1977)
Circle Study #10, 1972 by Benny Andrews (1930-2006)
A page from Laid Waste by Julia Gfrörer, Fantagraphics Books, 2016.
Portrait of Man Reading, 1977 by Malick Sidibé (1936-2016)
I dug Grace Krilanovich’s “Slutty Teenage Hobo Vampire Junkies” novel The Orange Eats Creeps, calling it good gross stuff in a 2020 review.
Her follow up, Acid Green Velvet, is forthcoming this summer from Two Dollar Radio. Their blurb:
In the late 19th century on the central California coast, two wayward young hoboes — Paulette and Kenneth — threaten to kill a menacing man who wronged them: Paulette’s father, Rodney Eligon.
A handful of years later, the town of Anzar has become the stomping grounds for all manner of cults, eccentrics, earth religions, and communal living. Presiding over the town from the luxe frivolity of their family manor, the Hasleys have ruled Anzar for generations. Their grip on the town is threatened by the rise of the working class, and their union with the itinerant population. Meanwhile, Paulette has taken up residence in the home of Johnny Hasley, a wealthy faux-socialist poseur, hoping to become his wife. Her plans are complicated by boot-prints in the garden signaling the arrival of Kenneth, who carries with him a dark secret that poses a grave threat to both of them.
In Anzar’s cracked mirror, Californian freakiness meets Victorian preoccupations with the domestic, pollution and filth, haunted houses, fringe societies, living death, spiritualism, vampiric women, and class parasites. Acid Green Velvet is a surreal powder keg of nihilism, fathers and their failures, manifest destiny, and American identity, penned in rapturous prose by the fiercest writer of her generation.
Manhattan Landscape with Figures, 1968 by Sylvia Sleigh (1916 – 2010)
Cover for Good Girls #3 by Carol Lay, Fantagraphics Books, 1988.
In answer to the question: “Why do you write?”
Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.
Because art’s life is preferable, in truth, to life’s beautiful terror.
Because, as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes), it passes the time.
Because death, our mythless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs.
Because epitaphs, well-struck, give death, our voracious master, heartburn.
Because fiction imitates life’s beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks.
Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world.
Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it.
Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child.
Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks.
Because God, created in the storyteller’s image, can be destroyed only by His maker.
Because, in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious.
Because, in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life.
Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood.
Because in the beginning was the gesture, and in the end to come as well: in between what we have are words.
Because, of all the arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men.
Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretensions.
Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow (upon, it must be said, no surface).
Because the world is re-invented every day and this is how it is done.
Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression.
Because truth, that elusive joker, hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there.
Because writing, in all space’s unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure of all.
And because, alas, what else?
From Delta #28, June 1989; republished in Conjunctions.
Beckett liked knockabout drama. Vaudeville acts where somebody just gets pummeled. Trapped, insulted, or kicked. Punch-and-Judy. I love Beckett. I also like the Three Stooges.
Beckett once said, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” and he was thinking about Charlie Chaplin, the genius of unhappiness. And Beckett’s own work is that, too. It’s failure, unhappiness, ignorance. When you’re not involved, other people’s unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it’s you, it ceases to be a comedy.
From Barry Hannah’s Paris Review The Art of Fiction interview, Winter 2004
Self-Portrait, 1974 by James Baldwin (1924-1987).
First published in the Paris Review as an excerpt from Burt Britton’s Self Portraits.
Untitled, 1947 by Suzanne Van Damme (1901-1986)
A page by Charles Burns from BLAB! no. 2, Summer 1987, Monte Comix Productions.
Initiation, 1999 by F. Scott Hess (b. 1955)
Dear Jane, 2024 by Robin F. Williams (b. 1984)
Biblioklept 