"As a longtime fan of the outre and fiction of the abject, I can say that very little of what I read anymore shocks, revolts, scares, or disturbs me. But Hertzan Chimera manages to do it EVERY TIME. I read his work the way the First Lady reads romance novels or the way Chaucer professors read Heavy Metal magazines -- Chimera is my shamefully perverse guilty pleasure. People tell me I'm a sicko all the time, but I'm a kewpie doll compared to Chimera, and I'm glad there are more disgusting writers out there than me. UNITED STATES is a romp through the dark lands of the free mind. Fans of William Burroughs should rejoice -- he's been reincarnated for the new century in Hertzan Chimera. This is Naked Lunch on nuclear acid. Rated X for Xtra demented. It'll step on the faint-hearted like an army boot on a gimped fly. But those with strong stomachs line up: it's feeding time."

-- Michael A. Arnzen, Bram Stoker Award winning author of GRAVE MARKINGS and FREAKCIDENTS.

With that in mind, come join us as Hertzan Chimera has graciously provided us with a romp through Scary Voices.

Scary Voices

Horror. n. & a. 1. n. painful feeling of loathing and fear; intense dislike (of) or (colloq) dismay (at). 2. person or thing causing horror.

This is my artistic mantra.
Why, as a writer of horror fiction, should I give a shit what the average horror novel actually looks like? Structurally? Stylistically? Word count? Layout? Should I use speech marks in dialogue? Should I concentrate on one central character's plight? Should I write strong, clean, simple sentences that aren't too offensive to the senses or sensibilities of my readers?

Fuck all-a that for a laugh.
This is my creative life and the literary outpourings must take whichever form they need to at the time. It really is like being at the whim of SoMe cRaZy uRgE. I can only write this way. I have tried 'censoring' myself by entering themed competitions and anthologies but, although the editors reply with positive terms about the correctness of my grammar and the dazzling brilliance of my oozing prose (really quite praising responses like that), I generally tend to wind them up the wrong way and as a result tend not to find myself among my horror peers on the leather-bound printed page.

Pornography, written or filmed.
Pornography, even the high-class kind that Book Publishers or Hollywood is apt to sponsor from time to time, is utter shite. If it's written like a novel or an anthology, it's either crass or over-romantic, generally dead from the groin up, lacking any radical ideas beyond the religious fist-fuck or the shaved details. If it's filmed it's either badly scripted or overlit, mostly tedium in between mindless goggle-eyed grinding accompanied by some wailing brass instrument or ascending guitar riff of nausea. You very rarely get a proper horror-sex film that isn't played for laughs.

One of my favourite movie makers has to be David Cronenberg because he actually...

...unbelievable in this day and age of formulaic tat haunting our screens and book shelves, he has the unnerving ability to think and make us think. Cronenberg, as bad a screenwriter as he is, actually has very important things to say about "the beauty of the body" not just the perceived, fashionable beauty as standardised by next year's fashion model or movie star. In films like VIDEODROME, DEAD RINGERS and NAKED LUNCH, he let's rip mercilessly upon the flesh of the cathode ray transmitting device and that's what I relish in his work. The danger of the hidden beauty, that thing that normal society hides behind pricey lingerie or dirty old mackintoshes in fog layered silhouette. The willingness to risk his entire career with every new release.

As Jorg Buttgereit said about my first ever novel (published by Creation Press under the pseudonym Michael Paul Peter in 1989) RED HEDZ "it would make the perfect Cronenberg film". Praise indeed.

Which leads us to Hertzan Chimera.
I began exploring my darker side in Art College (the safest place for it as there are professionals there like a trapeze net). There then came a series of one-man exhibitions of my personal and surreal artworks that got me absolutely nowhere - I was clearly painting red shoes in a green shoe market. I spent more time chasing set-up money than painting and gave it the push, many of those old paintings I took the axe to as a therapeutic expression and thanks for the memories. I have been writing as Hertzan Chimera now for the last thirteen years. And, you know, they say a picture paints a thousand words. So my first Eraserhead Press novel SZMONHFU (pronounced "je m'en fous" French for Don't Give a Damn) is worth about 104 paintings. So a good bargain at half the rate.

What is it all about?
Szmonhfu? What is it all about? It's about the creation of art itself and the cliché of the artist as manic-depressive drug-obsessed pillock. It is about the figurization of one's artistic creation that comes back to haunt the naive artist, all our mistakes embodied in one perfect lust-filled beast. It is about the search for meaning in a world devoid of hope. It is about the shimmering other world that presses its face up against the back of every closed door. It is about social programming and the things you can't even see because your brain won't accept the horror. Szmonhfu is actually three separate 40,000 word books welded together over the last ten years and refined into the most grammatically congested, visually shocking and mentally deranged 104,000 word piece of Dark Surrealism ever published. The critics have been split right down the middle. You got gushing 5 star praise and vitriolic denunciation. No two critics can agree. Either I am a twat or a genius, and I am staying right out of the argument.

What's next on the horizon?

Two projects.

One, a collaborative project from myself, Alex Severin and Wrath James White called BROKEN. It is published this July by those masters of subversive horror, Medium Rare Books and launched at the Horrorfind Convention in Baltimore. This large collection is sex-horror at its most extreme and most relentless. There is no hope for any character in this collection. Horror is about the everyday in most respects. In the everyday, you can feel pain forever without dying. There is no salvation of narrative resolution that will dull the ache. You are living in Hell itself.

Two, a new novel from Eraserhead Press called UNITED STATES. After FEO AMANTE referred to me playfully as the reborn Marquis De Sade, this is my great apolitical debauch. No moral stone is left unturned in this, a novel that was written nearly twenty years ago when parties were the only reason left to go on drawing social security benefits and the wretched manuscript spent all of that time in a dusty box of shame. It is a terrible work that should never have seen the light of publication, terrible because of the desperate characters it portrays and their terrible lives lived on the edge of a razor. It was inspired in the main from two movies I saw that bore absolutely no relation, Brian Yuzna's SOCIETY and the Disney film FLIGHT OF THE NAVIGATOR. Why then release it now? Why not just burn it and end the pain? Not possible. The future can be altered, just takes a couple of brave revolutionaries. If I'd have wanted to sound like the most pretentious pervert in the entire literary world, I would have called it "I, Spartacus".

Mike Philbin (Oxford, June 2002)
email: mike@hertzanchimera.com
www.hertzanchimera.com