Scary Voices: Mike Philbin

It took me fourteen years to give birth to, nurture, allow to grow and then kill off the writing persona Hertzan Chimera. I had learned to live with his craziness as his writing skills and online confidence grew. I had accepted his whacked-out control over my fingertips at the expense of some literary understanding on the part of the reader. That didn’t bother me back then. I was purposefully trying to make the reader’s life more difficult. Trying to get the reader to think a little more about the shit he was reading, the sheer crap publishers throw onto the shelves these days. Trying to challenge ‘accepted’ standards of what was sellable fiction, format, narrative.

Then he got too big for his boots. You can see it here, I’m talking about ‘him’, Hertzan Chimera in the third person. I guess I should be happy that it’s at least a ‘male’ alter ego. This book itself talks about the life and death of what was merely a writing persona I allowed through whenever I sat at the keyboard to write all those ‘Hertzan Chimera style’ short stories, collections, collaborations, interviews or novels. I wasn’t convinced that I was channelling – I didn’t think some old writing spirit was passing his vision through my hands, I’m not a great believer in ‘the everlasting spirit of man’ – for me, when you die, you die. I saw that by encouraging this Hertzan Chimera personality to take the piss out of the reader (and that was his major function) I had coaxed a monster from the shadows. He almost got out of hand and totally took over my public function. But worse than that, my aggrandisement of the Hertzan Chimera persona had made him into a bit of a joke. Thank fuck it’s a stupid name I never felt comfortable with in public or I might never have noticed the total absorption of myself into it.

The book THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HERTZAN CHIMERA started out as a simple laying down of the facts in an auto-biographical style then, as the last few paragraphs came to a close, I realised it coincided with my publicly-announced death of the writing name (and personality) I had invented some fourteen years back and had been nurturing on the internet and with small press publishers like Eraserhead Press, Double Dragon Books, Massacre Publishing and Cyber Pulp Books.

This realisation gives the book a greater focus beyond a simple cathartic exercise in lost memories. After all, the reason for the mentality and psychology of the stories written in the ‘Hertzan Chimera style’ lies in the subject matter of these auto-biographical entries. It allows me to return to the original first-pass document and add more human significance to the truth of a normal life expressed in works of fiction that have their basis in depictions of mental torture, bodily transformation, graphical sex and violence.

I have a wicked temper. It’s like a blue pilot light is always on. Then suddenly the gas is full on. No build up. Just instant inferno.

In my teens (after a few years of martial arts training in various styles) I started to break and damage things in the house with my fists and feet; doors, walls. I used to love the feeling of power this actually gave me. I could control matter with my own hands. Creative decisions at least were in my hands and what powerful hands they were. What great destructive technique I had.

In my twenties, I discovered that I could injure myself and achieve some form of physical release, in the same way that people under intense stress self-cuddle. I remember one bout of insanity where I literally tore my face to shreds with these long gothic nails I grew, I had to go to work with all these silly red scars down the length of my face. I could punch myself in the face. The forehead could be cracked against a wardrobe, an adjoining wall, the corner of a door. Blood would pour and that in itself should introduce another haemo-philic entry. In a brainstorm of anger, I once punched myself in the jaw a few times until some chips of tooth came off. I had to eventually get one of the teeth on that side replaced, such was the damage.

I will try to break my own fingers – who fucking needs fingers?

I did end up going to a doctor who referred me on to a local out-patient Anger Management course but after a couple of weeks of boredom, I phoned them up and said I won’t be coming to any more sessions – I was very polite and courteous on the phone. I don’t have a perfect anger-management regime and I do lose it every now and then but the more I study myself honestly like this I can easier recognise when the anger is going to erupt. I can walk away from the tempest, side step the storm. It is working but not always as well as I’d like. Maybe I should write a book about the techniques – if only there were any that truly worked.

What I tend to do is try to stay aware at all times of burning tension in my jaw, the soaring timbre of my voice and cold steel headband of fury across my mind. If I notice it, I can usually avoid the juggernaut of its wrath. Deceptively feinting to the left and the right to avoid a full-on collision with the beast.

Recently, I have mellowed quite a lot thanks to this self-watching. In the same way that I grew out of my teenage asthma, I hope one day to have this anger managed. Not eradicated, managed. I think the anger is a great defiant creative power that helps me confront my own stylistic issues and the terrible things in the world with defiant resolve and I would never think of dulling it as so many other “so called” creatives are tending to do with Prozac or Ketazine or Depakote or other bi-polar medications. That is like buying a professional steak knife then filing down the sharp edge in case you cut your finger when slicing the meat. Well, learn to keep your fingers away from the edge, keep alert for fuck’s sake.

I have lived 38 years on this planet but when I sit down to think of the events and the people and places that led to the life and death of Hertzan Chimera I don’t come up with much. Just a few key moments linger while the rest is a grey blur that used to have definition. There must be a lot more to it that I’m either missing or denying.

One of the major problems I am having writing an auto-biography is my memory. I have patched of life that simply will not fit into the allotted timeslot, serious gaps in my memory of times and dates and I don’t know whether I have a disease, I’m lazy or I have blanked out certain periods of my life for some traumatic reason or other. There’s a yawning grey area that isn’t full of content, it’s just empty. No electrical buzz. No fizzle of remembrance. Not even a cold wind blowing down a cold, dark back alley. Devoid of content. Empty. It’s like a great controller is whispering in soothing tones, “You don’t need to look there, Michael. There’s nothing to see.”

As you read this book it will seem to be going okay but remember, these entries have not been compiled in written order, they have been reorganised in something like a chronological order long after the struggle of working through them has passed. If I had left them as they were, they would have been unreadable, jumping from time frame to time frame, sporadic memories intruding on the writing of every other entry. Part of the point of writing this book is to maybe unearth some of those memories again and make something legible of the outcome.

I must look back one day through the writings of this Hertzan Chimera personality because I remember very few of the details of his stories, I have often read back over a new story some days or weeks later and gone, “I didn’t write that.” It’s like I go totally blank when I’m in Hertzan Chimera mode. The words flow out like smoothly strained stinky vomit and I can’t hold the content in my mind.

I shouldn't really talk about my Auschwitz fantasy - maybe I’ve already said too much about these lusty mountains of shrunken corpses by just mentioning it… so, what started it off, it’s obviously featured a great deal in your life to become a ‘fantasy’. Well, I blame a history programme called THE WORLD AT WAR, a show about the second world war tracing Hitler’s path across his conquered Europe.

The image I have in my head is of mountains of naked, emaciated bodies being bulldozed into a mass grave. I also remember mass executions of concentration camp victims, their hands on their head. Sometimes they were shot in the back of the head and fell into the grave naturally, sometimes they were first kicked into the grave before being shot from outside the pit. I also remember some scene of a young boy trying to escape by hiding in a cesspit and all these disgusting German soldiers were crapping on his head. I think he was eventually caught and executed anyway. But I don’t think this was THE WORLD AT WAR, that was some other TV I can’t remember when I watched that.

But that’s where the unmentionable Auschwitz fantasy comes from. I’ve had daydreams of swimming through the mountains of rotting flesh like a dolphin through the water and I think this is where one of my favourite characters comes from. It was in the first half of the UNITED STATES book. A boy falls into the wallpaper and swims about in the concrete below the pattern like a dolphin. This is based on real events, not the swimming in concrete, where I would spend hours looking at the strange vine-like wallpaper I used to have on my bedroom wall and if you stared at it for long enough, the pattern would lift off its backing and you could imagine slipping your hand below the pattern.

I have had dreams of putting my foot into naked females corpses. This is in fact where the imagery for the VIXEN-NAKED ULTRA-LUNCHEON story came from.

I have absolutely no idea who Hertzan Chimera was or what I was trying to achieve with the Hertzan Chimera persona. I know he pissed a lot of people off. Maybe that’s a good thing. I could do whatever the fuck I wanted with him. He was totally malleable. My writing style and subject were limitless. I could really take the piss. I could really reach for the literary high ground. Sometimes I took it all far too seriously and offended a lot of what I called mediocre horror writers. So what, they gotta have thick skins like all good writers. Especially if you’re trying to go beyond mere standard or conventional narrative or character or ‘writing effect’.

I realised that I was trying to break too many eggs for each omelette and the mix was probably too rich for most readers. Even the readers of so-called extreme, bizarre or absurdist writing had a hard time with my stuff. That was the point. But I think I pushed it a little too far. Over the last two years, my style has cooled somewhat and I am having more fun just writing instead of trying to reinvent so many wheels. My writing life will undoubtedly continue but as Mike Philbin and this will be my first book in this new style.

~~~

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HERTZAN CHIMERA will be available June 1 in paperback from Cyber Pulp Books.

Mike Philbin

http://www.mikephilbin.com - website
http://mikephilbin.blogspot.com - blog

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