“I think you’re fucked up.”
-
Eric Bateman
That is the one and
only quote of criticism I chose to include on the back of my first book, Cut Short. How ironic—at the time I
seemed to actually relish the implication. It seemed cool and edgy; the sort of
quote that sells books, mysterious and controversial. I gloried in the
assessment. Implications of a deranged brilliant mind. What I didn’t consider was
the obvious: for some people this quote and the stories within would be their
sole introduction. A reflection of the author himself. The intellectual
handshake and artistic icebreaker. Meet
Abner N, disturbed sociopath writer.
Great.
This slender volume of profane
horror, a meditation on paranoia and obsession—stories about sex and murder and
demons with nipple rings, sub-machine guns in baby cradles, malevolent acne and
sinister cysts—THIS will be my agent, descending upon a world of unwitting
readers, skewering my reputation.
And though that may be true—though
it may be an accurate representative, it is also incomplete one. Because there’s
more to me than just that, there is more to me than morbid musings and grim psychoanalysis!
I just happen to like my art with a little bit of arsenic—gloomy, macabre—the
type of stories to read on dark quite nights with rain outside the windows and
skeletons rattling around in the closets.
Sure, that’s me. But it’s also not. I’ve always thought
the good guys were boring, so I write about the bad guys instead (with a dash
of salt for the wound) and that doesn’t exactly mean I’m a bloodthirsty
Satanist roaming the streets with a mouthful of razorblades and broken glass.
Jesus Christ, give me a break!
I’m confident [sometimes] in my artistic identity just as much as I’m confident [sometimes] in the other facets of who I
am; overwhelming positivist, traveler, truth seeker, dreamer, defeatist,
sometimes a nihilist or existential depressive, and occasionally the most hopeful romantic. Personalities are
complex. Even more so the creative lens through which we express our thoughts
and feelings. And the fruition of that process isn’t always a direct reflection
of who we are as people or even what we believe in. It’s imagination and what
we observe. Sometimes it’s the personification of disgust, or taking an
emotion—ours or someone else’s—and exaggerating it, putting it under a
microscope and dissecting it.
It’s
fascination.
And it’s integral, irrevocably a
part of you.
The stories in Cut Short are a part of me, but they aren’t exactly WHO I am. They’re
a reflection of my interests and observations, and other things also—but they
don’t represent me as a whole. How could they? I’m only sorry that Cut Short is such a lousy icebreaker for
the uninformed. Either way, I stand on it. I’m proud of Cut Short. And whatever comes next, I’m glad it was my first book. Meet Abner N: art without compromise, art
without fear.
And all this sounds great until you
meet that beautiful soft-eyed chick who wants to give your shit a read-through.
Then it all comes crashing down. It’s back to square one: Meet Abner N, deranged sociopathic writer. Who would have known!
And then because your ego gets in
the way you open your big fat mouth and opt to provide her with a copy. And
then you do. And then you go home and write a thinly veiled confessional about
how your confidence means shit, and that pretty much all men are spineless when
it comes to a pretty girl.
0 comments:
Post a Comment