D.F. Lewis and Matt Rossi justify themselves (+ Fantastic Metropolis + Bill Hicks)

Happy new year to everyone.

A quick note before I get going, Fantastic Metropolis Listmania! 2004 has just started with lists from Paul Witcover, Zoran ZŽivkovic', and Matt Cheney, with many more to come.

Also, this article from the San Francisco Chronicle on the late comedian Bill Hicks is worth a look.

Two of my favourite books of 2004 were D.F. Lewis' short story collection, Weirdmonger...


D.F. Lewis justifies himself:

1. Why should readers pick up your book as opposed to, say, just aboutanybody else's book?
Because (without exaggeration and in all seriousness), it has the most striking, stylish and enticing cover ever perpetrated and the book is a delight to hold. Meanwhile, reading it is an acquired taste. Reading it could take you years to complete (as confirmed by several in-media-res readers). It's a lifetime's experience. A real money's worth experience.

2. Does your book have any socially redeeming qualities? If so, what arethey?
It's bad, real bad, and evil, the repercussions are so solidly awful to contemplate. Horrendous implications barely veiled by humour. And without bad, there can be no good. Bad produces more good as balance and vice versa, because one without the other cannot exist. In a literary, non-realworld, it is possible to talk in such terms and still hold one's head up high. Whilst, in real life,*any* bad is bad.

3. Does your book have any medicinal or mental health value to readers?
Please see the naswer to 2. above. And whilst you're doing that I shall surreptitiously slip in here a sugar comforter tablet which your absent mind will believe to be the answer to all diseases and mortality itself.

4. Assume your book has been filed under "Ages 8 to 12" in the children's section, perhaps by mistake, perhaps not. How horrified do you imagine a child would be after reading your book, and why? How many years of therapy would the child take to recover from the experience?
Luckily, at such a tender age, they would not be able to penetrate the convoluted texture of the prose. A woven fire-wall of words.

5. If no one buys your book and you are unable to continue publishing your fiction due to the intense vilification that occurs in the media, what line of work will you go into?
Well, I've spent all my lengthening life in a day-job and still do. I do not expect to earn any money at all from my book nor do I need do so. If I did need to do so, "Weirdmonger" would have been quite a different book (possibly better).

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...and Matthew Rossi's excellent collection of essays, Things That Never Were (as an aside, Matt just posted a list of his favourite things he wrote in 2004).



Matthew Rossi justifies himself:

1. Why should readers pick up your book as opposed to, say, just about anybody else's book?
Well, there are many wholly subjective, purely selfish reasons. I'll
try and hit the highlights:
A) You won't ever read another book quite like it.
B) It's entertaining, informative and above all else, colloquial in a
demented way. I don't write down to anyone: expect your intelligence
to be assumed, not insulted.
C) I want your money.
D) I want to release the second, even better volume of essays.
E) Seriously, it's a really good book. People I don't personally know
nor have blackmail information on have said so.

2. Does your book have any socially redeeming qualities? If so, what are they?
Define 'socially redeeming'. My book has never lied, stolen, cheated, assaulted or otherwise caused any sort of social harm. On the other hand, my book has been compared to a psiocyabin suppository. So I guess if I've done my job right, my book is socially redeeming in an abstract, rebellious, Milton by way of Blake way. If you don't think having your synapses taken and made slow, passionate love to by a demented street preacher on ayacusha and adrenochrome from the brainsof psychic cockroaches who serve Ah Pook is a good time, my book may definitely be said to have no socially redeeming qualities.

And not that anyone asked, but no, I personally have none.

3. Does your book have any medicinal or mental health value to readers?
In the same fashion that snake venom can be said to build a tolerance, yes.

4. Assume your book has been filed under "Ages 8 to 12" in the children's section, perhaps by mistake, perhaps not. How horrified do you imagine a child would be after reading your book, and why? How many years of therapy would the child take to recover from the experience?
Oh, the children wouldn't be horrified.

Their parents, I dearly hope, would be. But the children... I do have such plans for the children. I will be needing an army of the mind, I would think. And living with their minds permanently expanded is it's own form of therapy, no?

5. If no one buys your book and you are unable to continue publishing your fiction due to the intense vilification that occurs in the media, what line of work will you go into?
Hunting down and extirpating (possibly through defenestration) villificators.



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