Q&A with Garrett Cook discussion

Hate Nicholas Cage? Wanna find out more about my body of experimental Neopulp Bizarro? Ladies also welcome.

Okay, you take the chocolate and I'll take Nicholas Cage. I happen to like his movies. Now, experimental Neopulp Bizarro, you really have my curiosity up, especially when you finally admit that ladies are welcome. Hmmmm

First of all, Bizarro is the "literary equivalent of the cult section of the videostore" as Carlton Mellick often says. So, if David Lynch, Troma, Jodorowsky, weird anime, Nekromantik, John Waters, H.G Lewis or Andy Milligan are more likely to be on your netflix queue or what you take off the shelf in the videostore, than Bizarro is for you. My brand of Bizarro places emphasis on creating smart, satirical pulp that comes from real cultural places. I like to tell a pulp narrative in an experimental way and I don't think a person should place barriers on what they can include in their work. My books include things like teddy bear detectives, awards for serial killers, extradimensional Lovecraftian/Gigerian monsters turning people into machines, dinosaurs, dollar store hotsauce wars and existential detective work. I think essentially, my books are all about existential detective work, where the truth of the world melds with the truths of the self. Surrealistic Expressionism where things happen that should only happen in "low" fiction. There's blood, deviant sexuality and weirdness as far as the eye can see, but at the core of it, there's a message.

Oohh - sounds like a literary Salvador Dali. Sorry, I didn't recognize more than a couple films you listed. Haven't been to a video store in YEARS.

Garrett wrote: "First of all, Bizarro is the "literary equivalent of the cult section of the videostore" as Carlton Mellick often says.

That feels like a cop out answer. But then, when I picture "cult section," I picture the Blockbuster I worked at for four years, where anything that didn't get rented and couldn't be firmly called "drama," "comedy," or "action" went to "special interests."

Garrett wrote: "Surrealistic Expressionism where things happen that should only happen in "low" fiction. There's blood, deviant sexuality and weirdness as far as the eye can see, but at the core of it, there's a message."

This group keeps presenting me with ways to evolve my own writing. I don't think my style is full-blown bizarro, but I love the genre, so I know I'm going to borrow from it, consciously or sub-con.

ETA: Oh, uh, Raising Arizona was good. And Con Air and Matchstick Men. I totally would have fucked Nicolas Cage in the 80's. His hair looks like someone ran a pasta crimper over a taxidermied bird sometimes. It's hypnotic.

I agree, it feels like a cop out answer. But, it's one of those things you know when you see it. If you ask me to define for example, what pornography is, I can't define it, but I know when I see it. Maybe it could be said that Bizarro, like Horror is more of an atmosphere or a sensation than a genre. If you feel that you are in an environment where things do not make sense and the best explanation for why this is happening still does not make sense, something is Bizarro. Example: It is raining pigs. You ask the question "why is it raining pigs?" and you can get a sense of genre or the feeling that's supposed to be evoked. If it's not raining pigs and you're just tripping, this is not a Bizarro situation. If it is raining pigs because Mr. Mxyzptlk is in town to annoy Superman again, it's not Bizarro. If it's raining pigs because pigs have tired of the farms and decided they wanted to live in Heaven but God sent them all back, it's probably Bizarro. If it's raining pigs because it's Thursday and on Thursday it rains pigs it's Bizarro. If it's raining pigs because a kooky wizard tried to cast a spell and got it wrong because he's kooky, it's a Terry Pratchett book. If a young man walks outside and it's raining pigs and he has no idea why and he feels the hairs on the back of his spine stand up and he has a sense that something is not right anymore and his madness is seeping into reality and destroying it, it's horror. And yeah, Raising Arizona was good, but his vendetta against cult cinema puzzles me. Why must he ruin everything?

You left out the "You're at a Pink Floyd concert" scenario.

Garrett wrote: "If it's raining pigs because pigs have tired of the farms and decided they wanted to live in Heaven but God sent them all back, it's probably Bizarro."

Bay of Pigs of the Dead is going to be the name of my new book. When there's no more room in Hell's stomach, the ham will walk the earth.

Garrett wrote: "And yeah, Raising Arizona was good, but his vendetta against cult cinema puzzles me. Why must he ruin everything?"

Is this a literal vendetta - in that he's actively trying to stop whatever crappy Dogme95 Harmony Korine is trying to make next - or just his general predilection for horrible movies with horrible scripts based on horrible comics or horrible books or horrible concepts?

(Big ups to me for using my word-of-the-day word, "predilection.")

One of the things that made your explanation of Bizarro interesting to me is that I've been thinking about fairytales - their original function in society and the absence of that today. Like, where did the fairytales go? If society had a need for them back then, what did they evolve into for today?

I don't mean the Disneyfied cartoons. The fairytales of old Europe were what you described: animals that talked were perfectly normal without a contrived explanation of how; graphic violence, like a head being severed and yet continuing to talk to the main character - happened all the time.

For some reason, the human psyche had a need for those kinds of stories. Where did they go? Maybe your work fills a void or some psychic niche.

You should read Grant Morrison's intro to his first volume of the Invisibles. It's also available in Misinformation Press' very cool Book of Lies, which is one of the more unusual and great books on magick I've read. I also recommend Our Gods Wear Spandex, I forget the author but I'm sure you can find it. Myth has become a very different thing in this day and age. Watch an episode of Family Guy and you'll see this. Peter, the Protagonist, mingles with a lot of archetypical beings, beings like Spiderman and Lee Majors. The revenant becomes the vigilante, Odysseus becomes Peter Parker. We are not in a cultural vacuum where all that exists are the works of Grimm, La Fontaine and Virgil. Bizarro addresses this better than other literary movements have by far. Bizarro acknowledges that William Shatner is a Campbellian monomyth, creates as a fairytale a gutsplattering Rankin-Bass Christmas special where Santa is made out of sausage and plays out the quest to understand manhood and sexuality in a fetish crazed Wild Western town in Nevada. I just like to write hero narratives. My serial killer hero Jeremy is looking for a true call to adventure in h8. He battles demons that might not exist and is called upon to fight off ones that most certainly do. And of course, there's the hero journey Archelon Ranch, which is a book reexamining the hero journey. And Jimmy Plush is a hero's journey as well, a journey toward selfhood where the mysteries in front of the character are barely mysteries, but bigger mysteries abound.

You forgot the part where Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" is the hero's journey into the underworld and back.

No I didn't.