Interview with Alexander Kattke
2025-01-01
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Y: The images and episodes in your writing appear to be the stuff of nightmares. Do these come from genuine dreams or are they attempts at purging certain feelings? Are they a bit of both?
AK: I don't experience hallucinations nor have I been diagnosed as schizo. But I am very much a manic depressive and have experienced a lot to say the absolute least. Although, I have not received any treatment that could be considered effective. It comes from everything, feelings, life experience, my appreciation of art and cinema, sometimes rage and affection. The only things that ever came from dreams was contained in the book On The Compassion of Spiders (I LOVED writing this and A Welcome Mat is a Bad Omen, my other books can be painful to write sometimes) with the stories ‘Hunting Hypothesis’ and the ‘Red Spider Nebula’. ‘Hunting Hypothesis’ was a dream I had when I was 13 and chapter none was how the dream played out almost exactly. ‘The Red Spider Nebula’ was a dream where I imagined watching it play out as a film directed by William Friedkin. I was incredibly disappointed waking up and discovering it didn't exist.
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Y: The narrative direction, if we can call it such, of both RED BLACK INFINITE and FLOWERS BLOOMING FIRE, tends to go from shocked voyeurism into an emotional crescendo of raped meaning that then trails off toward the last third of the book as desensitized chaotic nihilism. Is that how you feel as an author regarding the works or am I merely describing the reader's experience?
AK: It's intentional that it descends and keeps escalating. As far as narrative direction is concerned, I approach it like I'm trying to hurt the reader. It's psychotic to approach the work in that way but it gives it and me (the writer) a purpose in writing. In your mind’s eye you're like Ted Kaczynski creating his magnum work while simultaneously doing actual criminal acts. I see writing as a way to preserve your consciousness and it interests me to try to weaponize that. The intent with the writing is to kill the reader and rebuild them. Drill a hole in your skull via trepanation and pour everything horrible about me into your brain and take your soul and erase you and rebuild you.
Side note: as I respond to these great questions, I have NIN's Eraser (polite) playing.
That's how I see the writing: a declaration of holy war or a weaponization of art. I suppose Antonin Artaud radicalized me in that way.
Werner Herzog also spoke about this desire of a holy war through art.
One aside regarding weaponization of art: I'm reminded of Lucio Fulci going so hard with the gore scenes in his films (even the non-horror films) and he said (I'm paraphrasing) that he wanted to fuck with the censors and just went as hard as possible. He was also a lapsed Catholic and nihilist which interests me despite never finding religion. I could be considered an existential nihilist.
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Y: 3. Your social media handle, Songs of Maldoror, is a reference to Comte de Lautreamont. What is your personal relationship to this long-deceased pseudonymous writer's work?
AK: Yes! I read Maldoror back-to-back with Naked Lunch when I was 16. I felt, I guess you could say muy simpatico with Lautreamont or Isidore Ducasse. I may have French spiritual ancestors. I am HUGELY inspired by Lautreamont, Francois Villon, Artaud, Bataille, Baudelair, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, etc. All the great French pervert writers. Even though I can't speak French.
I have a deep connection to writers who are discovered after death. I feel like that's my inevitability if you pardon this morbid aside. It doesn't quite work when you try to get laid tho "Hey baby, wanna' hang with the next Lovecraft?" And they just keep walking. Although as of late I have found my muse who appreciates that contained insanity.
Pardon my rambling but Maldoror blew the fucking doors open for me and writing. I was amazed by it. I had never seen anything like that before. It completely changed the course of my writing. I think of it like a quote by Supervert where he said "Sade is to philosophy what fisting is to a virgin anus" that's what Lautreamont is to writing. Even though his writing isn't quite perfect but I think imperfection is what defines us as human. The handle for my Twitter was in tribute and I find it sometimes pretentious to go under your real name plus there's a desire for anonymity in hiding from the usual suspects.
I sometimes wonder how my work would read out in French. I worry about things lost in translation so I hope that the purity of the imagery will shine through fog of mistranslation.
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Y: Although one can see a very strong influence from William S. Burroughs, we could also say your work is not as intently or obsessively sexual as his is. What do you take from WSB and what do you reject?
AK: Burroughs gave me tons of ideas. I don't copy the cut-up method but how I write is I jot down a few lines, images, maybe a paragraph or something like that. I have it all laid out and just let a stream of consciousness attack the ideas. Kind of like right now. I try to avoid sex in my work or at least avoid dwelling on it. I hope not to recreate the child orgy scene from Stephen King's IT. I have higher standards and don't enjoy cocaine. Anything sexual is largely incidental unless I'm trying to make a point. It's like how I write characters in that they're not truly characters but forms or meat to be manipulated or puppets or whatever. I see my characters as faceless voids at the edge of infinity. Characterization simply doesn't interest me and I chalk that up to anti-influence in writing; I despise paragraphs that go into character description. I don't think it's terribly important not unless (again) you're trying to make a point. I don't care about the biography of Officer McFuckFace if his ultimate fate is being raped by scorpions. It's largely "insert your consciousness here" when it comes to characters.
As far as what I take and leave from Burroughs:
I take his genius writing and dark humor.
I leave his pedophilia and association with Ginsberg.
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Y: The progression of your work, from release to release, has advanced from more narrative and explicative, to more condensed and visual. The episodes are also given less of an explanation. At first, this can be jarring, but then one understands it is all about the essence of experience. Do you have a vision for what the next step in this sequence is?
AK: Thank you for noticing. It's an evolving process. I've always wanted to make a film but haven't been able to achieve that so I write instead. The miracle of A.I. generation has opened new possibilities regarding that. The next step appears to be an essay/confrontation with the reader with my next book The Sacrifices. There's traces of that in the other books. But I feel like you have to keep evolving. You must change and adapt. It's like a comedian doing the same material for decades or a wrestler that never changes his gimmick. You have to keep going and I like the option of giving the reader multiple choices to indulge in my madness.
"Oh, you don't like abstract Existential Surrealist Atrocity Horror prose? Okay, here's my anthology book., here's my novel, etc."
I experimented with psychedelics while writing Flowers Blooming Fire. I don't know if the reader can spot a difference or not. It was a test to see how it would affect my writing and I would joke to friends that the opposite intent would happen and I'd be inspired to write a great children's book (this inspired the Nietzsche kid book line in RBI). I wrote the next book -The Sacrifices- pretty much entirely sober.
The Sacrifices began as a suicide note and the long-short of it is that 2024 was a bad year. Shit happens. But I wrote the first draft of the suicide note while on shrooms and dealing with a towering depression spiral.
Maybe 4K words were written under the influence. It seems to have made no difference.
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Y: Your work is very visually oriented, and it also works through snapshots. You have mentioned your interest in and admiration for cinema and certain directors. You have also gone as far as to say that you would like to work on film but have not had the opportunity. Would you take Alejandro Jodorowsky’s road to crystallizing his feverish plots and archetypal improvisations, by writing scripts for the comic-book form (graphic novels)? If so, what artists would you dream of or enjoy working with, judging from their style?
AK: Huge fan of Jodorowsky. El Topo was a movie that changed the course of my life much like Fulci's The Beyond and David Lynch's Eraserhead and Roger Watkins Last House on Dead End Street. I was fortunate enough to meet Jodorowsky at a screening for Holy Mountain and have his autograph. Nice man.
Side note: I was fortunate enough to be friends with Roger Watkins who I would consider to be a Grindhouse Bukowski sort of character. Big influence there and it means a lot when you’re young and you look up to someone’s work and they give you the time of day and like your shit. It’s almost like you have a garage band that never had an album break the top 100 but Lemmy Kilmister likes your shit, sometimes that’s all you need.
Yes, that is my plan. I'd like to adapt my books at some point hopefully in the near future.
Artists I love: I'm not big into comics but I can say Sam Keith (Huge fan of The Maxx), Greg Capullo (I grew up reading Spawn), and Dave McKean whose work on Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is phenomenal. That's my favorite comic right there. As far as manga there isn’t much but I do like Berserk and the work of Suehiro Maruo and Jun Hayami.
I also enjoy many of the Dark Horse Alien/Predator comics and The Punisher.
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Y: Inflicting psychological pain on the witnesser of your work, do you find in this sadistic endeavor something entirely different from conventional pleasure as drawn from being kind to others? Is it a more intense or even distilled essence? How different is it from physically hurting someone?
AK: It's funny, I can write some of the most horrifying shit you can think of. I've shown non-writer friends just fractions of it and they're always a little shook even guys who have seen a lot of the horrors that the internet beholds. But I'm overwhelmingly empathetic to pain and don't wish to inflict that on the innocent or animals. So, when I say that I want to destroy the reader's mind and all that I mean that in the context of Destruction is Creation.
I think of Destruction is Creation to be a surrealist statement meaning that it can be taken as a threat or an act of self-discovery (destroying yourself to find yourself) or it can be like taking a dead tree stump and carving art into it or taking cement off the side of the road and reforming it into a statue. Trade Pain for Pain is the same in that it can be a threat, such as a serial killer venting, or it can be taken in sorrow where you share your pain with someone as they share theirs for that kind of deeper understanding: two broken forms enjoining for completion.
So, I don't want to actually kill people through psychic mind rape no matter how cool that sounds. But I'd rather destroy and rebuild someone.
The way I see it is that if you've braved past the first page and can understand or want to understand it then you must be a brave explorer.
I like the effectiveness of flash fiction and the aphorism. I borrow Nietzsche's use of the aphorism because it's so effective. He wished to say in a single sentence what it takes an entire book to say by most men. When Hegel said "god is dead" Nietzsche took that football and ran with it. And I suppose Picasso was the first to say "destruction is creation" but not in those exact terms, I take that idea and expand on it. Although I was completely unaware of the Picasso quote before I began using it. But it pleases me that I may have been spiritually influenced by an artist. I was also born the day Frank Herbert died so perhaps I absorbed part of him that day? Even though I have no interest in Dune but liked the David Lynch adaptation (I hated the newer ones).
I value that kind of purity in a terse statement. I imagine the work being like machine gun rounds fired repeatedly or like that prototype weapon used on aircraft carriers where it's a giant turret using magnets that fire a million rounds a second.
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Y: You have mentioned the impact of De Sade on philosophy and compared it, in your opinion, to the impact of Lautreamont on your writing (and potentially on all writing), adding that his writing method is impactful despite its imperfection. De Sade has been immortalized over and above what we may consider superior writers and philosophers. In turn, Lautreamont’s influence on the surrealist landscape has not weakened and rather grown in force. Aside from obvious establishment forgeries to cement cultural poles, such as Shakespeare or The King James Bible, or even continuous failures pushed on the public by the millenarian cultural project such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, would you say that anyone who becomes attentive to the deeper meaning of art as an individual connects with souls lit on the fire of their unique ‘imperfection’? That is, and as you said, it is these so-called imperfections (for, what is ‘perfection’ assumed to be, exactly?) which ‘make us human’, or rather, shall we say, individuals?
AK: I think this shit just finds us. I mean, I have this sort of shyness about my writing. I learned not to share it with "the good normal people" not unless I intentionally want to offend and it's like my rattlesnake rattle. But yet it still finds people. Sometimes I have to ask if someone is interested, sometimes I just post it somewhere imagining the writing to be contained in a glass bottle cast into the ocean. Sometimes I leave my books in stores and other places. Any marketer would tell you that's not good business but I get a real joy from someone randomly discovering it. Most of all because it's truly a genuine reaction and you're not stapling your book into their chest demanding they read it or trying to emotionally blackmail someone to buy your book.
Or worse yet, it's like that episode of The Critic.
In my will, I would prefer a cardboard cutout of myself with a book in one hand and a pistol aimed at my temple in the other as I chant "Buy my book!" in after death.
Regarding philosophy: I should point out that my early books weren't too good. I had yet to find my voice and it was through my inner circle that I discovered the power of dark humor and I'm at my best when I write in 1st person. But I realized on my own, upon re-watching Videodrome for the umpteenth time, that giving your work a philosophy is what makes it so effective. It was the scene where Max meets the old Gypsy woman asking about Videodrome and she goes "Max... You don't understand. Videodrome is a philosophy!" That was it. Light bulb clicked on and the bombs fell. That was when it clicked for me. It's what made Sade eternal is the philosophical aspect and that you knew he 100% believed in it. Something with a philosophy is infinity more frightening then the vacant, mindless and thoughtlessly cruel. It's intelligence. It's why women want to fuck Hannibal Lecter.
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Y: With regards to sex, you mention avoiding it unless necessary to the story. That and descriptions. With violence, it seems to come at you, and you seem to use it everywhere. Elytron Frass once commented the following on an online public space (Twitter/X): “I want ritual sex, ritual violence, rooted in myth and perverted through an articulate psychopathology. Everything else serves more or less as a backdrop worth dropping.” Your work, however, seems, like Burroughs’, devoid of both ritual and myth, or, said otherwise, in your work as in Burroughs’, traditional ritual expressions are made commonplace (thus authentically desacralized), and the myth becomes flattened and abusive reality devoid of any meaning (not even misanthropic meaning) whatsoever. What’s the next step? Does utter nihilism break through to a new kind of non-causal post-mythic sensibility or does it just spin repetitively without going anywhere else?
AK: I enjoy twisting around these ideas of mythology. I grew up fascinated by Greek mythology. But I don't follow a strict guideline because things change. The Aztec's seemed sure that sacrifices would bring good tidings as did the Vikings whereas I think the Dahomey were just doing it for fun like seeing who could get the highest score, similar to beheading contests in Nanking. But I don't hold rigid a ruleset to mythology because it always changes.
I think nihilism can be a gateway to new ideas and philosophy, evoking Devil's Advocacy. It brings to mind a Cioran quote: “Only a monster can see things as they really are because the monster lies outside humanity.”
It can lead to creating a new philosophy which is something I try to abide by. Let's say there is no god. There's nothing. Okay, now what? How productive is it to sit on your ass and do nothing? My belief is to create something in spite of all of that. And if you create something then maybe it was all worth it? New-age hippie fucks tell you that the body is a temple but I challenge that, what if your body is a weapon instead? That's one thing that annoyed me about Ligotti's Conspiracy Against the Human Race (aside from too many references to Sweeney Todd) is that he abides by Schopenhauer that life is pointless and nothing but pain. He casts aside Nietzsche's ideas regarding Reevaluation of All Values. Okay, so why are you writing this book? He never seemed to address that conundrum at least in a way I found satisfactory. I love that book and it's the best thing he wrote (and yes, I love True Detective season 1) but I think that's a fair criticism. It's good to point out the flaws of what you love. Werner Herzog and Alfred Hitchcock said to watch shit films and learn what not to do. Alan Moore (before he started to hate his audience) said to read shit books for the same reason. So take heed of the garbage-makers like Ginsberg, Delaney and the other NAMBLA members. Break into book stores and torch the Chuck Wendig display. Etcetera and etcetera. Que sera sera. More young people should read Sade to understand how brutal & unkind this world truly is.
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Y: You’ve said that there didn’t seem to be any difference to your power and creativity in writing under the influence of mind-altering substances. Others have expressed similar thoughts, that in any case, just strap you down and you may become aware of what you already know and what you are already capable of doing. That is, an active artist tapping into their own soul will find no help in drugs. Why do you think that is?
AK: I think it could be a placebo effect in some cases. It's the romanticism of drugs and art. Chris Farley wanted to be like John Belushi so much that he died the same way and the same age. That sort of Dionysian high. I think when you do this long enough (I've been writing for 24 years now) that you get to a point where you don't need assistance and maybe you don't need an inner circle any more begging for feedback? You could chalk it up to evolution or simply just being brave.
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It is a shame that the idea that someone might have had an experience leads to responses of not having schizophrenia type conditions.
"Drill a hole in your skull via trepanation and pour everything horrible about me into your brain and take your soul and erase you and rebuild you."
From Teddy K. straight to Jeffery Dahmer, nice.