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DUET FOR THE DEVIL, Nominee for the 2000 Stoker for Excellence in First Novel To Stare Without Blinking by t. winter-damon
First, let me prevail upon you, gentle reader (or, if you prefer, brutal reader, if your persuasion is so inclined...), not to make any judgments of, nor to condemn, my partner in crime, Mr. Randy Chandler, based upon my comments & allusions & revelations herein contained... i, & i alone, am guilty of this confessional tidbit of literary heresy...
Quite obviously, i don’t know how you spent your New Year’s Eve, this past December 31st... poised as we are, or were, at the cusp of the infinitely augured &, alternately, much ballyhooed & panegyrized or much dreaded & vilified New Millennium--certainly the media has engaged in its wild orgy of speculation, now it is time for reality (such as you & i choose to perceive it...) to set in. But, allow me a moment to indulge in regaling you with how i spent my evening, before setting myself the task of composing this preface, David Barnett suggested i draft...
My wife & i watched two demented little movies whose shared subject is serial killers, of the psychotic Christian zealot persuasion. Outside Ozona, directed by J.S. Cardone, featuring a quirky cast including David Paymer as the psycho salesman, Meatloaf, Robert Forster, Lois Red Elk, Taj Mahal & Sherilyn Fenn--of Twin Peaks (the deliciously precocious & seductive Audrey Horne...) & Boxing Helena (the alluringly limbless Helena...) fame--i’ll watch anyfreakin’ thing she’s in...to my mind, Sherilyn is the most sensual, provocative femme fatale since Debbie Harry as the incredibly seductive, masochistic pop psychologist Nicki Brand in Videodrome. & Resurrection, directed by Russell Mulcahy, starring Christopher Lambert, & cameoing David Cronenberg as a priest--the Cronenberg cameo alone makes it certainly worth the price of the rental! i’ve seen Cronenberg as a leather-masked psycho killer (Nightbreed), a hitman (To Die For), a hospital lawyer (Extreme Measures), a postal supervisor (The Stupids), an auto wreck salesman (Crash), & a gynecologist (The Fly)--but a priest is most assuredly a new twist for this darkly visionary film director!
As proof of my own demented reality filters, i offer in evidence that Cronenberg’s cult classic, Videodrome, is my hands-down, all-time favorite flick... i’ve no doubt seen it well over a hundred times... If i recall correctly, the “godfather of cyberpunk”, William Gibson, once said that Bladerunner was too much like the inside of his head he was forced to flee the theatre only partway through it... On the other hand, decidedly the left, that is, it is one of the very qualities i embrace in Videodrome...
Outside Ozona’s killer was of the cleansing scourge persuasion (you guessed it...), out to purify the earth from the corrupting taint of harlots, while Resurrection’s psycho slayer was racing against time, striving to cobble together, in a manner akin to The Modern Prometheus, a surrogate body of christ on the cross by eastertide... Despite some excellent casting, some finely crafted acting by both casts (my sole major complaint in this respect being the criminally under-utilized talents of Sherilyn Fenn...), & often darkly elegant & stylish camerawork, where both films failed miserably, in my opinion, is the Achilles heel of most films & books dealing with serial killers & psychos--failure to convincingly show us or allow us to experience the Evildoers’ motivations & thought processes--to, as Edward Lee so eloquently puts it in his introduction, to “take you deep deep down inside the snakepit of a psycho’s soul...” This is not the robotic, in the driver’s seat POV, leering through the eyeholes of the hockey--(I just caught myself subconsciously mis-keying it as “hokey”...) or ski-- or Halloween-masked, mindless, slice-&-dice-teenager franchises as the Jason Vorhees/Friday the Thirteenth & its countless clones...
Granted, due to the externalized, visual orientation versus the internalized & introspective nature of text narrative, this is far more difficult to pull off in film than in should be in print--David Lynch’s Dennis Hopper/Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs, Robert Mitchum’s roles as the homicidally insane, itinerant preacher, Harry Powell, in The Night of the Hunter & as Max Cady in the original Cape Fear, or Robert De Niro’s Max Cady reprise in the remake of Cape Fear, or his portrayal of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, immediately leap to mind as cinematic exceptions. Thomas Harris’s superb novels, increasingly from Red Dragon to Silence of the Lambs to Hannibal, John D. MacDonald’s Cape Fear, the novels of hard-boiled crime’s grand masters, Jim Thompson & James Ellroy, Jack Ketchum/Dallas Mayr’s brilliant masterpiece, The Girl Next Door, Rex Miller’s cult classic, Slob, as well as his Frenzy, Stone Shadow, Iceman, & Slice, Edward Lee & Elizabeth Steffen’s Portrait of the Psychopath as a Young Woman, David Schow’s The Kill Riff, & Michael McDowell’s surreal Toplin, as literary examples of this inside-the-psyche-of-the-psycho viewpoint.
i believe you can tell a great deal about someone from their favorite movies. My top twenty favorites (the kind you can watch & rewatch 20, 50, 100 times & never grow tired of viewing & rediscovering...) are an admittedly bizarre mix--David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Scanners, The Naked Lunch, Crash, & eXistenZ, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, (the much maligned) Fire Walk with Me, & Lost Highway, Dario Argento’s Suspiria & Inferno, Alice in Wonderland, John Waters’ Dangerous Living, The Wizard of Oz, Flesh Gordon (the XXX version...), Forbidden Planet, Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, 2000 Leagues Under the Sea, & Caligula (the XXX version...). Next runners-up, Barbarella, Apocalypse Now &, collectively, those nihilistic, ultra-violent, gritty, spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood--A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Hang ‘Em High, Pale Rider...
As for my favorite TV series of all time...?--David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, of course (to digress for just a moment--various friends who also religiously watched the show often commented that every time they saw the decidedly demented Dr. Jacoby, played by Russ Tamblyn, they would fall into a fit of laughter, joking to one another--”there’s Damon...”) Next favorite TV series: Nowhere Man (starring Bruce Greenwood), Chinese puzzle box within Chinese puzzle box within Chinese puzzle box of conspiracy theory: A total paranoia freakout. Multiple layers of lost identity. Snuff photos of U.S. senators hanged by a Lat-Am death squad: but the photos are revealed to have been shot seven miles outside Washington, D.C....?
As for my favorite artist/illustrator: above all other, Salvador Dali! Dali for his unflinching, lifelong “conquest of the irrational.” Dali for his unabashed devotion to the magickal--as he said in his Les Passions selon Dali, “For a mystic like me, man is alchemic matter capable of being turned to gold.” Dali for his transcendent, all-devouring godlike egotism--as he once proclaimed, “The difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist.”
As for my other favorite artists & illustrators: Hans Bellmer, René Magritte, Harry O. Morris, J.K. Potter, Giorgio De Chirico, M.C. Escher, Patrick Woodroffe, N.C. Wyeth, Aubrey Beardsley, the Pieters Bruegel (both “the Elder” & Hell”), Hieronymus Bosch, Gustave Doré, H.R. Giger... “We converse among ourselves-- We indeed plunge headlong into the New Millennium, which will--even if its immediate advent was not accompanied by the Fire & Brimstone of prophesied Apocalypse or the Ice & Fire of Ragnarok--surely prove an epoch of mindreeling changes forced upon us in dizzying succession...an epoch of resurgent atavism & techno-tribes, of neo-paganism, of bio-implants & genetic engineering, of yet new & newer designer drugs (altering & reconfiguring both mind & body...), of New Gods & The New Flesh... From what the progression of rapidly escalating urban violence & gang warfare of the ‘90s suggests, the decades to come may also prove a transformation to a veritable bloodbath...& then an unstoppable tsunami bloodtide...
Historically, there have been far far more innocents slaughtered in the name of God, Christ, Jehovah, Yahweh, whatever, than in the name of Satan, Lucifer, Belial, Leviathan, Asmodeus, Baal Zebub, & any other infernal name you care to invoke...
Yet, as many of The Twelve Omens, as well as national headlines attest, there seem to be an escalating number of crimes committed either expressly in the name of Satan or with strong Satanic signatures, whether overtones or undertones, to the crimes themselves... Hyperreligiosity is often one symptom of the multiple murderer, & the fanatic killing in the name of Yahweh, as in the aforementioned movies, or of Satan, as in the slayers of Duet for the Devil, is still manifesting the Janus faces of the same fixation...
This Waking Dream we’ve all shared is finally at an end. The Living Nightmare we have experienced thus far in but fleeting glimpses now begins in earnest, soon, so soon, reeling over us in shockwaves... Indeed. The Day of Mankind is past. The Age of Mancruel certainly is at hand...
i was once “lambasted” by the Information Minister of the late Anton Szandor LaVey’s The First Church of Satan, who accused me of being a “philosophical dilettante.” This, after i opted out of drafting my half of the proposed The Secret Book of Luciferóa project that could, potentially, have proven extremely lucrative, based on sales of similar books, such as The Satanic Bible... Far from considering this as the insult it was intended to convey, i actually perceive the assessment a compliment, a tribute to my embrace of often radically varied viewpoints. i, in turn, perceived this “condemnation” betrayed the opinion of a narrow-minded zealot of a far too confining, regimented, fundamentalist theology...every bit as much fundamentalist in its proscribed, indoctrinated canon as any bible-thumping Baptist televangelist...
In delving into the darkest regions of the human consciousness, in exploring the most demented extremes of perversity & aberrant behavior--a task i’ve committed myself wholeheartedly to in creating my somewhat notorious body of works--i have become, by general consensus, somewhat of a lay expert in the fields of Surrealism, world mythologies, Meso-American mythology & rituals, serial murder, sexual sadism, cannibalism, & the occult.
Aside from the works of de Sade & Baudelaire, of William S. Burroughs, of Edgar Allen Poe & H.P. Lovecraft, the most influential books i recall from my teens & early twenties were Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking, visionary anthologies--Dangerous Visions (1967) & Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). These books threw wide open new doors of perception as to slipstream SF’s possibilities as a legitimate, controversial, mind-altering, subversive, literary art form. “Anarcho-lit.” The age of Starship & Empire, The Gernsback Continuum, had at last been overthrown by the full force assault of a radically new kind of hard-edged, often hallucinotic, often street-level story that defied all predefined conceptions of what SF was & what it could be...a psycho-alchemical transmutation into the first evolutionary phase of The New Flesh...Although Ellison repeatedly promised a followup volume, i believe it was tentatively entitled, Last Dangerous Visions--regretfully, this long-awaited, third Ellison brainchild offspring was stillborn...
Hence, i consider myself as thrice fortunate to have my work included in the seminal SF anthology, SEMIOTEXT (E) SF anthology (1989, AUTONOMEDIA), often referred to as "Dangerous Visions for the ‘90s,” or, simply, “The Bible,” by many devoted readers with whom i’ve spoken...The anthology was edited by Robert Anton Wilson (author of the ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy) & Peter Lambourne Wilson (both major gurus of Chaos Theory) & wellknown cyberpunk Rudy Rucker. The anthology included work by such literary & SF notables as William S. Burroughs, William Gibson, J.G. Ballard, Philip Joseé Farmer, Colin Wilson, Sol Yurick, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, & Michael Blumlein. The following is quoted from their introduction, “Strange Attractor(s)”: “NO WAVE SF Various publishing ventures have done this in the past; one thinks of NEW WORLDS, the Dangerous Visions anthologies, Unearth magazine. Now it’s time for a new jolt with a Post-Everything topspin: the SEMIOTEXT (E) SCIENCE FICTION ANTHOLOGY. An Einstein-Rosen wormhole into anarcho-lit history: “TENTACLESUCKER SF The third category of contributors emerged largely from the underground world of xerox microzines and American samizdat: writers so radically marginalized they could never be co-opted, recuperated, reified or bought out by the Establishment. This group includes, for example: Bob McGlynn, a post-peacenik activist with a Brooklyn group called the Sacred Jihad of our Lady of Perpetual Chaos; Nick Herbert, a ‘real’ physicist and author of Quantum Reality, but a dangerous madman; the Rev. Ivan Stang, High Epopt of the Church of the SubGenius; the legendary anarchist hippie and friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kerry Thornley (a.k.a. Ho Chi Zen), to whom the ILLUMINATUS! trilogy was dedicated; Hakim Bey, a ‘Poetic Terrorist’ and pornographer;...and others to be introduced later on. “TRANSCYBERGNOSTIC SF Along the frontiers of your actual science, something has recently appeared which may soon replace both relativity and quantum as the source for a new social paradigm: “chaos.” An amalgam of Catastrophe Theory, randomicity math, topology, dynamics and statistics, “chaos” also possesses great potential in fields as diverse as biology and morphogenetic field research, economics, brain physiology and consciousness, political theory and radical spirituality. The ideas are so new they haven’t even filtered down to many SF writers yet, much less to revolutionary thinkers...” The introduction to my “Lord of Infinite Diversions”, therein (which was reprinted in DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories, XVIII--the second of five times Dr. Karl Edward Wagner selected my work for this anthology series), notes “‘t’[sic] winter-damon [sic sic] has published widely in the zine-world and on the lunatic fringes of SF...The ‘experimental text’ is now an established genre; at its juiciest...it can attain (as it does here for instance) the intensity of a visionary wetdream.”
Most recently, my work, & my collaborative works with Randy Chandler, have been categorized as belonging to the so-called Avant-Pop literary movement. To quote from “The Cyber-Psycho Manifesto” by Zeena Fabreaux:
& she proceeds to list “Some Cyber-Psycho Books: • • • Dr. Adder by KW Jeter Maldoror by Lautreamont • • • The Forbidden Gospels of Man-Cruel by t. Winter-Damon and Randy Chandler Crash by JG Ballard The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard Fathers and Crows by William T. Vollmann The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner Valis by Philip K. Dick The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson Apocalypse Culture from Amok and Feral House 1984 by George Orwell...” To be included among such cutting edge literary landmarks is flattering, indeed...
So, what is this book, Duet for the Devil, you now hold in hand? Our publisher, David Barnett, has advertised it as “...possibly the most disturbing novel ever published...” We believe it’s also “...quite possibly the most extreme novel ever published...” We sincerely hope it is. We have tried our damnedest to make it so... If you don’t trust us; then trust Edward Lee when he says, “Hell yes. It’s grosser than anything i’ve ever written or ever read.” & i consider Lee a fellow connoisseur of the depraved, the savage & sadistic, the twisted, & the bizarre, in fiction & nonfiction & in film... If we can horrify & disgust you & disturb you with this book, if it offends you & makes you think--yes, that, indeed, would make us happy. If we can even slightly shake the foundations of your reality & perhaps change forever the way you may still view this world as fundamentally safe & sane, ah well, that would make us very happy. On the other hand, if we could destroy your sanity, entirely, undermine every precept you hold dear--why, then, we would be positively gleeful!
Of any novel i have ever read, the most disturbing book, by far, has to be de Sade’s One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. If there is one book i consider, on my part at least, has served as inspiration for Duet for the Devil, then it is surely the hateful, sadistic, malignantly lustful, disgusting, perverse, & hypnotically seductive revelations of Les 120 Journées de Sodome...
Another closely related major inspiration for Duet for the Devil is the concept espoused by the French poet, mystic, dramatist, actor, theoretician & avant-garde theatre director Antonin Artaud, “self-exiled” member of the Surrealist movement, in his Manifeste du théâtre de la cruaté. Plagued by lifelong bouts of perceived mental disorders, Artaud was frequently confined to asylums... The Theatre of Cruelty is a surreal theatre, rooted in ritual, magick & fantasy, & based on the development of gesture & sensory responses, building to an extremely heightened emotional state of the cast, bordering on hysteria, a state wherein they could communicate with the audience on a more profound psychological level than is possible with mere words. The best-known such work is no doubt The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, by the German dramatist Peter Weiss. To quote the Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume 18, p.232c : “...[ The Theatre of Cruelty] launches an attack on the audience’s subconscious in an attempt to release deep-rooted fears and anxieties that are normally repressed, forcing people to view themselves and their natures without the shield of civilization. In order to shock the audience and thus win the necessary response, the extremes of human nature (often madness and perversion) are graphically portrayed on stage.” To attempt, within the context, not of the stage, but of a novel, &, hopefully, to accomplish such an assault & transformation is certainly one of our primary motivations in writing Duet for the Devil...
&, in Duet for the Devil, we sought to drag forth from the depths of depravity that “terrible beauty,” the ultimate frisson nouveau sought by Baudelaire & Rimbaud & the Symbolists in their writings...
Another primary reason for writing Duet for the Devil has been my longtime interest in serial killers--&, to my mind, by far the most fascinating serial killer of all certainly must be The Zodiac/Green River Killer. i mention the two in “one single breath” because i am absolutely convinced the “Green River Killer” is but one of many “masks” the police-taunting, occult-influenced Zodiac would wear in His prolonged further murderous exploits after “going subterranean,” after proclaiming He would no longer announce to anyone when He committed His murders, “they shall look like routine robberies, killings of anger, & a few fake accidents, etc...” & added “The police shall never catch me because I have been too clever for them.” Zodiac has been the subject of frenzied speculation in numerous newspaper articles, nonfiction books, novels, websites, & films in the years since He rocked the headlines, then, mysteriously “vanished”. Just as one example, from an article by staff writer Dave Peterson, in the Vallejo Times-Herald, dated 25 April, 1974, titled, “Are 2 Zodiac Terrorists Operating In Two States?”: “...Sonoma authorities found a witchcraft symbol beside the remains of three young girls, ages 12 to 15, who were dumped off Franz Valley Road in 1972-73. It consisted of sticks laid in a joined square and a rectangle, with two stones in the latter figure...”
As for potential Zodiac suspects, during the official investigation, over 2500 persons were considered, & eliminated, as possible suspects in the case. In most murder cases of this type, one of the individuals included in the initial stages of questioning is later discovered to be the perpetrator, even though they were ruled out, for one reason or another, until much later. In the case of Zodiac, much later is over thirty years later... Among those noted in public speculation over the years, a handful of individuals have gained some degree of prominence. Gareth Penn’s book, Times 17 (Foxglove Press), focuses as its suspect on Michael O’Hare (described as brilliant, an excellent marksman, reputedly a suspect in the 1981 murder of Harvard graduate student Joan Webster, & expert in both Morse code & binary mathematics...); Lawrence Kane (profiled on the 14 November 1998 episode of “America’s Most Wanted” featuring the Zodiac; Pam Huckaby, sister of Darlene Ferrin, has reputedly identified Kane as the stranger who was stalking Darlene during the timeframe just before she was murdered...); an individual known as “Peter O.”; ex-Manson family member Bruce Davis; convicted Unabomber Ted Kaczynski; Richard Marshall, allegedly the pseudonymous “Donald Jeff Andrews” of Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac (reportedly, traveling from his native Texas to California, Marshall was suspected of killing a young hitchhiker & assuming his identity...); &, perhaps one of the best matchups as a suspect, the late Arthur Leigh Allen, reportedly the “Robert Hall Starr” of Robert Graysmith’s Zodiac, & most recently noted as considered the prime suspect by many investigators in a segment devoted to Zodiac in the History Channel’s “Perfect Crimes” series (the number of “matches” he has with details of the Zodiac profile is indeed very high...deceptively high...) However, none of these suspects was or is the mysterious killer known as “Zodiac.” In studying every bit of available information i could possibly access over the years, i was fortunate enough to decipher & extrapolate certain clues that have been hitherto overlooked or ignored: there is absolutely no doubt in my mind (nor, i believe, will there be in yours after reading the many previously unpublished details of these clues laid out in this book, Duet for the Devil, you now hold in-hand...) that Zodiac’s given name was “George Simon Brittain”--before & in the years following His reign of terror as “Zodiac,” He has worn many “masks,” has assumed many names, in His bloody, terrorist campaign against Society...
The writing, marketing & eventual, current publication by NECRO Publications of Duet for the Devil has proven a labor that’s consumed somewhat over a decade--perhaps Sisyphusian punishment for the audacity of our intended crimes of literary terrorism...this “unparalleled novel,” this damned, infernal sigil/objet fixe, through which we have relentlessly striven to create our own Einstein-Rosen wormhole into anarcho-lit history...
Early on, Randy & i were extremely flattered when supporters of our novel termed it an “underground classic,” a “Dr. Adder for the ‘90s”--by which they meant a groundbreaking novel of literary merit so shocking & uncompromising we would struggle against seemingly hopeless odds for ten years or more before at last finding a publisher with the cojones to dare risk placing it in print. Time has indeed led us to feel a definite kinship with K.W. Jeter’s visionary masterpiece, Dr. Adder--a book reportedly written in 1972, but more likely actually written in 1973, which did not see print in America until 1988, although it had received critical acclaim & achieved the limited beginnings of cult status when published in France in the interim. Dr. Adder is the definitive proto-Cyberpunk novel of extreme body modification, inspired by the following excerpt from a letter that reportedly appeared in Penthouse magazine’s November 1972 issue: “I would like to add my vote in favour of showing female amputees in your magazine. One-armed and, especially, one-legged females offer a unique excitement and a pictorial featuring attractive girl amputees would certainly be welcomed by a large number of readers...” No lesser literary giant than the legendary Philip K. Dick was Jeter’s mentor & avid supporter in assisting him see his book printed in America. In his afterword to the 1988 Signet edition of Dr. Adder, the book’s first American publication, Dick begins:
Philip K. Dick proceeds to say, “Very simply, it is a stunning novel and it destroys once and for all your conceptions of the limitations of science fiction. This is, of course, why so many years had to pass before it saw print. It’s not dirty. Mrs. Grundy is wrong. Yes, it deals not only with sexual perversions but with fantastic sexual perversions: dreams of sexual perversions which are dreams you and I never supposed existed.” Dick later states: “Forget your timid preconceptions of what a science fiction novel should be like... This novel is about our world and so it is a dangerous novel in the same sense that Harlan Ellison’s DANGEROUS VISIONS stories were, by and large, dangerous. This is precisely what we need.”
In the introduction you’ve just read to Duet for the Devil, Edward Lee cites: “It delves into taboos so mind-boggling that the likes of Richard Ramirez and Richard Speck would be jealous, and it does so with an eagerness of vision and an energy to offend. I welcome this because that which offends us also provokes us...to think.”
i first made acquaintance with Randy Chandler in 1986, while he was editing Bone-Chilling Tales magazine & ‘Lil Demon Review, writing some very powerful short horror fiction with a decidedly experimental literary bent, such as his incomparable “(3-D)” which had just appeared in the experimental lit-zine EOTU--a horror tale as densely compressed as the heart of a blue dwarf star, packing the whallop of a Howitzer shell in perhaps a thousand words, at most... Randy also was drafting reviews on a regular basis for the prestigious Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He accepted my own “Penetration Maximum” for publication in Bone-Chilling Tales, as well as a number of reviews for ‘Lil Demon Review. i was struck by the intelligence & compression of his writing, his flair for language, his savage, biting sense of humor, as well as by our shared love of genre perfectionists such as the recently anointed wunderkind of horror, Clive Barker, & SF’s reigning gurus, Cyberpunk William Gibson, the always amazing, genre-tripping K. W. Jeter, Thomas Pynchon, & Philip K. Dick, hard-boiled crime badboys like Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson & James Ellroy, & the wild, experimental literary writing of the works of William S. Burroughs, & Bob Dylan’s dazzling “novel”, Tarantula...
i would like to present you who may be interested with some insights as to our rather unusual creative process...
In Duet for the Devil we explore the darkest depths of psychoses & the psychotic mind... How did we so plunge our own psyches into such an extreme mindset? Again, speaking for myself alone, i threw myself wholeheartedly into disciplines I had previously used in my writings--both what Arthur Rimbaud referred to as “the systematic disordering of the senses,” & to Dali’s “Paranoiac-critical activity.”
Sometime in late-January, 1987, i must have mentioned to Randy i’d be interested in collaborating with him. He replied in a letter dated 07 February 1987, “I’ve suddenly become intrigued by the idea of doing collaborative fiction, thanks, in part, to your mention of it. Methinks it would be a blast. So, if you’re game & if & when you have the time, would you like to give it a shot with yours truly? Something ‘experimental,’ of course. I have a wide-open title in mind: ‘Duet for the Devil’ which would obviously refer to the duo of its authors & would be a title we can easily play upon in the creation of the work itself....” So was first conceived this diabolic offspring, this wailing, offensive enfent terrible you now hold in-hand. As we progressed, Randy commented in a letter dated 26 July 1988, “Fanfuckingtastic, brother! I knew we were on to something good, something hot, but it’s turning into something better than I had expected--something white hot & cool cobalt blue. Your work/inspiration in XI opens with dimensions we were sniffing out in earlier segments...Reel you in? Fuck that! Run with it, take it deep, plumb the oceanic depths. I’m getting the scary feeling we’re tapping close to some sort of black hole in the great Unconscious, the horror source (literary sorcerers we) & that our black creation may one day be viewed as a watershed work of black art. Exploring the Evil core underlying humanity, methinks we’d best get a good grip on our minds/souls. Horror-nauts light out...” From a letter dated 14 July 1990: “Thanks for the MONSTER. & what a fucking MONSTER it is! Most impressive, dark dude. I finished reading it last night--Friday the 13th, of course--and it did send me reeling...DUET is a HELL of a horror story, an ultimate conspiracy caper, its dark roots running deep into ancient mythology/biblical prophesy & even drawing from modern ‘mythology’ of Hollywood & Barker & King, etc. Our poetic creation is nothing less than a fearless look into the dark (Hogbutcher’s) heart of humanity & into the sick side of our bastard culture. What we have here is the ultimate horror novel. Maybe I’m blowing it out of proportion...maybe we’ve both gone over the line a little too far into psychosis...nah, I don’t think so. We crossed the forbidden lines all right, but there was no other way, eh?...the graphic sick sex scenes (Mal’s & Frank’s) are truly poetic...those scenes are probably the most horrible scenes I’ve ever had the shuddering pleasure to read...”
By 1990, Randy & i had completed some 500-odd pages of Duet for the Devil. With the unflagging support of & introductions by longtime friend & fellow-traveling Old Soul, noted horror author Brian Hodge (author of the recent bestselling novel & World Horror nominee, Wild Horses, as well as of Dark Advent, Oasis, Night Life, Deathgrip, The Darker Saints, & Prototype, & of the collections Falling Idols & The Convulsion Factory...), the as-yet-unfinished manuscript Duet for the Devil had been circulated to several well-established literary agents for consideration--it had proved far too extreme in content for the first two, but a third was “knocked back in her chair” by its “incredible sense of presence” & the “dizzying energy of its wired, onrushing pace.”
Also eager to obtain maximum exposure & publicity to its potential readership for our still in-works project, we submitted numerous excerpts, most of which received quick acceptance & publication, by 1990, seeing print in a wide variety of venues, from the luridly titled little Splatter-lit zine Festering Brainsore, to major markets such as World-Fantasy-Award-winning Grue #10 (Fall, 1989; as "& They Shall Receive a Mark Upon Their Flesh”), the Noctupla IV anthology (“Motel on the Road to Hell”), & the highly respected British slipstream/SF magazine, Back Brain Recluse #13 (simply titled, “Duet for the Devilî). The excerpt in the latter drew a flurry of reader letters published in the following issue. Among the Brits, then SF rising-star Simon Clark commented, “I have to say now that BBR is not on par with Interzone, It is better. ... but I can’t imagine them using ‘Duet for the Devil’ by Randy Chandler and t. Winter-Damon. This was an amazing, gob-smacking story; hip-deep in bizarre, multi-coloured imagery that covered seemingly everything, bouncing from Lovecraft to the Book of Revelations to Clive Barker and beyond. Messrs Chandler and Damon should burn rubber, burn the midnight lamp and finish the novel. It will be essential reading for the speculative fiction reader...” Mike Hadfield noted, “the poetic prose of Hakim Bey and t. Winter-Damon...” & Christian Vallini, a reader from Buenos Aires, Argentina, wrote: “‘Duet for the Devil’ is so strange, well, I’d say it’s a wild story. A really wild one due to its treatment. Although it keeps on some relation to Splatterpunk, it’s a different style I don’t see in Skipp and Spector stories. ‘Neo-Baudelarian Cyber-Sade’?...”
A re-publication of the same excerpt from Back Brain Recluse, under the title, “Palette of the Perverse”, appeared in the American EOTU soon after. Its appearance garnered nominations for the 1991 World Fantasy Award--however, the story did not make the final ballot.
But, despite the fact that editors, readers & critics increasingly referred to Duet as an “underground classic,” our literary offspring began to run into trouble. When we turned over the completed manuscript to our agent at that time, the text counted in at, i believe, somewhere in the vicinity of 976 pages. She informed us that we would never find a publisher willing to chance the investment/risk involved in printing a first novel of that length. We were forced to seriously reconsider the cast of the then-sprawling epic--The Great Beast Lotan & his minion, Hsuan Chieh, were completely elided; regretfully, in retrospect, the Lilithian Lucy Nation’s presence in the book suffered dramatic cuts, & her Erebos’ henchman, The Troubleshooter, found his role diminished to a mere passing mention. A wild, murderous, cross-country roadtrip by Maldoror & His 2 accomplices through Indiana & Illinois, culminating in a pitched gunbattle with State Troopers, resulting in the lawmen’s slaughter & torture was cut, also, because it trimmed some 100 pages, if memory serves me correctly.
All in all, the result was a far tighter, much more publishable novel--despite the pain Randy & i suffered, making these necessary “amputations.” &, now, much of the “lost” segments of Duet for the Devil are scheduled to see print from Jasmine Sailing Books, under the title, The Forbidden Gospels of Man-Cruel, Volumes I & II, later this year, 2001. These will be accompanied by introductions by genre notables Brian Hodge & Don Webb. &, due to some limited circulation of the galleys, The Forbidden Gospels of Man-Cruel has earned the books a pre-publication place, as previously referenced, among works by such cutting-edge authors as J.G. Ballard, Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K. Dick, K.W. Jeter, & John Brunner, & literary giants William S. Burroughs, George Orwell, William T. Vollmann, & Le Comte de Lautréamont, on the Cyber-Psychos’ website’s recommended reading list... Yet another excerpt from Duet for the Devil appeared in Grue #14 (Summer, 1992), under the title, “I am He that Liveth and was Dead...& Have the Keys of Hell & Death”. This one drew a rave letter (dated simply, July 1992), from none other than the King of Hardcore Horror himself, Edward Lee: “...I read your I AM HE excerpt in Grue 14, and really loved it. You guys definitely write some rough stuff! I love the way you mix jags of nerve-racking clinical imagery with the hallucinotic stylemode. ...you definitely got a pair of balls!” A final, expurgated segment from Duet for the Devil, in a radically reworked, greatly expanded format, appeared in the Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium anthology (Darkside Press, 1996, limited, signed-&-numbered hardbound edition, & ROC, 1998, massmarket paperback), as “...& Thou Hast Given Them Blood to Drink & They are Drunken with the Blood of Saints & with the Blood of Martyrs...”
But, even with the cuts we’d made in Duet, we parted ways with our then-current agent over artistic differences, particularly involving certain cuts she demanded regarding the more sexually explicit portions of the novel...A friendly editor, temporarily “agenting” for us, was able to get the manuscript read by the editor of the hottest imprint going at the time--Dell Abyss--but Jeanne Cavelos rejected it, primarily, if i recall correctly, due to its unprecedented level of sexual explicitness...
This very explicitness we unwaveringly believe is absolutely imperative to the intensity & integrity of its aesthetic value, imperative to telling this particular story, the way the story itself demanded to be told. We bent with the wind--but, in that flexibility, we survived the wind, not allowing it to break us--some of those deliberately excruciatingly prolonged passages deemed most in-your-face offensive, which, from an artistic standpoint were intended to make the reader feel as though he or she were being forcibly held down by sadistic madmen, eyes taped wide-open, unblinking, head submerged in the chill, black waters of perversity, helplessly flailing to escape, slowly, torturously drowning--these we finally expurgated, in part only...yet we retained enough of their substance to assault the reader’s senses with their still unprecedented brutality...to take you “into the psyche of the psycho.”
We increasingly felt a kinship with those authors who had gone before us, who had experienced rejection or even persecution because their literary visions challenged the limits of then-current moral strictures...
In its current incarnation, Duet for the Devil is still considered even by some of its supporters as “pornographically violent and pornographically sexual.” However, we have never considered Duet to be pornographic--instead, we think of its unblinking stare into the darkest, most forbidden recesses of the human experience to be hyperrealism...according to Dali’s philosophy, a progression or leap from the concrete to a state of delirious hallucinations--the fever state when the normal appears grotesquely deformed & exaggerated, when the most inconsequential object may take on a threatening & malignant & obsessive life of its own... In Duet for the Devil, you will find this hyperrealism may suddenly zoom in & focus upon the movement of a wheel, or upon a host of flies crawling on a ravaged corpse, or the slashing of a killer’s blade, or hands strangling the life from a struggling victim, or upon some perhaps bizarre permutation of the sex act...as we stare unblinking & unblushing at as de Sade so eloquently put it, “Nature Unveiled...”
However, as we are reminded by noted critic Alexis Lykiard in his introduction to Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror & The Complete Works, “...Maldoror’s shocked first publisher refused to bind the sheets of the original edition and perhaps no better invitation exists to this book which warns the reader, ‘Only the few may relish this bitter fruit without danger.’”
De Sade & Baudelaire & Rimbaud & Artaud & J.G. Ballard’s literary works all faced censorship or prosecution for obscenity or blasphemy during their own lifetimes. Their works are now considered literary classics... & please recall that William S. Burroughs’ literary classic, The Naked Lunch, was attacked as pornographic, as were the works of James Joyce & Henry Miller, & they were tried by the courts of the metaphorical Mrs. Grundy in an attempt to censor & suppress & shackle art that dares transgress those restraining, arbitrary boundaries blue-nosed Society dictates...
Perhaps the very closest comparison, however, to our own struggles in seeing Duet for the Devil see publication are the hardships well-known hard-boiled crime novelist Jonathan (Wayne) Latimer suffered with his 1941 novel, Solomon’s Vineyard. (Latimer was the author of Murder in the Madhouse, Headed for a Hearse, The Morgue, The Dead Don’t Care, & Red Gardenias, Sinners and Shrouds, & Black is the Color for Dying, among many others; he also wrote screenplays, most noteworthy his script for Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key; as a television script writer, among numerous other works, he wrote 50 episodes of “Perry Mason”.) Solomon’s Vineyard is “...a work so tough-minded and sexually explicit that no American publisher would take a chance on it in its original form...,” according to Bill Pronzini (anthologist & author of over 40 mystery & suspense novels) & Jack Adrian (a noted anthologist & authority on popular and genre fiction of the 20th century) in their introduction to the definitive collection, HARD-BOILED, An Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford, 1995). Solomon’s Vineyard also contained necrophilia (as does Duet for the Devil). It finally saw print in England, where, reputedly, “...the dust-jacket blurb trumpeted: ‘It’s got everything but an abortion and a tornado.’” Completely coincidentally, you’ll find that Duet for the Devil indeed has both... Solomon’s Vineyard finally was published in the U.S., in a “heavily expurgated paperback edition” in 1950, retitled The Fifth Grave. The original text did not see print in the U.S, until 1982, when it was released by a small press in a limited edition of 326 copies...
Our next agent, Stan Tal, of Tal Literary Agency, tirelessly circulated the Duet manuscript globally--but, despite extremely positive comments, it all boiled down to the bottomline--no major publisher had the balls to print it. Until, that is, he sent the manuscript to David Barnett, of NECRO Publications. Thanks to Dave’s faith in the book & his legendary cojones--you now have an opportunity to read the long-suppressed, “underground classic,” Duet for the Devil...
As for the title of this preface, “TO STARE WITHOUT BLINKING”--it is a bastardization of a quote from Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, The Lessons of Don Juan, citing the teachings of his mentor, the Yaqui sorcerer or brujo, don Juan Matus: “...look without blinking until you see.” He describes the practice of this concept: “...all one has to do is to cross the eyes. The technique takes years to perfect. It consists of gradually forcing your eyes to see separately the same image. The lack of image conversion entails a double perception of the world; this double perception allows one the opportunity of judging changes in the surroundings, which the eyes are ordinarily incapable of perceiving.” don Juan further explains that it: “...allows the eyes to pick out unusual sights... It takes a long time to train the eyes properly. The trick is to feel with your eyes... It’ll come to you, though, with practice.
Castaneda instructs us, the would-be warrior or man of knowledge, as the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan instructed him, “’Focus your eyes on that spot,” he whispered in my ear. ‘Look without blinking until you see...’” t. Winter-Damon,
Elementary, my Dead Whopper.* We have created a bloody monster.
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