Mike Young – 4AM has something to tell you, but it’s outside. The press has something to tell you they saw, but they always wait until it’s gone

Mike Young, We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, Publishing Genius Press, 2010.

„Mike Young’s poetry is an absolute stunner. We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough streams one intricate, scenery chewing, note perfect, balletic, swervy, mind blowing composition after another. These may be nothing but great poems, but I can’t think of a paragraph anywhere that can match them for style or cover their emotional distance.“ - Dennis Cooper

„We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough reveals the gestures & tics of common experience as portals to the sublime, the theoretical & the silly. These poems jumpcut like French New Wave & confide like a sinner, always trembling with energy, always trying to contain the tiltawhirl glamour of life & exploding.“ - Mathias Svalina

„We are all good says the book, says the poet. The poet Mike Young is not afraid of marionberries or MySpace, Nyquil, or Dunkin’ Donuts or KFC, or a crucifix on wheels, or Gillis Beukel or Martha Stewart or Minnie Mouse, or Cheetos or Craigslist, or breast milk or milk duds or Cool Whip, or NASCAR or MMORPGs, or a theory of radical alterity or The Decemberists or Barry Bonds, or Arkansas or Crescent City, California. Oh my god, he is not afraid of Chuckie Cheese! This is a reckless, fearless poet we’re meeting, and I think we should all wish him safe travels. He reminds me of Marcel Proust. He is that greedy and that good.“ - Dara Wier

„Mike Young’s first full-length poetry collection, We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, is an absolute stunner. Young, who is also a regular contributor at HTMLGiant and co-edits NOO Journal and Magic Helicopter Press, has summoned all of his lyrical talents in this 80-page whirlwind of a book.
This fearless 24 year-old poet writes honestly about subjects ranging from Craigslist to The Decemberists to breast milk to NASCAR and everything in between. The poems, written mostly in free verse, are a mixture of concisely written observations and long-winded verbal assaults. The true value in this collection is Young’s ability to switch topics on a dime and not miss a beat.
If the barometer of a great poet is his ability to create an alternate reality so true that the reader is transported there upon opening the book than Young is a top-notch wordsmith with a bright future.
It’s been quite a long time since I’ve read a collection that combines both sheer quantity and elegant quality. Mike Young has succeeded in doing just that. There isn’t one single poem in the book that I would advise skipping over; you’d be doing yourself a disservice.
The lack of a central theme weaving together these poems actually serves as a challenge for the reader. Before reading this collection you must be willing to confront any preconceived notions you may have of what poetry is and what it should do. True poetry should make you think about things in a new way and leave you wanting more. Mike Young has accomplished that because by the end of the book I was left both intellectually stimulated and yearning for more. The challenge for the reader is complex because not only are Young’s topics wide ranging but also he manages to take the most seemingly everyday mundane thoughts and spin them into complex observations that show off his keen eye for detail.
Don’t get me wrong; Young isn’t one of these stuffy, pretentious poets who take themselves too seriously. In fact, he is just the opposite. It seems as though his youthful exuberance serves as far more than the launching point for a burst of spontaneous prose that jumps off the page and actually allows him to show off his more humorous side. The tightrope that he so delicately walks balancing both a sharp sense of wit and a decisive knack for sensitivity is on display in numerous individual pieces throughout the collection.
If asked to come up with a favorite poem or a single piece that defines the collection I’d be hard pressed to choose just one. Several lines, however, jump off the page upon first reading.
“Excuse me. You’ve parked in the towaway zone of
my confidence.”
“When you are near me, I am a confident paper boat
in a bathtub full of Kool-Aid, where I tilt in circles toward
the drain, which does not worry me, for I know that a wet
hand will reach up and carry me into the kitchen.”
Those are just a few. Honestly I could’ve just written the entire review using great lines from this collection but then why would you want to go out and buy the book?
The only thing that would make this collection better, in my opinion, is if there were more poems! I’m afraid that some potential readers may be put off by the author’s display, in the majority of his poems, of a young sensibility. My only fear is that the depth of his work might go underappreciated to some who get lost in his subject matter rather than focusing on the fact that he broaches such topics with a devastatingly mature voice and a wisdom that belies his age.
I’m definitely going to be looking forward to his next release of short stories by Word Riot Press in December to see if he can top this performance. As both a writer of fiction and poetry, Young has showcased all of his writing skills in this book. When asked about how writing fiction influences his approach to poetry he responded, “I feel like poems involve imagining you have a mouth in your brain, and stories involve maintaining eye contact with every body in the room.” Young has let that mouth loose on the public without ostracizing himself from anyone in the room with We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough.
This collection has renewed my confidence in the future of poetry while also making me feel jealous as a writer. I truly believe that all aspiring poets should view this book as required reading if they want to improve their craft.
My advice: GO AND BUY THIS BOOK! If you fail to then you’re taking the chance that you missed out on discovering one of the great new young American poets of this generation.“ - Patrick Trotti

„I am a scholar of, teacher of, student of, and writer of poetry. This constellation of identities means that when I pick up a new book of poetry, I turn into Robert fucking Langdon from the fucking Da Vinci Code: I look for correspondences, connections, patterns, “Symbology,” so that I can solve the book’s mystery and come up with a thesis clever enough to bring down the Catholic church. Mike Young’s We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough stumped me for a long time. There are no correspondences, there is no Symbology, there is just stuff and stuff and more stuff:
All the new bewilderment is about hay fever tablets.
In this it resembles the blind men running from the
elephant. In this it resembles nude appliance repair.
We’re pulled aside and told we’re loved, but listen:
the mustard gas has got to go. If I keep feeling this way
I will have to use a lot of emoticons.
The emoticons line is brilliant, but otherwise this passage is, well, kind of bewildering. The first line is intriguing and reads almost like a word-substitution game, but I can’t even imagine what it would mean to try to explain the “resemblances” noted in the second and third lines. I can make sense of the mustard gas as hyperbole, an apocalyptic version of “I love you, but lose the mustache,” but its relation to the earlier lines is utterly opaque.
My inner Robert Langdon was tearing his hair out until I told him to shut up already. This book is jam-packed with delightful moments, and it’s right and good and interesting that they’re moments instead of coy pieces of a picture-puzzle. “Dancing is just putting yourself on inside out.” “Oh, this is no cello analogy // you weepy motherfucker.” “In 1954, the last documented case of / ‘real people’ buried a milkshake recipe / and two coupons for used boxing gloves / outside Sparks, Nevada.” This book is a riot of noise and joy and weirdness, and reminds us that life is full of interesting things.
But then suddenly, three-fourths of the way of through the book, my inner Langdon found the Cryptex. In case you’ve forgotten or repressed this movie (which I swear I saw only in the dollar theater and only because it was such a cultural phenomenon), allow me to remind you that the Cryptex was the little cylinder with symbols on it that operated like a bicycle-lock and opened up to contain some kind of scroll that helped Tom Hanks solve all the mysteries. My Cryptex to Young’s book is a prose poem called “Now You Try,” and it begins like this:
Your roommate has something to tell you about the sociology of chip brands. Driving has something to tell you about shivering. Your porch has something to tell you about your ex-girlfriend. Evolution has something to tell you about acne. Bea Arthur has something to tell you about drugs. Beaches have something to tell you about community. Your mom has something to tell you, sometimes. The post office has something to tell you about the rest of your life.
It goes on for quite awhile, and it gets weirder:
If you are lying in bed and there is a maple bonbon on your nightstand a little out of reach, how much and what kind of effort you employ through your body toward that bonbon has something to tell you about death. 4AM has something to tell you, but it’s outside. The press has something to tell you they saw, but they always wait until it’s gone. Watermelons have something smart to tell you. Breakfast has something to tell you about your friends. The Decemberists have something to tell you about Russian history — yeah, you and everybody else, dude.
And so on and so on. And suddenly it all seemed clear: it’s not just that this is a book full of weird stuff, it’s that it’s a book full of weird stuff that means stuff. Everything has something to tell you if you know how to listen, and this, I think, is part of what Young is trying to tell us. The title of this poem, “Now You Try,” not only references the title of the volume (correspondences! Symbology!), but it invites the reader into this enterprise. The “formula” of this poem becomes rapidly clear, and the reader is asked to make up similar statements of her own, to look around and figure out which objects are trying to speak.
One thing that’s striking about this volume is that over half the poems are dedicated to specific people. In those poems and elsewhere, moments of real tenderness shine through: “This feeling is called kiss me. This feeling is called hi.” “The word okay is like skydiving. / If I say swingsets, will you make it rain?” “Give me something to give into. / It will be weird. It will be so weird.” These flashes of quirky sincerity put me in mind of Frank O’Hara, whose name I actually scribbled in the margins when I read these lines: “My moments of inward congratulation are / offset by meals alone in pants I really like.” If O’Hara is a patron saint of this volume, it is because he and Young both seem to be giving you a sidelong glance, revealing the marvels of the everyday while checking to make sure that nobody is taking themselves too seriously.
So if you like weirdness — if you like Craigslist, Leonard Cohen, and stray flamingos — if you hate the damn Da Vinci Code — you owe it to yourself to pick up We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough and to ready yourself for Mike Young’s forthcoming fiction collection, Look! Look! Feathers.“ - Erin McNellis

„Mike Young’s We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough reads at first like something disjointed, with lines and images that seem to all bleed into something mostly nonsensical, that leave you wondering the why of what they might be trying to tell you or convey, if they’re trying to convey anything at all beyond sound or silly, because there are poets these days who do only that and you’re not particularly partial to that, you like to communicate with the text.
And, just when you’re about to possibly put down the book, you read:
Amateur opera singers do their own makeup.
The higher you go, the more your face gets
installed. Then it dries and waits for your
approval. I keep getting submitted to
withdrawal. We all say things none of us
believe, like “gift economy.” Or “wait.”
It maybe hurts a little, and if not you at least stop to appreciate the image of installing a face. While appreciating, somewhere far back in your head recalls a title from earlier in the book, “You Can Know That Wait Means Stay,” how it makes those last two words take on a new meaning, a new weight, and you wonder about the earlier poem, this permission granted.
You turn back a few pages and read “You Can Know…” again and this time it reads as an ache and a silence, and there it is—a Rube Goldberg machine in the words and pages, these small and big parts, some silly and some more obviously utile, all working for a greater whole—this gathering of attempts at connection, and just as in life some of it falls short, some of it is perhaps a little close to Young’s brainspace for us to really get the exact object or event or maybe even emotion he’s trying to convey, but then there are these shining moments (“Keep the lights on through all loss. Don’t forget: / brilliant also means that none of us can see.”) where you take Young’s title at its word and try just a bit harder.
You try so hard you think maybe you’re reaching for something not there, but you go ahead and let yourself reach, let yourself go a little into a space more like where Young may have been while seeing the world and writing it into these poems, and ripcord!
You’re off and feeling, and there’s ache and there’s joy and there’s anger and laughter, and you want to shake Young’s hand and call him Mike instead and buy him a gin and tonic and laugh balls.
You begin turning back pages and rereading some poems you thought were maybe just simple strings of sounds and where before there was only mouth cartwheels, now meaning and conveyance! and he’s begging you, Mike is actually begging you, “Please listen I have something to tell you. Please tell me I have something.” And you listen.“ - Christopher Newgent

„In the poem “Money”, Young states “They know that being amusing is good because it makes you feel good and feeling is everything...” This line best summarizes the poems in We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough. There is a sly, yet comfortably awkward self awareness in these poems. The poems that make up this book are a collection of experiences that anyone can relate to, but what sets them apart from most contemporary poetry is they lack overwhelming self-indulgence. They're also really quite fun to read.
The poems in the book are of their time—the immediate present. The lines flow, the images shift with such fluidity and nonchalance they fit perfectly in the technological daydream we live in. But Young also borrows a style and use of imagery that recalls the cultural heroes of the 50's and 60's. Especially “Mindy the Famous Divebomber Visits the Thrift Store We All Care For”, which reads like a delightfully absurd short film treatment.
This is one of the better collections of poetry I've read this year.“ – Casey Mensing

„In ten words (no more, no less), describe “We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough.”
- Lonely astronaut face-to-face feelings that flip language pancakes by flashlight.
Within the Theory of Radical Alterity, what is the first truth?
- This comes form the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who says philosophy should be more about the knowledge of love and less the love of knowledge (which is the literal translation of the word). “Radical alterity” means the irreducible, at-the-root Otherness of the Other (“alterity” means otherness). In other words, one of our deep-seated duhs is that other people are fundamentally not knowable and cannot be made into objects of the self. We can’t live inside someone else’s feelings. But we can have face-to-face encounters with them, which is pretty terrific, and we can start dialogue from this point, accepting the Other’s mystery/unknowability/whatever you want to call it, and going from there. Martin Buber influenced a lot of Levinas’s thinking, and Buber talks about how we don’t even really exist except in relationships, in meetings. All of this is pretty heady stuff, but gets translated in the book into half-nelsons and sheet forts.
Take a second. You don’t know what is going to happen next, but who is going to be there?
- The poem that’s from, “You Can Know That Wait Means Stay,” was written for Carolyn Z, who is a human carrot cake. But I guess I like to vainly think it’s portable, not for me to use with somebody else, but for elses to use elsewise and ever. One of the best parts of being in love is a certain kind of knowing who you’re with and giving up the knowing of everything else, and I think it’s interesting to recognize that feeling with the person you’re in love with and with everybody who might be recognizing their own love.
At what port does the U.S.S. Bitchface reside?
- Probably the port where I eat burnt chili by myself at some hour that seems the furthest from any sun.
On the cover, what is the single arm dripping?
- Glitter, pop rocks, multi-colored candy corn. Maybe when you go around life collecting all your receipts and movie stubs and Post-Its, and then you accidentally leave a bunch of crayons in your pocket, and all your spare useless paper is ruined, so you chop it into confetti and use it to salt your radishes.
What will you never do, but lie about?
- You can say and mean and truly mean and still know you don’t. Mean, I mean. Which sometimes makes it kind of terrifying to say anything.
Is The Missionary your favorite positron?
- What I like are mirror neurons. Let’s go watch football and wince. Last week I got into an argument, kind of, about mirror neurons as the basis via cognitive science for empathy, but I think we just believed in competing mysticisms we didn’t want to tell the truth about. All I know is I ate a burger and she gave me a business card.
“Gift Economy” – why do you not believe in it?
- I think I do, now. I think I am just worried about the seething niceties of gifthood, the thank-you notes and so forth.
What is the one thing that can tell you about love?
- Love is a recursive function.
What was the last secret you told when you kissed a neck?
- When you tell someone a really good secret, it is like finding a colony of bats inside your chest and rooting them out. In other words, there is surprise and a black mass.
“There will be things you save to tell someone that you’ll never get to tell at all.” Here’s a chance for you, fire away.
- Maybe what that line means is more about the someone than the saving. There are visions and versions of people we wait for that we decide are the only people that fit certain parts of who we are. This is probably not true, but that doesn’t stop anybody, I don’t think. In other news, the dude across the way from me right now has a Q-Bert tattoo and a mason jar full of mozzarella balls. His friend just said “I think you imagine it as a like a disturbance in water. Or, like, a thickness.”
In ten words (no more, no less), describe your next project.
- A letter of YouTube account cancellation that bleeds and frets.“ – Interview with BL Pawelek


„Mike Young: ...My book is a book of poems. Most of them are pretty talky. They're like the things you'd say if death involved sitting in a hot tub on a space shuttle, getting wet in the post-death gravity, hashing out the things you wish you'd said to people walking away. Another way to put this is from a new thing about singing, which is not in the book: "Singing may also be catalogued as Christmas underwater
 / and hiking slowly along the railroad ties with the best candy bar / but no home." I wish I could co-dream with people, but I can't, so I write these poems. There's a quote from Martin Buber in the front: "When they sang of what they had thus named, they still meant You." The other day, I was talking to myself in the shower, and I concluded by saying "a sublime cooperative knowing-of-absurdity that manifests as mutually blissful co-ignorance of that absurdity's terms." It's nice to take showers with a lot of people at once, but if you're not doing that right now, you could read poems instead. Here are some things that are in We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough's poems: scout ants; peanut butter knees; a scarecrow with a lantern in his chest; a mattress factory; someone saying "I want to sell the notions of May on eBay" to a friend he hasn't seen in a while; pissing on a cell phone charger; old man socks; hicks on condors; God's wheelchair; amateur opera singers; FDR's diary; carrier pigeons; huckleberries and hyperthyroids; coconut milk and rhetorical questions; a comparison of the new bewilderment and the old bewilderment; each happy person ever; an essay about money; a kitten in a cedar; dandruff teeth; and the alphabetization of home movies by flashlight.“ – Interview at Orange Alert


Mike Young makes moonbats in your brain

Poems from the book

Mike Young: Is This a Poem For the Year 2219?

Mike Young, Look! Look! Feathers, Word Riot Press, 2010.

“Mike Young is young and his song is real. This book is full of comedy, radiance and devastation.” – Sam Lipsyte

“I believe in Mike Young. I will follow his stories wherever they lead me. They are so fresh and full of the weirdest Americana. If Mike Young were a cult leader, I’d drink his Kool-Aid and it would feel electric.” – Kevin Sampsell

“Equal parts stylist and storyteller, Mike Young chronicles the moribund world with a cool voice and a big heart. Wise, engaged, suspenseful, and exuberantly melancholy, his fiction forges a holy path between the Cliffs of Irony and the Swamp of Sentimentality. Here is a newfangled old-fashioned writer whose stories both dazzle and nourish. What a boon, what a bright talent.”
– Chris Bachelder

“A fascinating book with lots of stuff in it, all the best stuff, funny stuff. Mike Young writes like the guy in the Viagra ad, the one whose erection is way past its four hours. He’s headed for the emergency room now. Go with him. See what happens.” – Frederick Barthelme
Mike Young, MC Oroville’s Answer­ing Machine, Transmission Press, 2009.

"Yr not dreaming. Yes, number 11 in the fantastic Transmission lineage is here. However, you may feel like yr dreaming when reading this book. Yr head might lift off from yr shoulders and you better hope you've got some kind of tether. Otherwise, yr head, bouncing around the stratosphere, might end up in one of Mike's poems. And, also, at least as far as I know, you probably wouldn't survive. Good luck with that.
So, you see, what you got yrself here is a fine book of poetry. Feel that plush poetry-y seating. Notice the spacious back seat. Smell that new poetry smell. And that engine. Holy smokes, does that engine v-room like the dickens. I do believe this is something you could live with a very long time and never want to trade in. What do you say?"

Here's a poem from MC OROVILLE'S ANSWERING MACHINE...

DO YOU LIKE MY SUNGLASSES?

Last seen in the junkyard on a yellow bike. Seen burning his mouth on the Keg Room pizza. Seen bearded at the punk shows in the autoshop lot, where I met a girl who made me lick the rain off the chainlinks and stop talking up a shitstorm. Some say MC Oroville moved south to work at a thrift store in the East Bay. Reprezent! It's not like we won't wait. We sell our water south, but the State keeps the money. In Scoops, the chicken mango dog tastes like the chicken Mediterranean dog. But we're trying. If someone invents a machine to bring murals alive, we will need new brochures. I bought Wayne the river for his birthday, and he promised to build a basement beneath it, in case MC Oroville needs to crash real low. At Staples, a drunk in a blue sundress watches the punks make flyers. She asks them if they like her sunglasses, her John Lennon sunglasses! But they are only the Wild Wild West sunglasses Burger King gave away in 1999. Then the punks split, and the lady photocopies her ID—some dispute with the law, the landlord. After she's evicted, she writes a letter. To my delicious punks, she writes. Kick out the links, eat the rain back to where it starts, find somebody's hair and set that hair on fire.

Hans Rickheit - Underbrain's dream: the entity that resolves all issues regardless of the rules: it’s through the looking glass: it’s your brain open

Hans Rickheit, The Squirrel Machine, Fantagraphics, 2009.

“Are reclusive, troubled brothers emerging as a cultural theme? Not only has E.L. Doctorow reworked the story of the Collyer brothers in his novel "Homer & Langley", but Hans Rickheit's newly released graphic novel, "The Squirrel Machine" (Fantagraphics), documents the relationship and habits of Edmund and William Torpor, a fictional brother duo dedicated to building odd musical devices from pig and cow carcasses in their secluded mansion.
Much like the Collyer brothers, the Torpors are a pair of misfits who come to depend upon each other for their emotional and physical survival. Novels, of course, are an ideal medium for exploring the consciousness of those we might not otherwise regard with close attention––freaks, outcasts, children. What's quickly becomes clear is that the graphic novel is a particularly apt form for inhabiting unconventional characters, and very few do this as well as "The Squirrel Machine".
Wielded skilfully, images are as expressive as words, and occasionally more so. Rickheit's drawings convey the boys' tortured feelings of persecution, elation and curiosity––as well as their uncouth creative urges––in a succinct and often gruesome way. Rickheit's frames vary from the cluttered to the stark, and his ability to pack detail into four square inches is rivalled only by his ingenious use of white space.
The author, who lives and works in Philadelphia, keeps scrapbooks of medical photography and counts Burroughs, Ionesco, Beckett and Kafka as influences, which is no surprise. It remains to be seen whether future novels, graphic or otherwise, will bring us further pairs of charismatically abnormal brothers. Whatever the case, "The Squirrel Machine" convinces anew that a picture is worth a thousand words.” – Molly Young

“In high-school English class, we're taught that literature features three basic types of conflict: man versus man, man versus environment, and man versus himself.
"Well, I think there's a fourth type of conflict, which I'm working with," says cartoonist Hans Rickheit. "I call that fourth type of conflict 'exploding cow.' "
Pressed to elaborate on this notion, Rickheit — who was born in Ashburnham, lived in the Boston area for a decade and a half (including five years dwelling in the basement of Cambridge's Zeitgeist gallery), and now calls Philadelphia home — replies with cryptic finality: "I think it's rather self-explanatory."
Er, fair enough.
For more obtuse readers, hints are offered by flipping through the gorgeous, enigmatic, disquieting pages of Rickheit's new graphic novel, The Squirrel Machine (Fantagraphics) — a book that could and should be his breakout work.
Set in some leaf-strewn 19th-century New England town, its story line, such as it is, concerns two eccentric, reclusive brothers, and the inventive uses they come up with for animals' taxidermied remains. As Rickheit tells their story, he conjures an aberrant world of shadowy Victorian attics, whispering woodlands, and strange, Steampunk-esque retro-futurist gewgaws, reveling in the collision of the organic and the mechanical. Plot is hinted at, but, like a phantasm, never quite materializes. Page after entrancing page, the book is an exercise, he says, in challenging "presumptive barriers of conventional narrative."
It's a remarkable piece of art ? one that percolated in Rickheit's gray matter for more than a decade, and took more than five years of working in earnest to complete. Even so, the story shaped itself organically. "I like leaving it vague," says Rickheit. "I like to surprise myself with each new page."
In turn, the reader is also continually surprised — and at times shocked and repulsed — by some of the more surreal and visceral imagery. (A dancing chicken spine, a head drawn tight in a vise.)
Rickheit draws in an obsessively detailed style that evokes the textured complexity of a woodcut (though one that uses simple Pilot V-Ball pens). "Every frickin' line is a lot of work," he says, admitting he sometimes spends a week inking a single page.
But he can't help but suffer for his art, cramming each pane. with laborious rococo detail. "When I read a novel, I like pages and pages of long, sumptuous prose," says Rickheit. He aims to create a visual analogue of that experience: "You can sort of read it once very quickly and get the narrative, and then you can go back and drink in all the detail. That's the book I wanted to make." – Mike Miliard

“Hans Rickheit has always been an enigmatic authorial figure for me - I fittingly discovered him at MoCCA a few years ago while he was absent from his table, but whoever was manning it facilitated the sale of a couple volumes of his Chrome Fetus minicomics to me. His new graphic novel from Fantagraphics is a drastically more linear and cohesively dialoged story than those volumes, but the same spirit of steampunkish surreal exploration between internal and external relationships still pervades.
In its simplest terms, the Squirrel Machine narrative is the tale of two brothers, Edmund and William, and their quest to master an organ assembled from pig heads. Edmund is a bit of a mad scientist, consumed by constructs that transhumanistically merge mechanics and biological systems for these grand sculptures of form and sound. The quest puts him at odds with his own family, however, and results in his own renewed efforts to help them — perhaps out of guilt. I was a little unclear on that, though.
The result is something along the lines of Alice in Wonderland meets Clive Barker’s Hellraiser in a visual spectacle that revives motifs from Rickheit’s earlier work, such gasmaskish facial interface devices, adolescent sexual discovery, and intimate relationships with animals that are not necessarily sexual. His storytelling style is a brilliantly paced series of chapters, that leave as much to the imagination between panels as they unveil in his larger scenes of Rube Goldbergian invention and menacing surprise shots that lie between M.C. Escher and H.R. Giger.
There’s an ongoing refrain of physical penetrations and external community confrontations that kicks off from the very beginning where Edmund finds himself awakened outside of his house. Most of these events explore major changes in his life brought on by what lies through the given scene’s metaphorical rabbit hole, and how that new discovery complicates his life further.
Rickheit’s linework is utterly astounding throughout, and his imagery is densely compacted in many circumstances. There’s an obsessively completist urge that appears to fuel his pages and balances well with the central character’s innocence, though the elegance of the story really resonates in the challenge to that innocence forced by the ending.
I always enjoy revisiting Rickheit not because he makes artwork that’s easy to consume, but because he makes visual narratives that issue these kinds of challenges as you get drawn in to his children’s quests and motivations. Those who appreciate Max Ernst’s work or the cold subjectivity of Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence should gravitate handily to Rickheit’s style. Actually, some of the dialog in The Squirrel Machine came across eerily similar to the old man at the hotel in The Silence.
This book was well worth the wait, and I was happy to see him get a publisher like Fantagraphics for it, who will hopefully open up his work to a wider audience.” - Brian Warmoth

"I'm not wholly familiar with the past work of cartoonist Hans Rickheit, although my lingering impression is that he's an artist with a first class visual imagination, craft chops to spare and an eye for the grotesque. So while I'm not the person to place where The Squirrel Machine fits into the arc of Rickheit's career, the velvety ease of the narrative and the facile blend of sexual, familial and natural intimacies on display suggest one of those steps forward with which the comics medium has been blessed over and over again this past decade. One falls through The Squirrel Machine as much as reads it, and the collection of feelings it imparts is as much due to the clarity of its narrative as it is the horror show that occasionally surges toward the reader from some deep place in Rickheit's mind, righteous and angry and wet.
Falling is a minor motif in The Squirrel Machine, or at least the threat of gravity and the honor won in a lengthy climb. So is sleeping, I think, from several angles: the loss of consciousness, the gift of dreamed insight, the helplessness of the prone body and the similarities between the sleeping form and one suspended in liquid. Most of the falling and sleeping comes from the book's protagonists. The Squirrel Machine tells the story of two brothers, William and Edmund (as in Barrett, maybe?). We meet the brothers as their relationship has settled into an overly-dependent torpor. William is physically trapped in a horrifying, jelly-like body and Edmund directs the majority of his attention to his brother's care buoyed by the simple A to B conviction of his love for him in doing so.
William's apparent escape sends the narrative scuttling back to their days as children under the care of a controlling mother from whom the children derived some significant portion of their love for transgressive art. A lot of the fun of these sections is how boldly disgusting Rickheit makes their forays into artistic expression. I imagine it might even lose him some readers who may see those moments as overly flamboyant, even frivolous or obvious. It's not unlike the reaction that the boys and their audiences stumble through, although there it comes with faintings and beatings and yelling and the opening up of magical, physical interiors. Rickheit seems to equate art with a state of mind that flutters between total mastery and absolute loss of control, a statement that shouldn't be underestimated when it comes from an artist whose precise pacing at times recalls that of Jim Woodring and Rick Geary.

I would imagine that finding a through-line is a task best left to every reader. The Squirrel Machine could certainly be enjoyed as a set of over-the-top moments and boxes opening, a fable with some very discouraging things to be said about familial ties. My attention was drawn specifically to how Edmund's first musical instrument (made from pigs' heads) produced a more glorious sound than one from several years later (made from a cow's body). By the time we see an older Edmund in the framing sequence he's a million miles away from the boy that grasps at goggles that may not show anyone else anything remarkable or the teenager that romps, vigorously and hilariously, through a sex scene surrounded by the creepy detritus of his artistic pursuits. In the end, both brothers are transformed, one through suffering into something more that appears more than human, the other as settled material to be reconstituted into art. It's unclear who gets the better end of the deal. I like how unafraid this book is of being silly or obvious or over the top, and I hope it's met with equal bravery.” – Tom Spurgeon

“Hans Rickheit is described on the dust jacket of his new book as a "legendary obscurantist." It's hard to argue with that assessment. Throughout all 179 pages of The Squirrel Machine Rickheit tells a rich, fluid tale, all the while approaching, but not quite revealing any implicit meaning the story itself might have. The result, a daring, surreal, often grotesque work, is more visceral than it is cognitive.
There isn't much about The Squirrel Machine that doesn't seem like everything you've just read is one giant dream, or hallucination. Many scenes contain nothing that could feasibly be referred to as "the literal", relying only on symbolism to tell the the story, or perhaps not even that. It's possible Rickheit's intention was to craft a story with no intrinsic meaning, leaving different interpretations up to the reader; the author daring his audience to take part in the creative process.
This isn't to say the story doesn't contain "facts". On the contrary, its foundation is somewhat straightforward: the tale of two brothers who are societal outcasts due to their odd behavior and freakish inventions, The Squirrel Machine follows its protagonists Edmund and William Torpor as they grow older, becoming slightly more eccentric as the story progresses.
However, it's what isn't said that seems most interesting.For example, we're shown the blueprints to the Squirrel Machine, the titular invention, only in passing, and we're never quite given an impression of what it might do. Even as Edmund is about to explain his discovery to William he cuts himself short as he sees his brother's bruised and scraped face, implied to be a result of a run-in with local crazy person the Pig Lady. The machine is never again mentioned by either character on panel for the rest of the book.
The Pig Lady herself is a remarkably surreal entity, part homeless loon and part female shaman. Her speech is little more than a series of gibberish words and grunts, her actions nothing short of hypnagogic. She's seen eating the boils off of sick animals, and scooping the brains out of a crushed human head. Still, she serves as sort of a vessel of change throughout the book for each of the boys, first supplying the means with which to create their "pig organ" (an organ with pig heads rather than pipes to produce sound), then acting as the trigger for their eventual sexual and spiritual awakenings. Their attempt at creating a second organ, this time with a cow rather than her trademark pigs, is met with disaster.
Of course, if none of this makes sense it may be due to one man's misguided attempt at applying meaning to that which has none. Still, meaning or not, Rickheit's work feels far too personal to ignore. His artwork is crisp and detailed, and he can turn a scene on its head with just a few panels. Even if you're unsure of what he's saying Rickheit demands your attention as he says it.” - Paul DeBenedetto

“Given what I've been reading lately I can't help but compare Hans Rickheit to Fort Thunder. Like Brian Chippendale, Mat Brinkman, Brian Ralph et al, Rickheit spent the late '90s and very early '00s living and working in a combination art gallery/performance space/flophouse in a New England college town--theirs, Fort Thunder, in Providence; his, the Zeitgeist Gallery, in Cambridge. Like them, he saw his one-time shangri-la end before its time--theirs by municipal diktat, his by fire. Like them--and, like them, perhaps unsurprisingly given his years-long conflation of room and board with bristol board--he creates comics centered on the exploration of space, rooms, houses, environments. And like them, he fills that space with marks, so that reading one is almost a tactile, exploratory experience itself.
But the similarities are not complete. Unlike Ralph's cavemen or Brinkman's monsters or Chippendale's warriors, Rickheit's Edwardians are observers at least as much as explorers. Though they move about in his strange, gristly world, they are not of that world. More often than not they're limned by a fine white void; it serves the purpose of making them pop against his often overwhelming backgrounds, yes, but it also reinforces their separateness, their otherness. They wander through strange environments constructed by unknown architects, gazing through lenses and orifices at any number of bizarre transmixtures of human, animal, and machine. They are constantly seeing things, to borrow the title of a book by Rickheit's visual and thematic kindred spirit Jim Woodring. When we see what they see, the effect is reminiscent of catching a glimpse of an older family member as he or she masturbates, or strips to reveal what Rickehit's friend E. Stephen Frederick refers to in his memorably Kenneth Smithian introduction to The Squirrel Machine as "secondary hair."
In the comics of the Fort, exploration is, at worst, value-neutral. In Ralph's comics they lead mostly to mischief and lessons learned (though that changed somewhat in the bleak zombie comic Daybreak), in Chippendale's they usually lead to freedom or adventure, and in Brinkman's, for every bleak wordless parable of creatures lost in an endless maze, there's another LOL-inducing story of a beast barging into a castle to take a dump on the king's throne. In Rickheit's comics, though, the explorations and the visions waiting at their conclusions are unmistakably disturbing. They reveal creatures and creations of arcane origin and dubious value, frequently hidden inside a smoothly artificial or warmly organic surface like a grotesque parody of birth, or a Cracker Jack prize. When you end up at the end of one of Rickheit's wonderings, there's a sense that, to quote Trent Reznor, "Now I am somewhere I am not supposed to be, and I can see things I know I really shouldn't see." That's no less true for our desire to see them. In this, he has more in common with Josh Simmons than with the Fort, though unlike the House author, up until this point the damage incurred in Rickheit's characters' travels is more psychological than physical.
This changes in The Squirrel Machine, Rickheit's Fantagraphics debut and for all intents and purposes a simultaneous coming-out party and summation of all that has gone before. In the past--his Xeric-winning erotic coming-of-age nightmare Chloe, his dewily sexualized surrealist gag strip Cochlea & Eustacea--Rickheit imbued his character's journeys into what he refers to as the Underbrain with a sliver of redemptive power. Chloe finds something that replaces what she lost; Cochlea and Eustacea's antics are as funny and horny as they are freaky. But here, the downbeat direction hinted at by C&E's fate in the last issue of Rickheit's self-published anthology Chrome Fetus emerges in full flower, and the result is awesome to behold.
In Rickheit's story of the brilliant brothers Torpor, William and Edmund, art does not provide the antidote to the encroaching cruelty of the civilized world, as it does in Chippendale's Ninja. On the contrary, the art of William and Edmund is wholly dependent on the taking of life. Their childhood games aren't free-spirited enactments of the struggle of good against evil, and they're not really games, either. They're attempts to follow their brains as far as they can take them. Other beings--the animals who are their chosen medium, their hapless mother, the angry townsfolk and mocking bullies--factor in only as means rather than ends. Even exploration itself is represented as a frightening loss of control by its most prominent exponent here, Edmund's sleepwalking. There seems to be no escape from the power structure of oppressor and oppressed.
The one exception to that rule is for those with whom they can form a sexual connection--but even that will only be allowed to take them so far. Visually, Rickheit tips his hand after the book's first big sex scene. It's weird, hot stuff as always from Rickheit, rooted in memorable details that serve to knock you off balance and make you vulnerable like the characters themselves. But in the middle of the act we cut to a stunning two-page spread, silent, no people present--simply incredibly byzantine images of the Torpor family home, utterly cluttered with the detritus of their inventions. Pipes and chains and ropes and stairs and beams and wires crisscross the panels, creating along with the gutters a dense thicket of tangents and congruences. The eye is led everywhere and nowhere all at once. The message is clear: Sex offers no escape. And like art, it can, and likely will, destroy and degrade and subjugate. When life and love, of a sort, finally do reassert themselves at the book's end, it's horrifying and drawn in a fashion that makes it look less like a natural thing and more like a terrible apparition, or a special effect.
It's strange, but of all the dizzying details Rickheit deploys in The Squirrel Machine, the one that stood out the most to me came early on in the book: A distant water tower topped not with the usual tank, but with what looks like a giant version of the old-fashioned, grated helmets divers once wore. It sits atop a tower and beside a train trestle that are both as realistic as you please, but there it is, a mute monument to illogic. In Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum, Amadeus Arkham recalls his fateful initiation into his mad mother's "other world":
A world of fathomless signs and portents. Of magic and terror. And mysterious symbols.
This has long been the world Rickheit has chronicled. The allure in both cases is that these portents can be scryed, these symbols can be decoded, this world can be mapped. But it's only in reading this book--a painstaking chronicle of the lack of solace provided by art to the powerless--and thinking back on the diver's-helmet tower that I realized that in our darkest moments, it's easy to see that world as our world too--only the symbols can't be read. When exploration is punished, when everything we see feels like something we oughtn't, when theoretically life-affirming forces are either nipped in the bud or exposed as brutal frauds, doesn't it all seem as maddeningly inscrutable as a giant diver's helmet on top of a water tower? That there's some reason for it all, something lurking beneath the surface, something we will never, ever get to?” - Sean T. Collins

“Hans Rickheit cannot be introduced without an introduction to the ‘underbrain’. The underbrain writes the preface for The Squirrel Machine and has made other appearances throughout Rickheit’s career. I, too, have an underbrain but I call mine my ‘inner bunny’.
For all intents and purposes, the underbrain/inner bunny idea is the entity that resolves all issues regardless of the rules. It’s “through the looking glass”. It’s your brain on open. All day long our lives are generally run through the mill, contained in boxes, stifled by morals. The underbrain sets you free. When Rickheit arts, he lets his underbrain free (or perhaps his underbrain frees him, hmmm).
The Squirrel Machine should be called nothing less than a masterpiece: a true culmination and maturation of illustrative style and story. The atmosphere portrayed in black and white is meticulous and unsettling. Even the banal moments of the story have depth and direction. The underbrain has seen fit to render this machine with reverberation.
The Squirrel Machine is a dream: a dream that culminates all of your ideas (the good, the bad and the ones you should have kept to yourself) and threads them through the loops and whirls of cogs and bolts to end up in the eye of a needle. This is a dream with that moment of falling and realizing you are at the bottom of the rabbit hole. This is a dream that though you try and wake so that the inevitable does not happen in the next second, you can’t and it does. It’s impossible to take your eyes off the next horrifying moment for fear that you will end up in the dark.
Rickheit’s history will only amaze you more; as you can see his art and themes bloom into this lovely and blasphemous affair. He makes available online an earlier version of this story that does not nearly come close to the genius depicted here. His other works in his series Chrome Fetus and graphic novels Kill Kill Kill and Chloe were intriguing but didn’t yet have the attention to detail in art or plot as that of The Squirrel Machine.
It’s music that carries this story forth. Music winds its way down off rooftops from unexpected sources. Music can not only soothe a savage beast but be drawn out of domestic beasts with the right tools and know-how. Edward Torpor and his brother, William are the conductors in a love story. As brothers can do, they hide their predilections from their mother and as they get older, from each other. This hiding is the key. The more you hide something the more illicit it becomes. The more illicit something becomes, the more you have to hide it. They are in secrecy together regarding ‘the squirrel machine’ and because of this they sabotage not only their own relationships but each others as well. Their socializations become distorted. Edward wears goggles because they shield him from reality. They separate him from his own personal responsibility for his actions. His somnambulism is either the cause or the result of his off-kilter mental health. The quiet yet willful William just prefers not to know about responsibility and follows Edward blindly.
Their sexually repressed artist mother, Emma the pig-lady, the curious Morgen, and the giggle-goggle girl unknowingly try and stop ‘the squirrel machine’. When they can’t they are either then included in the machinations or become conspirators and compelling forces. The female presence upsets the hum and whir of this mechanical composition. The brotherhood is desperate but unwavering in loyalty, down to the last orchestration.
The squirrel machine itself is a metaphor for life, albeit a bizarre and surreal life. All the escapes we build into our lives, the regurgitation of information and experience, our dreams and fears – the melodies of these tiny animal lives we lead. We attach the correct nozzles, crank the wheel and hope that something comes of something. It’s the fuel we pay for, with our sacrifices and with our lives to keep the machine running. Hopefully in the end, unlike the Torpor brothers, we find that we run the machine and that the machine does not run us.
Rickheit creates and destroys the squirrel machine with an attention to detail that borders on fanatical. If Rube Goldberg had a ménage a trois with a taxidermist and a Luddite at the World’s Fair in 1851, the offspring might look like the squirrel machine. With that said I, personally, hope to see much more from Hans Rickheit and his underbrain. My inner bunny awaits.” - R.M Rollson

“Occasionally, there are works of art or literature that defy simple classification. The brain breaks upon them like waves and they give up different secrets with each tide but never all the secrets and never all at once. These creations challenge as much as they entertain and ask for obsession as toll on the road to understanding.
The Squirrel Machine by Hans Rickheit is just such an enigma. At face value, it is the tale of two brothers, Edmund, the elder, and William. They live in a small New England town at approximately the turn of the 20th century, and the village’s desperate normalcy acts as backdrop for the boys’ increasingly strange explorations. The Torpor brothers are creators, Edmund an inventor and William a musician who plays bizarre instruments of his brother’s design. There are organs created from organs, music that emanates from pigs’ heads and cow carcasses, and an attempt at a recital on the “Bovine Resonator” results in a riot. Misunderstood by the town’s inhabitants and desperate to escape the attentions of their widowed mother (whose principle hobby seems to be painting stylized pornography), the two brothers eventually discover and retreat to a labyrinthine complex hidden beneath their home.
Plot is a nebulous concept here. How much of the story is metaphor, how much literal, and what part hallucination, all remain unclear and seem to shift during and between readings. The tale here lies in the telling. It is the characters’ journeys, the enigmas that they encounter and create, that ultimately compel the reader onward to the unknown, the uncomfortable, and the unclear.
The art is fantastic in many senses of the word. It is clean yet complex, always intricate but never overwhelming. Mechanical and organic forms are interwoven in complex creations. Rickheit’s vision is consistently compelling. Strange clockwork creations are fused with biology and windup toys are wedded to dissection samples. This is biotech steampunk where forms seem to whirr, click, and ooze right off the page.
The Squirrel Machine is ultimately an exploration of the mind. It delves into the imagination, unearthing fear, sex, repression, and finally, if not redemption, then reconstitution. Surreal, gorgeous, and both satisfying and confounding, The Squirrel Machine is a hypnotic, occasionally repulsive, always entertaining, and wildly creative graphic novel. It does not invite rereading so much as demands it, and each encounter reveals new and different details and interpretations. This book is a wonderful mystery, a basket of questions, a wealth of enigmas, and it looks utterly arresting every step of the way.” - Christian Zabriskie

"Some comics (along with works in other mediums, of course) are near-impossible to describe, or even understand, really. Or maybe that's just an easy way out: "I don't get it, so I'll just say it's too weird to understand!" Hans Rickheit's The Squirrel Machine seems to lean in that direction, but as strange as it is, it's interesting and seemingly substantial enough to make examination worthwhile, even if a final summation will probably come up lacking. The story, such as it is, involves two brothers who pursue weird experiments with technology and organic objects, mostly animal corpses, although to what end, or even what result, is mostly left up to readers to discern. One could accuse it of being willfully obscure and an excuse to present an array of grotesquerie without much in the way of explanation, but there's more to it than that, and while a final answer is difficult to discern, it's a book that compels re-reading and attempts at interpretation.
One thing Rickheit does here to make the work so compelling is to present everything in a realistic style, full of minute, exhaustive detail:
His settings seem fully realized, packed with grittiness and dirt, decay and collapse. The people move through it believably, fitting into what seems like a normal Victorian-era town on first glance, until more and more strange imagery is floated before our eyes and we get creeped out at the entire thing. The two brothers, Edmund and William, don't present very good reader-identification figures, mostly approaching their world inexpressively, committing weird acts without much of a show of emotion at all. But that in itself is a bit of a damper for all the weirdness; if they go about their actions without any indication that it is extraordinary, then one almost thinks of it as normal, to some extent. But their creations are so inhumanly inexplicable, with intricate machinery (clockwork gears, pipes, tubes, tanks, light bulbs, and so on) connecting to bloated carcasses, aquariums full of dead things, or cages enclosing skeletal fauna. And their laboratories themselves become increasingly impossible, cavernous rooms and tunnels whose walls are bursting with arcane mechanisms that stretch below their house that seem to connect to exits all over the town:
There's also a semi-feral young woman who raises pigs, a town populace increasingly hostile to the boys' creations, a mother who disapproves of their actions but can't seem to bring herself to do anything about it, and another young woman who takes up with Edmund without much of a reason outside of animalistic attraction. And that's not even getting into the odd visions that periodically appear, the young girl who haunts the caverns, the rampant vaginal imagery, and the strange creatures that present themselves:
One could come up with any number of explanations for the imagery here, from the encroachment of technology on the 20th century and the perversions of nature that followed, to the awakening of sexuality in the adolescent and the fascination with organic processes like reproduction, birth, and death that can dwell in the mind. Or maybe it's all a trip into Rickheit's subconscious, a slaved-over jaunt through the nightmares that haunt his waking mind. Whatever the case, it's a compelling, fascinating journey through an often creepy and always striking world, one that's regularly quite hilarious, as when Edmund, having a sexual tryst with a young woman who willfully accompanied him back to his mad scientist's lair, turns a spigot to release hundreds of snails upon their contorting, commingling bodies. What can one make of that sort of thing? You might be able to attempt an interpretation, one that will be just as valid as any, but it's just as legitimate to go along for the ride and see where Rickheit takes you. It won't be where you expect, that's for sure.” - Matthew J. Brady
“Hans Rickheit has been making mini-comics for as long as he can remember, right up to the point he won the Xeric Grant in 2001. The graphic novel that resulted was “Chloe.” His new book, released by Fantagraphics, is called “The Squirrel Machine.”
With an art style and period preoccupation very reminiscent of Rick Geary — just with a lot more psychedelics involved — Massachusetts native Rickheit spins a creepy little drama in the new work.The story follows inventive 19th Century brothers whose skill takes them to the edges of sanity as they fashion sickening and absurd musical instruments. Faced with the ire of their community and dysfunctional relationships with their mother and other women, the brother’s plunge into madness order to achieve obsessive heights.

You’re very preoccupied with earlier century stuff, science and pseudo science, New England, antiquated technology.
- I think a lot of the antiquity and so forth — objects, places, and people from that time period in New England …. kind of grabbed my imagination. I find them visually more interesting than modern trappings, modern buildings. And they’re more fun to draw, because they’re just so ornate. There’s a lot of baroque detail to draw on. And there’s conveniently a lot of photographs of New England from that time period that I was able to work with — which is also a lot of fun. It’s an interesting way to do that and I thought it would be an interesting setting for some strange stories.
What about the musical side to it? Like the pig organ?
- The pig organ is an idea spurred on by a friend who makes art work and multi media installations, but sometimes his work dabbles in the grotesque and uses actual animal carcasses. He was telling me how when he uses a pig carcass and he moves it around, it still makes noises. Even though it’s a dead husk of meat, it’s still grunting and squealing every time you move it around because there’s still oxygen inside that’s released. I thought, ‘Gee, if you had the inclination, you could build an instrument out of that.’ I’ve got to stress at this point that I do not endorse cruelty to animals. If I had the strength of will, I would be a vegetarian. I do eat meat, but if I had a little more discipline, I wouldn’t. I think it’s kind of important that people know that.
It’s odd, though, because… well, at the end with the human horn system thingie…
- Sometimes I’m not quite sure why I’m drawing what I’m drawing at the time. Retroactively I view it as we use animal parts all the time for everything. It’s like the old farmhand who would say, ‘We used every part of a cow.’ It seems like, yes, if we had the means, somebody probably would use animals to make musical instruments out of. And then I started to think about transposing that on people — people using other people for those kinds of things, like the hideousness of what happened in the Holocaust and so forth. Maybe subconsciously, that was the theme I was playing out, I don’t know. I believe that those sort of things are open for interpretation by the reader, which is ultimately what the book is about — it’s a series of events that are open to interpretation.
What you were saying about using every part of the animal in terms of turn of the century scientists, it makes me think of forbidden knowledge and Frankenstein and all that kind of stuff - but also we do go places that we just don’t talk about - vegetarianism, meat eaters don’t think about where their meat comes from)
- I do think there’s a lot about the idea of probing into places and seeing things we’re not supposed to see. That’s definitely a big theme of the book — at least to me it is — the idea of opening cupboard doors in houses that you are trespassing in and seeing things that you were not meant to see. The idea is that the two characters in the book find what I call the Infinite Basement. It’s the idea that somewhere under the catacombs of the earth, there’s a mythic mass of structure that nobody really should have access to, but these boys have found it and they’re probing around where they don’t belong. I thought that would be a fun thing to explore in a book. It gets dark and takes them weird places where they just shouldn’t be. I like the idea that the reader is seeing things that maybe the reader would feel like they were seeing something they shouldn’t be seeing.
There’s something very H.P .Lovecraft about the basic theme.
- I actually haven’t read any H.P. Lovecraft. I got a collection of short stories and dipped into it, but I can’t seem to actually seem to concentrate and read it.
Who has influenced your work?
- Favorite authors - Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, playwrights like Ionesco and Alfred Jarry. Another favorite writer is Bruno Schulz.
I’s interesting because you’re naming novelists and playwrights, but you’re treading the same territory visually - no descriptions required.
- I’m a terrible writer. I’m not particularly articulate. I find that if I have an idea, it’s better for me to draw it. I think part of these is that these are movies that I want to make, but there’s no way I’d ever get the budget to build any of this stuff.
A lot of those ideas, they wouldn’t work if I tried to describe them. Any of those things that you see in the book, if I tried to write it down, nobody would come up with the same images I had in mind. It’s the beauty of comic book storytelling — you can be more direct, more specific, especially when you’re dealing with such odd subject matter.
No concern for substandard effects, performances, or the other variables of film.
- What’s weird about a movie is that people look at movies and they expect you to trick them a little more. If you look at an old movie where it’s clearly a Hollywood studio and somebody’s standing in Egypt, the person sitting at home watching it on their video screen is going to think to themselves, ‘That’s not Egypt, that’s a Hollywood studio!” whereas in a comic book, they’re not going to look at a drawing and say “That’s not Egypt!” because it’s just accepted because it’s part of the story — they’re reading a comic book. The willing suspension of disbelief there is actually stronger and I can get away with more.
The reader adds a little bit, like any work of art, whereas movies can be passive experiences.
- It’s definitely not a passive book. It requests — gently and politely requests — the reader to come half-way and bring themselves to the story. The story is deliberately enigmatic and the book is deliberately a little bit difficult in that I want the readers to work and think about what they’re looking at and come up with their own conclusions, because whatever the reader comes up with will be much more interesting than what I give them.
I find it very rewarding when someone comes up and explains parts of the book to me, and they have ideas that I never would have come up with on my own. Just the other day, a friend of mind explained the ending to me and it was a perfect, concise interpretation. I just could not argue with it, and it had absolutely nothing to do with what I thought the story was about. That was exactly what it’s all about.
It’s like being at a shrink — your readers are interpreting your thoughts for you. The book is ripe for that.
- I think the book is designed to drive other people mad and retain my own sanity.” – Interview with John Seven

Intrview at The Daily Cross Hatch

Excerpts

Lindsay Hunter - An exploration not of the human heart but of the spine; mixing sex, violence and love into a harrowing, head-spinning read

Lindsay Hunter, Daddy's, Featherproof, 2010.

"You ever fed yourself something bad? Like a candied rattlesnake, or a couple fingers of antifreeze? Nope? You seen what it done to other people? Like while they’re flopping around on the floor you’re thinking about how they’re fighting to live. Like while they’re dying they never looked so alive? That’s what Daddy’s is like… Lindsay Hunter is as sweet as pie, but she’s got one mean, dirty mouth… Lindsay Hunter scares people. Over the course of a young career as one of the most revered short-short fiction writers, and one of the most sought-after public readers, Hunter has freaked out audiences and readers with gorgeous stories about ugly truths. Founder of the acclaimed Quickies! Reading Series, at the Innertown Pub, she’s arguably the most talked-about writer in Chicago without even having a book on the shelves yet.
Featherproof is honored to change all that, with the release of Daddy’s. In Daddy’s, Hunter tells stories like no one else in ways no one else can: A woman struggles to survive her boyfriend’s terror preparations. A wife finds the key to her sex life lies in her dog’s electric collar. A man is haunted by a dream, recalling a long-forgotten truth. This is the stuff of Gaitskill and Homes, the kind of stories played out in backyards and basements, where the neighbors can’t see. A rising star of a literary form whose popularity has recently exploded online. Hunter writes bold, beautiful stories that excise the sentimental from heartache. In this collection of slim southern gothics, she offers an exploration not of the human heart but of the spine; mixing sex, violence and love into a harrowing, head-spinning read.
The stories are visually imagined as the sort of dirty hooks you might find in the bottom of an old tackle box. The book opens sideways, as a tackle box would, revealing page after page of forgotten horrors rotting amongst the stories themselves. It’s a visual feast meant to lure the unwary.“ - Linas Jasikevicius

“Each tiny, diamond story—precise, comic, poised at the edge of surreal—contains one brutal life force tearing itself off the page. You can hold Daddy’s in your hands and feel it breathing.” —Deb Olin Unferth

“In Daddy’s, babies mean blood and nipples are like “lit match heads.” Lindsay Hunter transgresses where others fear to tread.” —Terese Svoboda

“Lindsay Hunter won’t be caught lie-telling in the name of nice. The miniature stories in Daddy’s are fierce and unapologetic. When the We’s she voices say the axblade was bloody with dirt, what they mean is the neighbor’s swingset creaked and moaned next door and we heard 
a child’s voice say Never ever. When I’m looking again for my next undoing, I’ll crack open Daddy’s, and get the true news they tell us we’d be better off not hearing.” 
 —Kyle Minor

“If Help is the alpha of Southern Lit, Daddy's is the omega. A brilliant little book of 24 little stories, mostly funny, sexy, and low rent. Kinky enough to impress your weirdest friends and your mother too.” —Paul at Prairie Lights Bookstore

“I didn’t meet Lindsay Hunter; so much as her fiction ran me over. ” —Three Guys One Book

"Lindsay Hunter makes drunk teenagers dry-humping in Cheeto dust compelling literary fare. Daddy's, her debut collection of short shorts, follows a trove of confused young people through frightening parking lots and crappy apartments. Those who miss explicit sex in contemporary literature, take heart: Hunter writes about it, and frequently.
"The Fence" concerns a woman who masturbates compulsively with an electric dog collar; "Sex Armageddon" offers a horny homeless couple, M&M's, and a Bic lighter. Hunter's approach to sex channels both Mary Gaitskill and John Waters: it's desperate, depraved, and thrillingly transgressive.
I'd be remiss not to mention Daddy's sexy packaging. The book resembles a tackle box: bound at the top and illustrated throughout with corroded-looking fishing-themed photographs. Neat!" - Eugenia Williamson

„Writing in an Internet journal—one wherein, last month, I considered the possibilities of new literature for the still-new medium, rich with potential, of the Internet—it is nice to have an opportunity to fervently defend the book as artifact, a physical thing with a weight and a smell and a presence—both material and beyond material, an aura—in a given room. In an age of e-books and digital readers, Lindsay Hunter’s debut story collection, Daddy’s, exemplifies one strong future for print literature, combining as it does the most sparklingly polished aspects of performance with the most creative and enticing aspects of book-as-object. There is a fetishistic appreciation for the possibilities of print in this beautifully produced little collection from the Chicago press featherproof. The book looks, from the outside, like a miniature tackle box and opens to reveal exquisite short pieces presented in sections with moody monochrome photographs embedded alongside the text.
Let me be clear: You should buy a copy of Daddy’s immediately and spend some time in its world…
“I wrote my sister this note about all the things I hate,” one narrator announces. “Gorgons, it said. And how people got nutville any time the moon throws a shape. Nasty ass Nilla Wafers. The smell of crotch, which only seems to come wafting out from my sister’s room.” The mastery of language here, the warped vernacular, along the scatological humor and, perhaps above all, a kind of innocence half-masked by precocity and rage—these are the hallmarks of Hunter’s art. And this art has surely been sharpened by the demands of performance; the inessential has been excised, the idiosyncrasies of voice and the music of phrasing have been heightened. There is also an expert sense of timing, comic or otherwise, and of tone. “The only other customer in the restaurant got up,” one story says, “stomping his feet like his legs had been asleep,” which phrase says more about the moment than many writers could convey with a full half page. In another story, this observation of presence in the midst of emptiness is rendered in the voice of a mother who can say, of one lost child, “I knew Letitia was dead inside me for days before she was born, but I let her stay inside. That was one of the happiest times in my life, me and the baby sharing a death.”
The characters in Daddy’s do not lead enviable lives. In short, they have problems, but they live amidst such mental and material clutter that even the simplest problem becomes extravagantly elaborate. Even seemingly empty space reads like a microcosm of decay, desire, and ruin. “Tiny shrines of catshit and dryer lint and wrappers for condoms candy beer-bottles toilet paper lipstick-tubes and various electronics,” cover one section of one surface in this book. The eerie accompanying photographs likewise collect physical detritus and, by isolating individual pieces—the grub-like melted cigarette lighter, for instance—offer these things up in further “tiny shrines,” banality acquiring an ambiguous significance. Things are everywhere here, and they can, quick as a drop, acquire too much meaning. Consider the woman who says, of her lover’s snacking, “The bit of M&M is gone from his lip and I wonder if it’s somewhere in my pubic hair.” Or the man, who, remembering his wife, thinks how she “often had lipstick in her teeth, how it made her look like she’d just bitten into something alive, something that bled.” Objects creep in and define our troubles just as objects offer us our only, brief, escapes:
'In the bathroom he stared at himself in the mirror. He imagined that his body was an elaborate empty coffin. Here lies Nothing. Here lies No One. He could smell the bagel burning in the toaster, heard his girlfriend hiss Shit. He masturbated with her mint green loofah and appletini body wash, crouching over the toilet so that when he came there’d be nothing to clean up, no trace of anything ever happening.'
Hunter’s world is riddled with invisible fences and full of casual, passing considerations of the possibility of suicide. People innovate, sexually, in preposterous and utterly believable, heartbreaking ways. But people also love, strangely enough, whether this love is between a mother and her freak baby smearing fistfuls of feces into the sheets or between, as it often is, siblings, a relationship Hunter treats as always at once complexly tangled yet also simple and dependable as a blade.
I haven’t yet mentioned that the book is dedicated to the Florida town where Hunter grew up, and dedicated, to be more precise, to the place in those precise years. As much as there is a savor of southern gothic in these tales, there is an equal pulse of nostalgia just beneath the surface. People get abused in these stories, taken advantage of, hospitalized. People seem to give up, or remain trapped in circumstances, or relish memories of temporarily shared death. Yet the book itself is characterized by a buoyancy, a hope, even in the face of repeated narrative disappointments. This hope is in the writing, carried by the rhythm and at times tremendous strength of it, by the singularity of the images and the voices. Thus, while reader won’t like want to switch lives with any of the sad denizens of Daddy’s, they will return again and again to scenes here, because in Hunter’s hands even scenes of failure convey a crackle of possibility, and what, to a given character, may well be the end of the line, becomes, for the reader, an entrance into awe and wonder.
'He kept driving. Veered toward the Gulf and rented a room a block from the beach. Kept his shoes on as he waded into the water for fear of jellyfish. It felt natural to be pulled by the tide, to be tempted to let it take him, and then for the tide to finally let go and push the other way. He stood like that for some time, dipping in his fingertips at one point and tasting the salt. He saw a shark’s fin on the horizon and it wasn’t until later that he realized it was probably just a sailboat.“ - Spencer Dew

"Lindsay Hunter's Daddy's is a powerful debut collection of short fiction, filled with raw, transgressive stories, emotionally empty characters, and some really freaky sex. It's not for the faint of heart, so consider yourself warned -- or intrigued!
First, let's talk about the sex. There's a lot of it. Whether it's strange or brutal or inexplicably involves Fritos and a Bic pen, sex functions mostly as a way for Hunter's otherwise numb characters to induce a feeling, any feeling -- be it pleasure, pain, or a (false) sense of fulfillment or connection. The sex is simultaneously erotic, repugnant, and sad, and rendered in an assured writing style that runs the gamut from low-down to lofty.
In "The Fence," the female narrator, an unnamed stay-at-home wife, masturbates using the electric fence that has been newly installed for the dog. She holds the dog collar to herself and delivers a jolt that is "Like a million ants biting. Like teeth. Like the G-spot exists. Like a tiny knife, a precise pinch. Like fireworks." The narrator's dense but adoring husband doesn't know about her habit, but he intuits her increased sexual energy, interpreting it as a sign of their mutual marital satisfaction. "God, I love you. I really do. I'm positively joyful," he says. But she doesn't share his feelings. Instead, she says, "I try and think of my husband when I go to the fence, but he becomes a distraction, and sometimes when I conjure him up I can't go through with it, and my trip is ruined." Like many of the stories in this collection, "The Fence" explodes the false promise that sex equals intimacy.
Another one of my favorites is "Loofah," about a man of undetermined sexual orientation who wakes up from a dream that reminds him of a humiliating attempt at gay sex, and ends up masturbating with his girlfriend's loofah and appletini-scented body wash, "crouching over the toilet so that when he came there'd be nothing to clean up, no trace of anything ever happening." Here, Hunter's incorporation of this solo sex works perfectly to showcase her character's loneliness, self-loathing, and a discomfort regarding his homosexual desire that is so profound, he needs to literally rub it out of his system.
As you may have guessed, this book contains fairly shocking material, which brings me to my one big complaint: there's so much shocking material, it eventually ceases to shock (a la the law of diminishing returns). And when it ceases to shock, it calls attention to itself as gimmicky, practically shouting off the page: "Yoo-hoo, I'm trying to shock you!" For instance, "Kid" is a nasty, brutish story about a 15-year-old who goes to 7-Eleven to buy dinner and ends up delivering a baby. The action of the story is interspersed all the while with the Kid's inner monologue, which goes a little something like this: "Vagina VAGINA menstrual pussy fucky times" and "I put my hand inside a pregnant lady's giner, I'm a golldang hero." While I like subversive writing and don't mind graphic sexual language, I had to look hard to see "Kid" as anything other than shocking for the sake of shocking. Sure, the story opens with the Kid reading his religious devotional, which could be taken as a nice bit of commentary on the potentially rotten core of an outwardly religious person... but, honestly, I left the story thinking his dad's hands smell like balls??
Overall, I had a visceral and mixed reaction to Daddy's. Hunter's prose is fantastic; it's poetic and filled with vividly rendered physicality. And though some stories made me cringe, others hooked me immediately and impressed me with their spot-on displays of deep emptiness. I can't give this collection an unequivocal thumbs up, but it's definitely worth reading. Just don't do what I did, which was to take this book to a coffee shop with the intention of reading for a couple hours. It's not that kind of book. I recommend that you pick it up, read a few stories, and put it down if or when you start to get numb. When you pick it up later, with fresh eyes, you'll be newly wowed." - Sheila Ashdown

"Lindsay, how annoyed is your father that you named your book Daddy’s?
- Well, smartypants, the truth is that Daddy’s isn’t named after or about my dad, nor is it homage to him; however this didn’t stop him from informing me that I needed to make sure to tell everyone that he’s “the one true Daddy.” So I think he’s secretly titillated, maybe even proud, at the thought of Daddy’s being a thinly veiled tell-all about my childhood or my relationship with him. He hasn’t read the book; once he does he may regret that statement, after he stops barf-weeping that is.
Why the f did you name it Daddy’s then?
- From the beginning, featherproof and I were looking at the book as an object, a commodity, and we were really concerned with packaging—we wanted the book to be about more than just the stories, like the book’s packaging could tell a story just as much as the stories inside it. And there are a number of weird fathers in the book, and Zach Dodson and I were kind of spitballing titles back and forth, and one of us said “Daddies?” and then we looked at each other and said No, Daddy’s; that possessive apostrophe did a lot of work—it claimed and announced and offered, all at once.
So then the book is Daddy’s tackle box?
- Right. And that tackle box is full up with Daddy’s stuff—there are hooks and there are “hooks,” know what I’m saying?
I’m kind of embarrassed for you. Nonetheless, what kinds of “hooks” can readers expect to encounter in Daddy’s?
- I think there’s something for everyone. You like stories about giant jealous babies? Ghost dogs in the desert? Anorexic bullies? Masturbation? Competitive eating? Serial killers? Sex and loneliness? If so this is the book for you.
I hear you’re working on a novel now. I also hear you’re no good with plot. That’s probably not going to end well, right?
- I have my fears. I also kind of don’t want to worry about all that and just write something that is fun and exciting for me, because I think that excitement is transferred to and shared by readers. But yeah, I was informed by a professor at one point that I’m good at imagery but terrible with plot, and I could hear the bells of doom clanging out of her throat, but over the years I’ve learned that you can just do whatever you want and everything ends up fine.
Is that why you write, then? Because it’s the space in which you can do whatever you want?
- Yes. It’s where, if I’m successful at the story or paragraph or sentence or word level, I can surprise and scare myself.
Speaking of being scared, your reading voice is a lot different than your actual voice. Can you explain what that is all about?
- Man, I don’t really know, other than the voice I read in seems right for the story at hand. I think a large part of it is that I want people to listen, I want them to feel, and the only way I’m going to achieve that is to become the story while I’m reading it.
That sounds…are you fondling your collection of crystals right now?
- I don’t have a collection of crystals.
Right. I knew that. So is the voice that you read in the same voice that you write in?
- I think it’s an approximation maybe. A lot of my stories start with a first line I’ve been carrying around for a while, and that line dictates the voice and the character and the atmosphere and the cadence. I can try to get there when I’m reading to an audience, but it’s impossible to do that all the way. I keep coming back to this idea of cadence—it’s important, I think.
Didn’t you want to name your daughter Cadence?
- No, I wanted to name her Carnation, after the Crayola crayon named Carnation Pink. I was also 7 years old at the time.
That’s way funnier. So, what inspires you, even if it’s an inspiration to rat your hair? In other words, what kind of shit are you into, even if that shit doesn’t affect your writing at all?
- I think everything affects my writing in some way or another. But here goes: I have a shameful love for murder/crime shows like Wicked Attraction and 48 Hours Mystery. Keith Morrison is my spirit animal. I love scary movies and violent books. The Drive-by Truckers (the song The Deeper In, wow), Cap’n Jazz. Football. Edward Gorey. Dogs, all of them. The circus. Freshly baked cookies. Mexican food. Folk art. Rap and metal and country music. Putting Rs in words (“sark my dark”). Lately, TV theme songs. And I can’t tear my eyes from the sky.
I feel 13% closer to you now. Okay, final question: if George Lucas were to option one of your stories for his new all-hologram movie studio, which story would you want it to be?
- Definitely “That Baby.” There’s a lot of material there that I feel confident George Lucas could interpret in really exciting ways. For one, the film adaptation is just screaming for lasers and an alien jug band. And I mean, a 4D rendering of Levis, the baby in that story, complete with baby boner and beshitted diaper, would really show all those idiots in high school who called me a freak, right?" - Lindsay Huntr's self-interview at The Nervous Breakdown


Lindsay Hunter: “That Baby”

Lindsay Hunter: “Out There” & “This One”

Lindsay Hunter, Don't Kiss Me: Stories, FSG Originals, 2013.

An explosive story collection from a bold, blistering new voice
With broken language, deep vernacular, unexpectedly fierce empathy, and a pace that’ll break your granny’s neck, Lindsay Hunter lures, cajoles, and wrenches readers into the wild world of Don’t Kiss Me.
     Here you’ll meet Peggy Paula, who works the late shift at Perkin’s and envies the popular girls who come in to eat french fries and brag about how far they let the boys get with them. You’ll meet a woman in her mid-thirties pining for her mean-spirited, abusive boyfriend, Del, a nine-year-old who is in no way her actual boyfriend. And just try to resist the noir story of a reluctant, Afrin-addled detective. 
     Self-loathing, self-loving, and otherwise trapped by their own dumb selves, these characters make one cringe-worthy mistake after another. But for each bone-headed move, Hunter delivers a surprising moment that chokes you up as you peer into what seemed like deep emptiness and discover a profound longing for human understanding. It’s the collision of these moments that make this a powerful, alive book.
     The stories of Don’t Kiss Me are united by Hunter’s singular voice and unflinching eye. By turns crass and tender, heartbreaking and devastatingly funny, her stories expose a world full of characters seemingly driven by desperation, but in the end, they’re the ones who get the last laugh. Hunter is at the forefront of the boldest, most provocative writers working now.

“The cover alone is great, but what’s inside will make you laugh and scream and cringe and cry—in the best of ways, of course.” —Jen Doll

“Hunter’s magical prose is the sort of thing that might happen if George Saunders and Gertrude Stein co-edited Raymond Carver. The stories vary wildly in pace and procedure, but each has its own visceral language that goes straight to the gut.” —Ashley Baker

“Don’t Kiss Me, Hunter’s second short story collection, is a bold, haunting, and beautiful observation of lives lived outside the scope of the mainstream . . . Hunter near-effortlessly captures the hopes, fears, realizations, regrets, and desires of the uglier, more taboo, and misunderstood side of humanity. Though their worlds may be sordid, Hunter manages to infuse her misfits with incredible amounts of empathy and humor. Instead of repulsed, we often find ourselves rooting from the sidelines. And it’s hard not to voraciously ingest all 26 stories in Don’t Kiss Me, given their breakneck pace, raw emotion, and Hunter’s own propensity for language that pops but never fizzles . . . [Don’t Kiss Me] is transgressive without being navel-gazing, confrontational without being aggressive. But above all, it contains a whole lot of Hunter’s bloody, beating heart.” —Rebecca Rubenstein

 “These 26 stories, deeply internalized in neurotic lyricism, are hilarious and fully realized portraits of the disavowed . . . And in the uproarious title story, a woman obsesses over a female coworker she envies and despises. Miranda July and George Saunders come to mind, but Hunter’s crass yet tender characters are unprecedented, relating fart jokes and impossible sentiment in stylized prose that mirrors their threadbare souls and ineffectual optimism.”—Jonathan Fullmer

“Overall these stories land with a wet slap—messy and confrontational. They demand your horrified attention, and they reward it with exaggerated and irresistible humanity.” —Publishers Weekly
“Lindsay Hunter is electrifying at the word level, sentence level, line level, idea level. Say hello to your new favorite.” —Amelia Gray
“Lindsay Hunter may be the most daring writer of any generation. Like animals on an undiscovered island, her stories are never-before-seen species to be gazed at with wonder, reverence, and no small amount of terror. In this collection of brilliant, deviant innovations, Hunter’s scorching comical voice will hold you tightly with a raunchy tenderness as you laugh and cry together through every imaginable apocalypse. Prepare to have your eyebrows singed, to get insanely high off the otherworldly fumes of its grotesque and unstoppable perfection.” —Alissa Nutting

“Lindsay Hunter’s prose should be part of a survival kit—her stories will start a fire and burn you. They’re heated, sardonic, fearless, and to the point. She mixes dark humor with everyday life, reminding me of writers like Amy Hempel, Maggie Estep, and A. M. Homes. Regardless of what she writes next, be it a book of poetry, a novel, or sentences carved on a gas station’s bathroom stall or scribbled on a tavern's soggy napkin, I wanna be the first one to read it.” —Frank Bill
“Lindsay Hunter is one hell of a writer who takes risks and leaves it all on the page in the very best ways. She makes the ugly beautiful and the raw elegant. Don’t Kiss Me, tell truths with a fierce, percussive voice that is not only wholly original but so powerful, it steals into your body, your bones.” —Roxane Gay