Jack Skelley is the author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e)), Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love (Far West), Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing (BlazeVOX books), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press) and Monsters (Little Caesar Press).
Room Temperature is the latest film collaboration byDennis Cooper and Zac Farley. It focuses on a family-run, amateur haunted house and was shot on location in Southern California. The film recently screened at San Francisco’s Frameline film festival, and before that at Los Angeles Festival of Movies. It will soon show in Europe. Although the concept of co-directing a film is unusual, the rapport between Cooper and Farley is natural… as evidenced by how they often finish each other’s thoughts in this QA with Jack Skelley. And this reflects in the quietly supernatural vibe of Room Temperature, which is spare and cool, but with deep emotional undercurrents. Jack:Can you describe the division of labor between the two of you? Dennis, one would assume that you’re responsible for the script and Zac is more responsible for directing camera angles, blocking, and those kinds of things. Is that true?Dennis: I’m not completely responsible for the text. I do the vast majority of that work, but everything is in consultation with Zac. He has lots of ideas that I can’t implement textually because I’m not as visually inclined as he is. But we talk about everything. And we’re so in sync about what we want that I trust him. Occasionally, I do question some visual decisions, but on the set, Zac is directing and I’m mostly there working with the actors and conferring with Zac. But as it’s being written, I’m basically the guy at the computer.Zac: The films are complete collaborations. We decide what we want to do and how to do it together. Neither Dennis nor I are classically trained filmmakers, so I guess neither one of us really knows how other directors make their films, but our collaborations feel both more complex and fluid than one does words and the other makes images. But yes, Dennis is a writer, a really great one, so I know better than to mess with his intuitions on that front. But we make all the decisions together. We do the casting together, for example.Dennis: And decisions about choosing locations are all completely mutual. But he is stronger in that area. So it divides up a little bit, but it’s always a back-and-forth.Jack: How often do these decisions happen on the set, in real time?Dennis: Oh, quite a lot.Zac: The goal on set is to be really attuned and responsive to what’s going on. We plan meticulously ahead of time so that we can feel free to react to a change in circumstances outside our control and to embrace happy accidents. There’s nothing more thrilling than something unexpected happening on set that supersedes our expectations, and to a certain extent we bet on and hope for happy accidents as part of the process. Both Dennis and I are particularly excited with working with the performers. Because we’re working mostly with non-professional actors, we cast people for what they can bring to the projects and welcome their own senses of intuition and insights into their characters. The film is really the result of a collaboration with the cast and crew that participated in bringing it to life. Dennis: When we’re shooting, it’s very common that a line we thought would work isn’t working. So we’ll cut the line or change the words. The same is true with the visuals: Yes, the films are storyboarded. But on set, we’ll realize a scene will be better if we change the POV.Jack: It was very interesting to compare the screenplay with the final product. A lot of dialog was cut. Now, having two directors is fairly unusual, right? Are there any models for this sort of dual relationship?Dennis: Well, there are the Coen brothers, Straub-Huillet, the Wachowskis … It’s not completely unprecedented. There’s never any confusion about that: We know what the other is capable of, and often one of us will back off and let the other person do what they need to do.Jack: Both of you are based in Paris, while Room Temperature was filmed in Southern California. It seems like a lot of effort to pick-up and relocate from your home base to California to do this.Dennis: We just set up camp at my Los Angeles apartment. We have the advantage of knowing a lot of people in Los Angeles. All kinds of friends to lean on. Our casting director Erin Cassidy and our main on-the-ground producer Luka Fisher for example, were based there. Zac: We made our two previous films in France, which was wonderful in that we could finance them in part with public grants. But to be eligible the films have to be shot in majority in the French language. Early on, we tried making Room Temperature in France, but it quickly became clear that this had to be shot in the United States and in English. Home-haunts unfortunately don’t yet exist in France, and while we had always envisioned Permanent Green Light (our previous film) as a French film, we wrote this one in a way where translating it into French would have done real damage. It was a challenge to shoot the film in the United States, but it was absolutely the right thing to do and we got to collaborate with some incredibly talented people. Jack: The collaboration between you is unusual and often feels seamless: The dialog is lean and punctuated by pregnant pauses. So is the visual framing with its own kinds of pauses. There are long, wide shots and slow pans. In this way, the film says more by saying less. Thoughts?Dennis: We have a really strong sense of the rhythm we want the film to have and how that will work. The dialogue is spare, but it has a lot of weight on its shoulders and the visuals are as important as the dialogue. Some of our favorite filmmakers such as James Benning make films with almost no dialogue to provide breathing room. Our films are poetic and formally surprising, but they provide time for the audience to settle-in to the pacing and commune with the characters.Zac: In a way, the rhythm and the pacing act as the glue that allows us to have sometimes wildly divergent tones coexist in the film. In a weird way while the film can feel somewhat slow at times, it’s actually incredibly dense.Dennis: This approach worked well with our Southern California desert location. It’s shot in the middle of nowhere with a family who is very isolated. They don’t have cameras or cell phones or computers, as far as we know. Not even a car. They live in a very closed-off world. So having all that space and silence reinforces the emptiness of the world they live in.Jack: Let’s talk about the differences between writing on the page and screenwriting: Writing on the page depends on the reader to provide some interpretation of the text’s dialog and imagery, while film, being more concrete and visual, presents the image more straightforwardly and the viewer is a less “active” participant in the experience as a work of art. Do you agree with how I pose this?Dennis: Yes, that’s obviously the way I think about writing. The novels don’t create such a solid world that the readers feel like they’re just an observer, right? They participate. And what’s interesting about film is it’s the exact opposite. Because the film is very solid, it does take all the responsibility. We try to open that up, so that the film is obviously a carefully made object, but at the same time it feels very translucent. It’s not so locked down that the audience is casually observing. They have to pay a lot of attention.We just saw the new Wes Anderson film. I love his films, but they are the most extremely fascistically visualized films. There’s no way our films are so completely locked up. But I feel a certain kinship with what he does. We do angle for images and shots that are very highly composed. So it’s weird.Jack: What is the origin of Room Temperature’s setting of a family-made haunted house? Dennis, knowing your obsession with neighborhood haunted houses, it must come from you. You even make Halloween pilgrimages to Southern California to visit many haunted houses.Dennis: Both of us are massive fans of them, and we think of it as an art form. On the surface level it’s just a family having fun and trying to do something cool and make their haunted house better than the neighbors’. But they put so much effort into something that is always a failure on some level… because they don’t have enough funds or because it’s just them and their kids playing with the concept of a haunted house. I love the amateurism of that. All of our films so far have been about people who can’t achieve what they want to achieve. We tried to capture that in this case using the setting of a haunted house whose aspirations are higher than the family’s imaginations and budget can realize.Zac: Yeah. It’s a shared fantasy that the characters have. But it’s also the individual fantasy of each family member. One kid will be really into the acting and theatrical part of it, while another member of the family will be into the architecture and fog machines. In terms of narrative structure, home-haunts are daring and experimental by default. You enter the first room and there’s a pretty classic introduction video explaining the premise of the haunt, but then you go walk into the second room and somebody was obviously just really obsessed with the animatronic ghoul they saw at the Halloween store, so they bought five and decided to operate them out of synch, and it doesn’t really fit with the surface logic of the haunted house, but the conflagration of the two is really generative. The visitor going through this haunted house can project narrative meaning onto something that wasn’t necessarily built to accommodate it, at least not in any literal way, and that creates the kind of openness that we’re seeking to have in our films. Haunted houses are like films in that they use acting, writing, music, architecture... In Room Temperature the house is a setting and a character, but it’s also a kind of analog for the film. Jack: In fact, there’s much discussion among the characters about whether the haunted house is succeeding. One of the first lines in the film is an outside character asking, “What’s wrong with your house!”Dennis: Then he says, “I’m not against it.”Jack This seems like a statement on not just the artistic abilities of the families. It’s an observation that can extend to the father character, who is like the creative director. And there’s definitely something very “wrong” with him. Now, in addition to haunted houses, you two share an obsession with theme parks. Symbolically, thematically, what connects these two art forms?Dennis: In a dark ride, the experience is out of your control. The car is devising your pace and each passenger sees exactly the same thing. Whereas in a haunted house you can hang around or go look at details that intrigue you. It’s not like everybody’s constantly being propelled forward, but there is a unifying quality that makes it a haunted house. You know, the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland in California is not completely dissimilar. In an earlier version of our script there was a point where people got in a little car and experienced a section of the house that way. It was impractical and overly expensive to realize, but we were very excited by that concept.Zac: There used to be a haunted house called Mystic Motel that had a ride-through component. It was created by a 14- or 15-year-old kid who was obviously very ambitious and excited about the mechanics of dark rides. He used one of those electrified shopping carts designed for disabled people to navigate giant grocery stores. He had it follow a track in his basement and built a remote-control system so he could decide when it would stop and go, controlling your rhythm. Dennis: Some of the big cities in Europe, such as London or Amsterdam, have the London Dungeon or the Amsterdam Dungeon. That’s kind of a combo because you walk through it, and it’s obviously much more professional than a family haunted house. For instance, in the Amsterdam Dungeon, at the end you get on a roller coaster that takes you through the final section of experience.Jack: Dennis, you are familiar with Sabrina Tarasoff’s concept for her “Beyond Baroque” walk-through haunted house – in the “Made in L.A. 2020” biennial at the Huntington Museum in Los Angeles. It focused on your writing and mine and others from 1980s Los Angeles. And originally it was to be a dark ride. Sabrina wanted something close to what you were saying, Zac, where you get in a little car that follows a track. And later, she and I wrote a piece for your blog, Dennis, about theme parks where we discuss Disney’s invention of the Omnimover: a shell-like, encased ride vehicle that directs your experience. This is unlike, say, dark rides such as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride where you can look all around. The Omnimover points and targets your vision and experience.Dennis: The Haunted Mansion uses those, right?Jack: Yes. They are named Doom Buggies. Now Disney and other theme parks have more sophisticated versions of this. I don’t know where I’m going with this question: I just want to use the word “Omnimover!”Zac: It’s a really good word.Jack: So, what are your feelings in retrospect about making Room Temperature?Dennis: It was an absolute and utter joy to make. Yes, it was exhausting. Sometimes on the set you were going until 5 o’clock in the morning. And it was often freezing cold. But we’re both very happy with the film. It’s not unlike what we hoped it would be when we wrote it. And the editing was a joy.Zac: Every time Dennis and I start a project, we set the level of ambition to a high point which we may or may not be able to achieve. This was much more ambitious than our previous films. And it was harder to produce for those reasons. But I think we managed to do what we set out to do.Jack: Another exciting yet subdued component of Room Temperature is the music. It is even more spare than the dialog. It appears only in very rare scenes. Who is the composer?Dennis: The music is by Puce Mary. In fact, the only pieces of music in Room Temperature are the sounds of the haunted house, created by Puce Mary, plus one song the character Andre (played by Charlie Nelson Jacobs) sings as part of the action. There is no music in the film other than that one song, the haunted house soundscapes by Puce Mary, and the end credits music.Zac: Dennis and I have been huge fans and admirers of Puce Mary forever. We have seen her perform live several times. She was our first collaborator on this film. She started drafting pieces of music – including the ghost sounds – maybe six years before we shot a single image. The song performed by Andre in the middle of the film is written and composed by Chris Olsen, who plays Paul the janitor. And the end credits music is a piece titled “Angel Shaving (L.A.S.E.R.)”by 7038634357, a really brilliant musician. Dennis: It’s important to our films that we don’t use music unless the characters hear the music as part of the action. That’s why there’s not a lot of music in them. It’s not because we don’t like music. We just believe scores are often manipulative. We are not going to dress-up the experience to make it more dramatic or sad or weird than it actually is for the characters.Jack: This certainly fits the vibe of the film. What’s next? Is there another collaboration in the works?Dennis: We are writing our next film right now. We have a meeting about it tomorrow. Jack: Yeah?Dennis: Yeah, and it’s good!
Madison Murray, My Gaping Masshole (Self-published, 2025)A tart is born: Announcing Madison Murray’s fiction, poems, collages. The collection is replete with references to Boston (especially North Shore, Massachusetts). You know, Dunkin Donuts, clam chowdah, the Red Sox Big Green Monstah, Paul Revere, etc. My Gaping Masshole is one unholy, whole, big-ass jam on the concept. Murray’s lewd charm stains every page. My fave parts are Murray’s stories, with real laff-per-paragraph settings, characters, dialog. Of today’s several new writers who are also sex workers (or sex worker-adjacent), Murray is the raunchiest… and funniest.The geo-specificity reminds me of this essential William Blake riff from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity.” (Italics mine.) Not “genius” in the sense of Einstein (although that fits). But in the sense of the human imagination embodied in every locale. Every writer does this to a degree. I know I never cease the love-hate relationship with the Los Angeles of my mind. Of course, in 2025 we’re deep in tawdry, post-post-post irony mode, so Murray mocks and embodies a debased “mental deity” of Massachusetts with the obsessive affection of a dirty completist. Book vloggersThere’s a world of yackers on YouTube. Most stick to reviewing large-press fiction. But keener vloggers venture into independent presses and niche genres. Here are some trends. Best vloggers: Chanel Chapters (pictured) reviews from Melbourne with access to at least two excellent indie stores (Metropolis Bookshop and World Food Books) and local libraries. Chapters’ open mind, plunging cleavage, and sometimes potty mouth recently incited threats by YouTube to demonetize her! (All part of the global megamedia crackdown, folks.) But this reviewer continues to rock with wit, humor, urban tours and delicious fits. YouTube has not exactified what rules were broken, so WTF else is she supposed to do? Go, Chanel!Ana Wallace Johnson has accrued 68K subscribers not only for reviews (personal takes but I haven’t disagreed yet), but also for travel vids and glimpses of her low-budget/highbrow NYC lifestyle and tastes. What sets Wallace apart is a droll demeanor. Come for the laffs, stay for the books: Wallace’s taste ventures past mass-market narrative toward non-fiction, drama, used bookstores, and forays into independent presses. The Wallace wit includes impromptu raps where she observes her word-choices in the act—self-mocking/self-correcting. Her Sally Rooney review had me howling. Honorable mention: Chris Via on Leaf by Leaf has total cred and writes legit lit crit. Trend Watch: “Weird lit” is a big vlogger term, but notice how often it is equated with horror, a mega genre that occasionally edges into artful lit-fic via voices such as Elle Nash and Charlene Elsby. Also, is Shirley Jackson really “horror”? Vloggers sometimes confuse “weird women lit” with the “sad-girl novel” and straight-up narrative. Like, are Ottessa Moshfegh and Sally Rooney actually “weird”? This adjective is abused! Editor’s advice: Avoid non-descript, general terms: thing, stuff, good, bad, really, something and, yes, weird… unless that is indeed the best word.Emmalea Russo, Vivienne (Skyhorse, 2024) Resonant novel fashions a (fictional) update of (actual) deceased artist Hans Belmer’s long-surviving (fictional) lover Vivienne Volker. Vivienne may or may not have been involved in the long-ago suicide of Belmer’s other (fictional) lover Wilma Lang, who may or may not suggest (actual) writer and artist Unica Zürn. But never mind all that. It’s just intrigue to power the contemporary plot and stylistic gymnastics. These feats include revolving POVs and entire chapters rendered in YouTube comments. Themes include shady shenanigans of the art-world “industry”; the hypocrisies of cancel culture (the author was a prey of same); and cross-generational sex/romance offered nonchalantly. The book may haunt you months after reading if you encounter Belmer and Zürn.Jessamyn Violet, Venice Peach (Maudlin House, 2025)Uh-oh! A TikTok time bomb has burst the Superdoom Portal. A vengeful AI president punishes all citizens, sex bots and media stars. Nothing, it seems, can stop the haywire L.A Hellscape seen by twisted visionary Jessamyn Violet. Inside dope: The author wrote this dystopian funhouse during the first Trump preziduncy. She learned Maudlin House would publish it just as Trump was re-elected last year. This gives the story’s vindictive President TBD 3000 – and all its characters and scenes – the quality of a Cassandra curse. Except that it’s farcically funny. David Trinidad, Hollywood Cemetery (Green Linden, 2025)Heaven’s stars are quasi-immortal, while Hollywood’s are fated to fade. Graciously, Trinidad’s page-sized eulogies grant a couple dozen bit players one last flash-in-the-pan. The actors tell their own stories, but Trinidad’s voice floats above them, an angel wearing shades, bestowing epitaphs, footnotes and the harsh irony of glimmer and glamour doomed in a company town. (Capitalism, like time, is cruel.) The lives of these players (including one dog, Toto) end prosaically. Still, they emit elegantly tangy poetry, as does this book.Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala, Double Feature (Insurance Editions, 2024). Elaine Equi and Jerome Sala are poetry’s power couple. For decades they have lived, loved, performed and blown minds together. Equi with amusement, bemusement and rough-to-smooth edges that engage the senses, then the mind. Sala with knee-slap spit-takes on commodity culture borne from a career in advertising. Both are premiere pop poets, descending from the New York School of tender accessibility. Despite their years together, this is, to my knowledge, their first collaborative book. It’s two chapbooks in one… a bargain!Diva Corp USA, volume 2, zineI do not understand the art industry, especially how its monetary mechanics so unsustainably skew to collectors and a handful of “art stars.” This tracks roughly with music and publishing. But the art world erects a pantheon of demi-gods in acropolis museums: The new Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a $ billion palace of excess by “starchitect” Peter Zumthor. Hilde Lynn Helphenstein’s Diva Corp essay “Stop Crying Over Spilled Inauthenticity” says this “increasingly byzantine” world strains connections between genuine artists/art lovers and its buyers/institutions. And, as if embarrassed by fancy servicing of the 1%, it bathes in identity politics. Is this what makes it prone to serial cancelling even while its elites roam free, hypocritically? Other Diva Corp contributions include stories, poems and reproductions…all on newsprint. It performs its public service in mock mystery. I attended the launch event. The editors/publishers were MIA. They are anonymous. Issues were placed by the restroom toilets. I couldn’t find one. But they did print my theoretical manifesto “Das NeuroKapital.”Dunce Codex, anthologyPubbed by editor Roo, this is two collections: prose and poetry. Impressive design and voices. Gobs of lit-besties young and not so young: Benjamin Weissman, Dennis Cooper, Frank Demma, Gabby Sones, Lily Lady, Erin Satterthwaite, Riley Mac, Meat Stevens, Derek Fisher, Manuel Chavarria, Sophie Appel, Selva Imran, Priscilla Jasmine, Brittany Menjivar, Clarke e. Andros, Pedro Minet, Alistair McCartney, Thomas Moore, Eileen Myles, Jacqui Alpine, Charalampos Tzanakis, Amy Gerstler, Jimmy Vega. Plus many worthy peeps new to me. Freakishly, my name pops up in two unrelated pieces and in Roo’s intro! Order from duncecodex@protonmail.com.Car Crash Collective, anthologyLike Dunce Codex above, this robust volume is proof of scene solidity. It evolved from the same-named reading series by lit Angelenas Erin Satterthwaite and Brittany Menjivar. (Events in L.A., New York, Berlin and…) There’s no index, so rather than skip to a name, you open and read. Rewarding prose results include Zoey Greenwald, Kate Durbin, Chris Molnar, Taylor Lewandowski, Alec Niedenthal, Sarah Velk and Belinda Cai. Beau Geste, 2nd Issue, zineHere’s a multi-media mind fuck: A magazine that is also an oversized artwork is also documentation of a recent Los Angeles performance. Curated by Jordan Rountree, the texts/images reflect that event’s perpetration of a high-level goof: Ostensibly it celebrated playwright Bertold Brecht receiving a long-overdue star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Except there is no such star for Germany’s socialist inventor of confrontational theater. (He deserves one: As a Nazi-fleeing expat in L.A., Brecht co-wrote the screenplay for the Fritz Lang-directed Hangmen Also Die!) Work is by Rountree plus Hannah Bhuiya, Brittany Menjivar, Joseph Mosconi, Zara Schuster, Ian F. Svenonius, Dakota Blue, Jean Marco Torres.Silicone God, Victoria Brooks (U.S.: House of Vlad, 2025, England: Moist, 2024)Here is part of my Introduction to the U.S. edition of this freak-ass novel: The characters and narrator(s) of Silicone God reference by inference what elsewhere has been termed The Singularity—the point where all technology hyper-evolves to one mass/individual consciousness. This is not a future historical period: It is a forever present. In Silicone God, that point is called Time. It manifests in the characters of future Silicone/human/god hybrids (their bodies composed of The New Flesh), while the Now is “our” limited experience as fleshly humans, also known as The Rotten. The author’s stand-in, Shae, envisions the Singularity of Time in passages that mix the cosmic with the tartly comic… and just plain bizarre… sometimes echoing (to me) the deranged geography of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations:“When I first saw the Sea of Time, I thought it looked like heaven. It was a heaving mirror, the same colour as the violet sunset and the silica under my feet. Massive cock-shaped mushrooms poked up among the dunes.” This partly explains Silicone God’s portal shifts of temporal teases. With tentacle-tongue in cheek, Brooks’ book’s dramatis personae embody a menu of preposterous and sublimely amusing monstrosity. Personal apocalypse is a hot and horny bitch mistress from a “future” (teasingly aggregated into the figure of Evaline), ever out-of-reach from a yearning ego-desire (loosely reduced to a self-conscious, auto-fictionesque narrator Shae). This scrambles “character” and “narrative.” Not to mention “gender.” And even “species.” Interrupting and disputing Shae’s chronology (directly on the page!) is Nez, a divine transexual character (created by mushroom gods 3,000 years in the future). Among these figures, a form of gender politics is at play. Males are backgrounded or subsumed into sometimes-competitive female psyches. And the carnally charged friction between these characters pistons plot conflict, intermingling their voices… suggesting that in Time, they are components of one God—or Goddess—psyche. Networking such concepts is a web of purposefully messy evolution imagery. This includes mushrooms, plus cephalopods and their anime tentacle-porn appendages. If mushroom gods usher in the Silicone Becoming of Time, does their form signify the phallus? As with the living, twitching dildoes in multiple sex-scenes, the answer is yes. Except, like everything in Silicone God, the phallus mutates, often mid-coitus, to female organs, and mixtures betwixt:“My little suckers cupped her skin – the slimy hot and cold sensations sending her wild. I put one on her clit, and carefully engorged it with blood so much that it became a mini cock. She begged me to kiss it till she came.”The Hamletesque, self-doubting narration of Shae jolts these freak shows with the frisson of lived experience. This is Silicone God’s twist on the (by-now) depleted or (always) ill-defined genre of auto-fiction. Did these scenes “really” happen? I don’t mean, did Shae’s legs really engorge into semi-autonomous octopus limbs, the better to pleasure her lover? But did the narrator want you to wonder if the author “really” was/is a multi-lover mistress gunning for full-on lesbo relations in a world of earthquaking gender norms? Or, is the shifting of skin and sexes a metaphor for lovers deceiving their intendeds and themselves? For seduction?Brooks cagily demurs. In a 2024 XRAY chat, she posited her theories of plastic narrative to me thusly: “My book gives dramatic colour to thinking around the mistress archetype, and I have been a mistress many times. So, some of the tougher scenes (and some of the hot ones!) are direct from experience. I've paired the very real, with the outright unreal.”
Two freaky fiction writers chat. Jack Skelley, author of The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2023) joins Victoria Brooks, author of Silicone God (Moist, 2023). Fear of Kathy Acker is a cult hit embraced by young readers. Skelley’s new book of stories is Myth Lab (Far West Press, 2024). Silicone God is a strange strain of post-human, science fiction/body horror by “Queer Mistress Wife Human” (Brooks’ Instagram name). Topic A: How horny writing may reach beyond tired categories of sexual and textual orientation. Jack: I’ll kick it off! Victoria, I was first attracted to Silicone God for its boundary blurring. Your debut novel straddles genres, becoming larger than its many parts: It’s billed as “queer sci-fi” but also subsumes body horror, perhaps auto-fiction, and ventures into themes such as species evolution (which my new book Myth Lab does too!) At the same time, its (very horny!) narrative messes with the sexual orientation of its protagonist. In fact, the novel messes with the very concept of time and narrative. Can you encapsulate how and why you do this?Victoria: In terms of why, I don't think I can do otherwise. It's all a mess: me, bodies, sexual orientation and gender. Sex. Time. I tried to reflect this in Silicone God. But I always feel like I'm fighting between letting the mess in and keeping it out - deciding which false coherences I'll accept. Choosing genres and drawing straight lines is hard because mess is fucking fun. And when the mess is sex, it's horny! This, especially in the case of writing like ours that mixes genres, including auto-fiction, can leave the reader with questions about what's real and what isn't. My writing (my nonfiction work and my sci-fi) draws on aspects of my life, but I like to play with the reader. I want them to wonder. I think it's sexier to read a hot scene and think maybe it actually happened. Myth Lab also embraces the mess (or the blur) in such a beautifully wild and sexy way - I'd love to know more about why you're also drawn to this mode of writing. Jack: I get what you said about “deciding which false coherences I’ll accept,” because so many coherences are merely imposed norms. Including sexual norms, of course. Myth Lab goes crazy messing (as you say) with depictions of sexual orientations and genders. For example, it portrays booming transgender medical procedures as advancements in human evolution. Hormone replacement therapy (HRT), silicone implants (breasts, butts and beyond), and “neurodivergent” approaches to sexual orientation are all celebrated in Myth Lab’s mish-mash mess. Rather than in traditional story form, it does this via mock-academic “theories,” and other genre perversions. I think Silicone God does a parallel thing. But in (mostly) narrative mode. Here’s a freaky paragraph from your book:My little suckers cupped her skin – the slimy hot and cold sensations sending her wild. I put one on her clit, and carefully engorged it with blood so much that it became a mini cock. She begged me to kiss it till she came.The sexy mess is so messy that the quaint term “bisexual” doesn’t begin to cover the book’s realms of trans-species sex. And trans-temporal sex! So let me confront you with the (admittedly reductive) question your readers have: How much of Silicone God is based in your personal experience?Victoria: I love how we converge on the point about transness: in Silicone God, there is a divine trans character (created by mushroom gods 3000 years in the future). Myth Lab's theories give me life, and more specifically give life to my drive to see sex on the page. Your text takes the form of so many dimensions of a sex life. We have the hallucinogenic poetic parts with lines like: “Where voice and vagina conflate, you’ll find kisses promise more illicit pleasures. The Other’s voice cajoles, seduces, instructs, creating the one hundred-letter word for thunder....” Then later, a switch to a more linear prose—one of my favourite parts is a short meditation on the erotics of gel nails—then to the tender: “How I yearn to hold and heal. How, upon cumming, I laugh uncontrollably. How, later or at any time, I weep at the most maudlin nonsense. A detergent commercial.”It also gives me joy to see your creative destruction of academic or philosophical authority over sex. I feel we have a similar drive in our writing to understand something, or grasp at a truth about sex (that maybe exists beyond our own words) and do something wild with it. To your question: it's hard to distinguish where I stop, and Silicone God begins. Even the scenes taking place in a future dimension called Time ruled by mushroom gods. Now, if the question is rather: Are there scenes that are written directly from experience? Yes. My book gives dramatic color to my thinking around the mistress archetype, and I have been a mistress many times. So some of the tougher scenes (and some of the hot ones) are direct from experience. So I've paired the very real, with the outright unreal. I wonder why. Does Myth Lab have a theory? Does it do the same?Jack: Yes, Silicone God’s trans divinity from the future comports with (one of) the central hypotheses in Myth Lab: That technology, an extension of language, is exponentially speeding human evolution. And this includes a new universe of sexual mutations. I sort-of summarize that in this line from the Myth Lab “theory” titled “Rendezvous with God-MILF”: “If DNA is evolution’s hardware, language is its software, and dirty talk does most of the coding.” Many of these ideas derive from Terence McKenna, the psychedelic shaman who postulated that pre-human evolution was jump-started by a metaphysical intervention from psilocybin mushrooms. So there’s another connection between your novel and my stories! Magic fungi! Towards the end of Silicone God, the narrator has this bizarre epiphany:When I first saw the Sea of Time, I thought it looked like heaven. It was a heaving mirror, the same color as the violet sunset and the silica under my feet. Massive cock-shaped mushrooms poked up among the dunes….Setting aside the phallic symbolism of mushrooms, Let me ask you this: You’ve already acknowledged having been a multiple mistress. Do you also have experience with magic mushrooms? Or what is the source of your mushroom god imagery?Victoria: We've coincided with mushrooms: magic! I'm excited that you mention one of my favorite scenes in Silicone God. I have certainly had my fair share of psychedelic experiences, but the source of the imagery is rather the evolution and physicality of mushrooms themselves. I find it extraordinary that their mycelium underground networks have helped trees secretly communicate; even flirt with one another. And as a queer person who believes fiercely in activism, I adore this. Perhaps it's even brought together our books! I'm also interested in the analogy of the mycelium and the mistress, and how she becomes a mode/body of communication between wives (or indeed between wives and husbands, and with other mistresses). That's where I was going with the scene you mention: the mirror sea (made of mistresses) nourishes the mycelium which is the network connecting the mushroom fruit bodies. I feel like we could keep on talking about this (and our mycelium line of communication will certainly continue) but perhaps we can wrap things up here with my question to you about imagery in general. I feel like our approaches to imagery are similar, although in Myth Lab I was struck by how skillfully you managed to evoke so many hallucinogenic scenes. This, for many reasons, is one of my favorites: “It suggests that James Joyce’s mistress ululates her uvula. It flutters with ovulations in the ‘Linguaverse,’ as you might call it. The ultimate sex worker, this super uterus is formed by subtracting her slave names from her pet names, and hiero-symbols in doublewide quasar waterways.” I'm curious about the experiences and/or processes that have resulted in such poetic alchemy? Jack: These “theories” are intertextual: They are inspired by what I’m reading and hearing. I quote from other books, and each story ends with a list of sources. I blend them with personal compulsions to arrive at a third place: linguistically based with lots of dumb puns and pop-culture references. This is my go-to high/low synthesis. Myth Lab mixes everything from Kim Kardashian and TikTok to C.G. Jung and Noam Chomsky. Plus a bunch of mythology, romance and sex, including sex-worker material. It’s fun to write, and – one hopes! – to read.
