by Karl Fischer
Eric Hendrixson began his career as a not-so-humble member of the
Magnificent Seven, the 2010-2011 New Bizarro Author Series, which has become the stuff of legends.
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| Pictured here killing varmints. |
In celebration of Eric's latest novel,
Drunk Driving Champion, a bizarro racing adventure evocative of
The Gumball Rally and
Cannonball Run, I reached out to Eric for a heart-to-heart regarding his escapades.
Let's start with the basics. Tell me how you found Eraserhead Press and/or bizarro fiction in general?
I
went to a class on publishing fiction at the library. The instructor worked in
fantasy, so she focused on knowing your genre. But I didn't have a genre. I was
always the odd man in any writing group I belonged to, and none of the
publications out there seemed to publish what I was doing. So after the class,
I tried to talk to the instructor about the kind of fiction I wrote, and she
said, “Well, I guess you're just bizarro.”
I
muttered, “Yeah, thanks,” and left. I don't believe most things people say and
assumed she was just fucking with me. I'd done a lot of reading and writing,
and I was pretty sure there was no such thing as "bizarro." Still, I
spite-Googled it a couple days later and bought the first two Bizarro Starter Kits. The first story I
read was The Greatest Fucking Moment in
Sports. After picking up a few more books, I knew I wanted in on this.
Imagine being a devout Catholic all your life without knowing the Catholic
Church existed. Then, one day, while out shopping for printer toner, you stumble
into Vatican City. That's what finding bizarro was like.
Back
then, there was a questionnaire that Eraserhead had you fill out to see if they
wanted to work with you. I filled out the form, and I guess they were willing
to work with me. And specifically, it was Donihe who wanted to work with me,
which was a big deal because he's the one who got me into this genre. My
application was accepted, and somehow, I didn't feel like they were fucking
with me. So I wrote a novella for the NBAS, which was rejected (it really was
just cyberpunk), and I went to BizarroCon, where I met the bizarros, the first
generation of NBAS, and Michael Allen Rose, who was in the NBAS class after me.
We've interviewed Michael Allen Rose before and talked about his unending font of masculinity. Do you feel any kind of generational connection to the rest of the Magnificent Seven or subsequent NBAS groups?
I think of each year of NBAS writers as a graduating
class, so there's a community of sorts among people who have had this common
experience. It's like a college alumni association except that it doesn't ask
you for money, send out newsletters, or officially exist. I was fortunate in
moving to Chicago, since we have four NBAS graduates in this city.
How did your year in the NBAS go and how has it affected your career leading up to Drunk Driving Champion?
I
started off writing a story about a narcoleptic disc golf player who fights an
army of Rickrolling squirrels who turn the White House into a giant Rick
Astley. I'd just gotten back from my first BizarroCon and was eager to get this
story on paper. It was also November, and I had done NaNoWriMo before, so I got
started. The problem was that it was a really dumb idea for a book. It was
obviously just wish-fulfillment, so I stopped writing it. In an online workshop
with Bradley Sands, I came up with the idea of a doughnut shop worker and his
kiwi fruit girlfriend selling human faces around Washington, D.C., while
dodging a Michael Jackson-impersonating hit-tomato. That made a lot more sense,
so I wrote that book instead. Then I lost the book. I went to a cheap motel in
Natural Bridge, Virginia, and rewrote it over the course of a few nights and
revised it with Kevin Donihe over a couple months.
Back
then, NBAS was more competitive. My NBAS class worked together a lot and
supported each other, but it was still stressful. There was a set number of
books you had to sell—hard copies, not e-books—to be even considered for future
submissions. I think it was a period of character-building. I learned a great
deal about marketing, more about what doesn't work than what does. However,
selling a book is more than just writing a book, and the year changed a lot of
my thinking about writing. Jim Koch, the founder of the Boston Beer Company,
once said that there's only room on your coaster for one beer. I'm assuming he
meant at a time. Similarly, at any given moment, for a person to be reading
your book and not any of the other books out there or that have ever been out
there is a pretty big deal. You have to make it worth the reader's while.
Given the short format of the
NBAS, how did you convince people to put a little beer on their coaster instead
of a big one?
If you have small glasses,
serve whiskey.
Tell me about Drunk Driving Champion - the process of writing it and getting it published. Was it always your intended sophomore release?
I pitched this book as a joke.
Drunk Driving Champion came out of a month-long anonymous online pitching session with a bunch of Eraserhead authors and editors. It was essentially a pitch workshop gone bipolar. Because of the way the message board worked, all of our ideas either got shut down or were simply ignored. The pitches most recently commented on went to the top while those without comments were buried. That's also how 4Chan works. We'd spend days on a pitch to just get a "nah" or "meh" from the group or for things to be buried and not ever read or voted on at all. In the second week, everyone started getting a little testy. I mostly vented by attacking my own pitches, using language I would never use against someone else. I was getting pretty surly. So full of frustration and beer, three hours after bedtime but ten minutes before bed, I threw together three pitches called "Chainsaw Nunchaku," "Fuck Fucks the Fucking Fuckers of Fuck," and "The Great American Beer Run," which became
Drunk Driving Champion. When I woke up, the beer run story had caught on. It was really popular, and Eraserhead accepted the pitch.
So I had to write it now, but as I wrote this story, the characters became very real to me. Because of the risk involved, a person has to have a good reason to participate in a cross-country drunk driving race, so I worked on each character's personality and motivation and let that be the driving force for each character's story. That was something I learned from reviews of
Bucket of Face, how people responded to the character-driven plot. That allowed each racing team to have its own story arc. There are no auxiliary characters except for victims along the road, and even they have to be real. Each character in the story deserves a story. I also built on the faster voice that I was developing in
Bucket of Face. Don't waste the reader's time. Make things happen. Always escalate. So there was a balance between developing the characters and always moving the action forward.
It's a thing of beauty when a farce turns honest. Tell me about your favorite character in Drunk Driving Champion.
I like characters who act as the voice of reason in unreasonable circumstances.
Anita, William's A.A. sponsor, accidentally gets dragged into the race when she
gets into his car at the starting line to stage an intervention. After offering
support, encouragement, and A.A. slogans for miles, she starts to lose faith in
her mission. This is used both to comedic effect and as a form of character
growth. Her failure as a sponsor allows her to question a lot of the roles that
she's been pushed into, stop being a sidekick, and take the lead role in her
own life. There are a lot of characters in the story who are crazier than she
is, but she's a sane person in an insane situation. She'd be better off if she
were a lunatic.
If you were in a 70's racing sex farce, what would your character drive and would he stand a chance at making it to the finish line?
I'd drive a goat-drawn wagon. It
wouldn't be drawn by ordinary goats but by disco goats. My disco goats and I
would get to the finish line with the power of music and friendship. Or a
Dodge. They made a pretty solid car back then, and you could fit a couple goats
in the back seat or the trunk, depending whether or not those damn goats can
fucking behave themselves for once. Also, instead of Sally Field, I would have
Sissy Spacek as my co-pilot because I think she's a damn good actress. Did you
see her in 'night Mother? That
was some solid work, and I think that's the kind of person I would need riding
shotgun.
And I'd want a shotgun.
I have not seen 'night, Mother, but then Bradley Sands would argue that I've
never seen any movies. Is Drunk Driving Champion satirical or absurd?
The ultimate purpose of satire is to preach to people by pointing out their flaws.
I think one of humanity's largest flaws is preachiness, so I try to avoid
writing too much satire. There are satirical parts, mostly making fun of
preachy people, but it's not the book's overall purpose. National Lampoon's
Deteriorata and
We Drive Drunk by Rucka Rucka Ali are parodies that transcend the
subject matter, but most satires and parodies don't. I'd say the book, like
most things, is absurd, but absurdity is not randomness. Absurdity has a logic of
its own.
What do you have in store for us in the immediate future?
Giving the Finger was in the
Bizarro Starter Kit Red, and being in a
Starter Kit was one of my goals going into the genre. I'm working on assembling
a collection with that story as the tentpole. Essentially, the piece is a
retelling of the Little Dutch Boy story. Once the boy has stopped the leak in
the dike with his finger, the town has no real incentive to let him take his
finger out of the hole. The leak is stopped. And when new leaks spring, it only
makes sense to take more body parts from the boy for repairs. I had a lot of
fun with that one.
I've always been a fan of anti-comedy, so I wrote a sort of anti-horror novel, a zombie story without zombies, which is on Kevin Donihe's desk right now. As a part of the world-building process, my novels usually have an underlying cosmology. Charles from
Bucket of Face was a
Fifth Day Philistine.
Drunk Driving Champion has an afterlife involving reincarnation and the void. This novel, which will either be called
Precious Blood of the Lamb or
All
Our Future Thursdays, works on a modified Last Thursdayist worldview involving tacos, Thursday being the fifth day and tacos being amazing.
I think "All Our Future Thursdays" is a beautiful title. I'd like to hear a little bit more about that, if you can tell me.
It's the usual boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy dies, boy tries to win girl back,
boy turns into a sheep, boy looks for tacos, girl dies, boy raises girl from
the dead, boy accidentally turns girl into a sheep, boy destroys the universe
looking for tacos story. And he does this kind of thing all the time, which is
probably why the girl dumped him in the first place. I know this description
sounds like a typical romantic comedy, but I tried to put an original spin on
it.
Last question. If I told you that you had a beautiful body, would you tell me how to live one's bliss?
You would never say that.
Today we're talking with a real legend in the Bizarro Fiction movement: Bizarro author and editor Kevin Donihe. Kevin wrote one of the very first books Eraserhead Press ever published, and he was the very first editor for the New Bizarro Author Series. His manic style of performance is as memorable as his writing. He is the author of SPACE WALRUS, MUSCLEBOUND MARIO, and many other Bizarro masterworks.
KD: Prior to 1999, I tended to submit stories in the horror genre. Anything that could have been considered proto-Bizarro remained hidden away and unpublished because I felt there was no market for it. In fact, my first published novel was one that I'd stopped working on for a few years prior to my discovery of Eraserhead Press.
KD: I've edited for the NBAS since 2009, and I continue to do so. For the first few years, I was the sole editor. Now, others have come and gone--or stayed on--in the continuing effort to grow the series. It's not always easy. Some years, I find no submissions I want to accept. 2015 was one of those years. 2016, however, shall be different...
