Pre-Order VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN here (out on March 30th)
"The vices of the flesh cannot be kept at bay forever."
Her chest rose and fell between her words, her breaths like gasps. Maybe she was about to die, or she was full of herself.
A video game designer named Raph Koster said in his book called A THEORY OF FUN that the sensation of pleasure is basically a neuro-chemical reward sent by your brain after you've mastered something. It's why people like to improve at stuff, and it's also why video games are boring whenever they're too easy. This idea is also why I've been looking to read outside my comfort zone, lately. It's just one of the reasons why I decided to pick up Vincenzo Bilof's VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN, despite knowing next to nothing about the author. As far as comfort zones are involved, both the novel and Bilof's quizzical, yet literary style kind of torpedo the concept by their very natures.
Rene, Madison and Nicole are vampires from Saturn (or at least in the vicinity of) who traveled to Earth to open a strippers bar and to cause the apocalypse on the last planet in the universe where sentient life exists. Rene also have a romantic relationship with half-man, half-horse in a future version of Earth, giving her second thoughts about ending life on the pale blue dot. Turns out that causing the end of the world is a complicated, time-consuming venture, like building a cathedral or sending human being on Mars and that the Earth is a little bit like the end of the world in itself. It's going to take some time and legwork.
A novel titled VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN has a lot to live up to. In fact, there's a corollary existing that suggests that the crazier the title of your novel is, the more chances it had to be a disappointing piece of shit (I just invented that corollary, but I believe it). This works, though. The beauty about VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN is that is doesn't confound humor and irony. It's hilarious, in a depraved and apocalyptic way, but it's also taking its own complicated narrative seriously.
There are no rules, logic is tarred and feathered, dead people come back to life, there's a severed head talking (my favourite character, Tommy) and every scene capsizes into a) over the top violence of b) a level of surrealism that would make David Lynch, the great contemporary visual surrealist poet, go into depression trying to film it. I proposed to Vincenzo Bilof to call it Jodorowskian for lack of a better term when I interviewed him, but he kindly refused to label his work as anything. I suppose I should know better than to question the creative process.
Will walked with the severed head down to the basement, where rows of coffins were lined up. Damn vampires wanted the whole stereotype; they wanted to experience vampirism. Rene didn't sleep here, and Madison had converted Rene's office to a bedroom on the notion that Rene was a coldhearted bitch and didn't deserve an office.
Another quirk of VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN that I both appreciated and struggled with (depending on the page I was on), is the non-linear structure. It's somewhat sketch-based, like a demented late night HBO sitcom out of your worst bad weed-fueled nightmare. Vincenzo Bilof's not a first time novelist and it shows. In VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN, he keeps switching point of view, creating strong and self-reliant scenes (chapters, really), and yet slowly and almost abstractly painting a bigger picture from his Roschach blotch shaped chapters. If you can figure out what Rorschachian impressionism would look like, it gives you an idea of what reading VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN feels like.
I have no idea what VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN should be labeled under at your friendly neighborhood's bookstore, but I do know that author Vincenzo Bilof is against the idea of having it labeled as anything in particular, so you might want to check your general fiction shelf, but also horror and fantasy just in case, because there are no (and there will probably never be) shelves for bizarro fiction. VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN is a blast, though. It's aggressively disorienting without every being metaphysical, and it's free from whatever restraint we're supposed to enjoy as reader. This is exactly the thing of thing I had in mind when I said I wanted to read new stuff in 2015.
I have no idea what VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN should be labeled under at your friendly neighborhood's bookstore, but I do know that author Vincenzo Bilof is against the idea of having it labeled as anything in particular, so you might want to check your general fiction shelf, but also horror and fantasy just in case, because there are no (and there will probably never be) shelves for bizarro fiction. VAMPIRE STRIPPERS FROM SATURN is a blast, though. It's aggressively disorienting without every being metaphysical, and it's free from whatever restraint we're supposed to enjoy as reader. This is exactly the thing of thing I had in mind when I said I wanted to read new stuff in 2015.