Heroic Perverts

Reading a lovely and beautiful wisp of a book punching above its wordcount weight on my front porch in the oppressive heat of July last week and found innerworldly cool relief from the briny breeze with every turn of the page. S.L. Coney's Wild Spaces is a tentacle horror, coming of age, southern gothic/rural noir adjacent heartbreaker that I'll be thinking about for a long time (and if you think that genre combo sounds like a gas please check out Chad Crawford Kinkle's Jug Face or Laura Benedict's The Devil's Oven, maybe Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs). 

Anyway, it got me thinking about themes of transformation transcendence, transgression, evo/devolution and adaptation which inevitably lead me to think of David Cronenberg. If you're a fan you might check out the anthology of essays and short fiction inspired by the earliest films of his, Children of the New Flesh edited by Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice. 

You can read my interview with Rice about the book at Southwest Review. I was particularly pleased with his definition of and ruminations on Cronenberg's use of the heroic pervert archetype. The heroic pervert is easily plugged into science fiction and supernatural horror, but its often effective in more crime blog-relative spaces like drug fiction, gutter stuff and generally transgressive fiction.

I wouldn't call Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World crime though some of the stories touch its outer boundaries, but I recently enjoyed following her heroic perverts on their downward spirals and knuckleball pitches. I haven't read her crime novel Eileen, but I did catch William Oldroyd's adaptation starring Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway and I'd be happy to see everybody involved continue down the dark path (really need to see Oldroyd's Lady Macbeth too - Johnny Shaw recommended it here).