Carlton Mellick III
D. Harlan Wilson

www.carltonmellick.com

Carlton Mellick III is the Captain Georg Von Trapp of the Bizarro genre. If you've never heard of him, you're not reading this ...

DHW: Your writing is transgressivel, taboo, comedic, irreverent, perverse, freewheeling, nightmarish, futique, and squishy, among other things.  In The Bizarro Starter Kit, you are described as an author of “trashy, child-like novels.”  Why do you write in this vein?

CM3: It’s the kind of stuff I would want to read if anyone else was writing it.  Since no one else is writing it, I decided to give it a try.  Personally, I really enjoy weird and trashy B-movies like Tromeo and Juliet, Citizen Toxie, The Dark Backward, or John Waters’ Desperate Living.  But I also love surreal fantasy children’s literature like Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, Dr. Suess, and Dahl books.  I am fascinated with combining the two of these.  When you combine two completely different things, it creates interesting complexities.  It’s like in cooking, when you combine sweet with spicy, such as putting jalapenos and pineapple on a pizza, the flavors oppose each other in such a way that it creates an interesting and complex new flavor. That’s how I would describe my work: sweet and spicy.  I usually give my stories a minimalistic child-like narrative, but the plots are dark, surreal, and often filled with over the top sex and gore.  No matter how disturbing or perverted a story might get, there is always a sense of child-like innocence to it.  That innocence trapped within the chaos is what intrigues me.

You have a rather large cult following — much larger than any other Bizarro author writing today.  What is the primary demographic of your readership?  What sort of interaction do you have with your readers?

Most of my readers are on the younger side.  I think teenagers and college students dig my work the most.  I communicate with several of my readers every single day, usually through Myspace.  I also try to invite them out to reading events when I’m in their area or book release parties.  I’m often asked out for free drinks and I usually take people up on that offer.

How long have you grown handlebar sideburns?

I actually shave them off and grow them back regularly.  I have had sideburns since I was sixteen, but they came in various sizes and shapes.  I’ve only had the giant chops for 6.5 years.  I like them.  They are like fluffy wings.

William Gibson recently said the following in regards to why he doesn’t write genre science fiction anymore: “Alice in Wonderland is good.  Alice in weird Wonderland is good.  But weird Alice in weird Wonderland is too much.”  It seems as if Bizarro might fall into the latter category.  What do you make of Gibson’s sentiment?  Is Bizarro weird to the point of being inaccessible or alienating?  Or is it just what some readers are looking for?

That was William Gibson quoting Damon Knight I believe.  I hate saying something bad about Gibson, who I highly respect, but I’m not sure he actually understands that quote himself.  What I believe Knight was trying to say is that if readers can’t relate to the main character of the story or the setting of the story, then they won’t like the story.  I agree with this.  But science-fiction does have relatable characters and relatable settings, although otherworldly.  I have never read any science fiction that I would describe as weird Alice in weird Wonderland.  Nor have I read any Bizarro fiction that is weird Alice in weird Wonderland.  This dictum is about good writing vs. bad writing, not science fiction (or Bizarro) vs. mainstream fiction.  No matter how weird a character is (or how weird a setting is), readers have to find a part of themselves (or a part of their world) in there for the story to be interesting to them.  A good Bizarro writer can not only create weird worlds and weird characters, they can make you care about those weird characters in those weird worlds.

Bizarro has been referred to as a literary formation that owes much of its lifeblood to 1980s cyberpunk.  Do you think this is true?

Well, the creation of Bizarro is closer related to cyberpunk than anything else.  The fiction is completely different, but the two came about in basically the same way.  When cyberpunk began, there were several authors independently writing a completely unique type of fiction and then they found out they weren’t alone, a lot of other authors were also writing similar stuff.  So cyberpunk was born.  That is what happened with Bizarro.  We were all writing fiction that was completely different from anything else that was being published and then we realized that a lot of other people were also starting to write the same kind of stuff.  So Bizarro was born.  I wouldn’t say Bizarro is the son of cyberpunk, I’d say Bizarro is a much younger brother of cyberpunk.  Both definitely fell from the same tree.  Cyberpunk owes its lifeblood to the era in which it was formed.  It was a product of its time: the ‘80s.  If cyberpunk was a product of the ‘80s, Bizarro seems to be more like a product of children who grew up during the ‘80s.  It was an odd period in time, after all.  The fact that four of the top Bizarro authors (myself, Chris Genoa, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Kevin L. Donihe) were all born one month apart from each other makes me think that our attraction to the bizarre has something to do with the era in which we were raised.

You are notorious for the sheer quantity of books you put out every year.  Since the publication of your first novel, Satan Burger, in 2001, you’ve gone on to publish nearly 20 more books of fiction, most recently Sausagey Santa,War Slut and The Haunted Vagina.  What’s on the docket for CM3 in the near future?

I actually am not as prolific as it seems.  It’s just because I specialize in novellas and do not write short stories or full-length novels.  An average fulltime writer pumps out 5,000 words a day five days a week, usually on short fiction or large 150,000 word novels.  If I wrote 5,000 words a day I would have a new novella completed every week.  Still, 3-6 novellas a year seems like a lot to people.  Personally, I feel like I’m hardly writing anything at all.

This year I have written books called Young Adolf Hitler (which is sort of a Nazis in Wonderland type of story), The Ultra Fuckers (a story about a sentient gated tract housing community that grows like the blob until it covers the entire globe), and The Faggiest Vampire (a children’s book).

Satan Burger is your best-selling book.  At Amazon.com alone, there are 65 reader reviews of the novel and it has a consistently strong sales ranking.  How do you account for Satan Burger’s wild success?

Your guess is as good as mine.  There was no promotion for Satan Burger.  I loved writing it but I didn’t think anyone else would ever care to actually read it.  I figured it might sell a couple hundred copies at most to people who knew me in the horror writing scene.  It took a year to take off, but people started finding the book on their own.  I think a lot of people were drawn to the book title and the cover image.  I believe they bought it just for morbid curiosity’s sake.  But I guess they really liked it because they started telling their friends about it and their friends started telling their friends.  It was a word of mouth wildfire after that.  Three years later it became the #1 bestselling horror novel on Amazon.com.  Personally, I think its success is just because it is completely different than anything that’s published in the mainstream.  It was also written for an audience that is widely ignored.

When you’re not writing or editing, what else do you do with your time?

I watch a LOT of movies.  But I don’t just watch them for entertainment.  I watch them to become a better writer.  I take them apart and study the plots, characterization, dialog, etc.  Basically, when I watch a movie I visualize it as a screenplay rather than moving pictures.  This is what screenwriters tend to do when they watch movies.  I’m not a screenwriter but everything I learned about writing came from screenwriting classes.  When I was in college I was mentored by a graduate of the highly-lauded UCLA master’s program for screenwriting.  I took several of his classes and eventually took private lessons from him.  Anyway, he taught me everything I know about writing and got me into taking apart movies while I watch them.  I do the same when I read books.  Other than watching lots of movies and reading books, I like to drink a lot (usually homebrew) and play Atari 2600 games.

What lies in Bizarro’s future?  Do you think Bizarro will be an ephemeral phenomenon or does it have staying power?

Over all movements of its kind, I think Bizarro has the most staying power.  Because it’s not just about writers wanting to write Bizarro, it’s about readers wanting to read Bizarro.  However, its staying power will probably only last among smaller cult audiences.  It might become an ephemeral phenomenon to mainstream audiences for a short time in the future, maybe after this wave of conservativism loses its grip on society.  Right now, Bizarro is snowballing.  It’s just going to keep growing and growing.  If the authors involved with Bizarro today stick to their guns, I see authors writing Bizarro for generations to come.

Lastly, who do you think was Jack the Ripper?

Warwick Davis — Time Traveler.