Splatterpunk, not Cancelpunk

As a black metal fan, I had to learn to distinguish between art and artist pretty quickly. As many of you may know from the best-selling book Lords of Chaos, turned into a movie several years ago, the beginnings of black metal in the early ‘90s were marred in criminality. Varg Vikernes a.k.a. “Count Grishnack”, one of the pioneers of the genre, the creative force behind Burzum, did jail time for murder and burning old Christian churches. Bard “Faust” Eithun of Mayhem stabbed a gay guy to death. Jon Nodtveidt of Dissection was also convicted of a homophobic hate crime. Given their anti-modernist and, at times, openly fascist stance, a few black metal bands, most notably Graveland and Marduk, were targeted by Antifa, resulting in canceled shows and overall chaos. More recently, Jason Weirbach a.k.a. “Dagon,” the frontman of Inquisition, was outed as a kiddie porn fan.

Since I’m not a neo-nazi, a homophobe, an arsonist, or a pedophile, I decided to make a strict distinction between the art and the artist, or, better put, between the art and the public citizen creating the art. That is, as citizens -- Varg Vikernes of Norway, Jon Nodtveidt of Sweden, Jason Weirbach of the US -- these people are criminals, and I don’t condone their crimes; I sit back and let the justice system do its work. No one is above the law of the land. I am, however, a fan of their music and I value these people as artists, such as Count Grishnack or Dagon and so on. Many black metal fans embrace this straightforward distinction. As Dayal Patterson, a scholar of black metal, puts it, “There’s no doubt that Varg’s statements in magazines (and on his website, which even relatively recently mentions “negros and other inferior races”) have long been politically charged, yet they have never found their way into his music. Burzum’s huge popularity suggests that Varg has managed to tap into something truly universal. Though his post-prison albums have not proven quite as significant as those recorded prior to his incarceration, Burzum remains hugely popular with a wide array of listeners, including those who completely disregard Varg’s politics and worldview.”  What would black metal be if Burzum and Mayhem were canceled? Would there even be such a thing as black metal?

Since discovering Richard Laymon in 2007, I’ve become interested in Splatterpunk and extreme horror and got to know many writers and readers in this community. In a nutshell, Splatterpunk is to mainstream horror what Cannibal Corpse is to Metallica, or, in movies, what Dead Alive or Bad Taste are to The Shining or The Exorcist. More brutal, more gory, more depraved, more disgusting. Compared to the extreme metal community, most artists and fans of extreme horror are peaceful and laid back, but, now and again, some perceived moral indignity would ruffle the feathers of the SJWs infecting their ranks. Most recently, Otis Bateman and Stephen Cooper have been on the receiving end of a public outcry. Did they kill anyone? No. Did they set buildings on fire? Not even. What they did is not so much criminal as it is in bad taste. They shared private nudes of a woman (gasp!) Now, in my view, the backlash to this indiscretion was completely out of proportion, barbarous, and cringeworthy, proving Nietzsche’s claim that madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, it is the rule. Incited by the outrage squad in their midst, the extreme horror community reacted with a feigned outrage and bogus solidarity that would have given Stalin a bulging erection. These rebellious creatives fighting societal taboos through their transgressive works, these fearless outlaws of imagination and conventional thinking, they all fell in line like a bunch of NPCs applauding a Kim Jong Un speech.

Soon, there was talk of rape, sexual abuse, sexual predators, psychological trauma, manipulation, suicide, and so on; the usual insults hurled by loving and tolerant internet mobs on the daily. Most extreme horror writers, afraid their sales would dip and they’d be unable to pay their bills, promptly joined the resentful mob and posted vaguely ethical and accusatory mumbo-jumbo. “Readers” ripped the books of Bateman and Cooper on deranged Tiktoks and threatened to burn them with Nazi fervor. A sex-starved pansexual fatty decided to steal the show and made a TikTok with her and her mom in a hospital room -- the poor old woman visibly confused and uncomfortable -- in which they ripped up the books of the disgraced authors while pick me Chubbs, caught in a cancel culture demented frenzy, busted some “dance” moves reminiscent of Sumo wrestling. 

Authors who collaborated with the two culprits speedily withdrew their support and threw them to the curb. This occurred soon after Otis Bateman and Judith Sonnet had released a novel together, No One Rides For Free (Absolute Chaos). Initially, the collab got stellar reviews and I was looking forward to reading it. But Judith Sonnet decided to pull the novel and have a characteristic mental breakdown. No surprise there. 

As I was dying inside following this cheap performance of deluded virtue-signalers, I remembered that Wrath James White, critically acclaimed splatterpunk writer, had mentioned Otis Bateman as one of the writers spearheading the fourth-wave of splatterpunk: “It might even be time to start discussing a 4-th wave that includes writers that began after 2020, like Otis Bateman, Rowland Bercey Jr., Bridgett Nelson, and Mique Watson.” In addition, the two were gearing up for a collaboration. Now, meekly following the outrage squad, Wrath James White did a one-eighty and, in an unexpected TikTok worthy of the Spanish Inquisition, began speaking of a “moral code” that extreme horror writers supposedly must follow. This move gave me pause. What happened? Did Otis Bateman’s work lose all its artistic value overnight? Did his books suddenly become garbage just because of a moral blunder? What’s with this deep asymmetry between the extreme horror community and the extreme metal community? Unfortunately, extreme horror writers are not critical thinkers and they can become victims of deep-seated prejudices like the best of us. These questions and bitter revelations made me revisit my argument for distinguishing art from the public citizen producing the art.

 

One widespread logical fallacy is the ad hominem argument. This means attacking the person instead of proving the falsity of their claim. When one makes a claim one puts something forward as being true. It’s beside the point to attack the person instead of the claim itself. As the saying goes, when the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser. A similar fallacy occurs when someone attacks the character of an artist. When an author publishes a work of fiction, they put it forward as something that has artistic value, something they think is unique and worth reading. In the context of horror, aesthetic value means something terrifying, disgusting, unsettling, or dreadful, according to the norms of the specific genre or subgenre. It’s up to critics and lucid reviewers to judge whether that work has artistic merit, whether it elicits the emotions it’s supposed to. The author’s character has no bearing on this judgment. Otherwise, it’s like saying the theory of relativity is false because Einstein was a commie. Book reviews that make references to the public life of an author are just cheap gossip masquerading as aesthetic judgment.

Why should we support an author who is abusive toward women? Why should we give our hard-earned money to them? These questions are the product of murky thinking. We support artists, not moral values. Supporting an author is an artistic statement, not a moral statement. Supporting an artist is different from supporting a political party. It is well known, for instance, that Bukowsky was an alcoholic and a wife-beater. Now, when I buy a Bukowsky book, that’s not a vote for alcoholism or violence toward women, that purchase only shows an appreciation for his gritty, dirty realist style of writing, for his poetic vision. The same goes for William Faulkner, William S. Burroughs, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, or other classic or contemporary writers accused of questionable behaviors and political stances in their personal lives. Was Lovecraft racist? Who cares? 

Unfortunately, the cancer of cancel culture spreads fast. Just the other day, this guy working for a minor horror publisher was bragging that they have fifty people blacklisted. This was cringe for so many reasons. Firstly, they already publish garbage and no self-respecting author would want to work with them in the first place. Plus, the hypocrisy. Suppose one of those blacklisted authors sends them something with real market value, something up there with the works of Bryan Keene or Bryan Smith. Do you think they’d stick to their guns? I’d bet they’d swiftly forget their moral posturing and go for the cash. But let’s consider for a moment the absurdities implicit in these oppressive attitudes. Should an author be subject to a background check when submitting a manuscript? After all, the publisher needs to make sure they don’t support the work of an outlaw. Should the police accompany them when they receive a literary award to confirm they are upstanding citizens? Shouldn’t a publisher have people infiltrate an author’s personal life to make sure they don’t commit any crimes? Make sure they don’t abuse their spouse or watch objectionable pornography. Shouldn’t we have artists under strict surveillance 24/7? Is this beginning to sound like Big Brother? What’s to stop the publishing world from becoming a police state? Having grown up in communist Romania, I can assure you police states are not fun, unless you’re a moral validation junkie or feminazi. Also, have you heard of the effervescent artistic life in North Korea? Their new fiction trends? Yeah, me neither.    

We need to step back and acknowledge a general fact about creatives, talent, and even genius. Artistic talent doesn’t come neatly paired with an angelic character in a nice package ready for mass consumption. Great art erupts from deep psychological conflicts in individuals who are fighting their own demons at the edges of sanity. These are deeply troubled psychological types, each unique in their extreme rebellion. That’s why so many are suicides: Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolf, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, and so on. The impulse to create comes from a place of illness and war, not from a place of health, peace, and harmony. Also, as the famous movie Amadeus shows, God doesn’t necessarily bestow genius on the most pious but on, to quote Salieri, some “little creature, an animal. A gross and vulgar little man.” Thus, by canceling those with deviant behaviors and attitudes, we risk transforming a lush artistic landscape into a barren terrain populated with plastic smiles, neutered, sedated “artists” promoting derivative works to a crowd of neurotic Karens and ultrasensitive PC gender-benders.