AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ADVERTISEMENT

Hi, I’m Hank and I’m getting ready to release a black bucket of snakes called Pancreatic Carburetor, my fourth collection of short stories. It’s strange, I always considered myself a “novel guy” and didn’t start writing stories until relatively later in life.

I  had written ten unpublished novels when, on little more than a lark, I moved to New Hampshire in 2005 and embarked on a thrilling (but eventually disastrous) three year binge of drunken insanity and turmoil. I was consuming superhuman amounts of booze. I didn’t write a word at this time.  I didn’t read either. I just drank and somehow worked a job. It was dangerous and foolhardy and it eventually landed me in the hospital with a case of delirium tremens and an unhealthy interest in suicide. I wound up psychologically depleted. I thought it was over. I eventually stopped drinking and moved back to Massachusetts in 2008. It was then that I started writing short stories. They seemed to come from nowhere. My abused, busted brain was repairing itself.

I moved again and got two laborious jobs. Around this time I started contributing to Paraphilia Magazine and Antique Children. The good folks at Paraphilia published my first book of short stories, The Membranous Lounge. Several of the stories were written while I was “pink clouding” following stints in rehab. I continued to drink off and on with dire, disastrous consequences. It pains me to reflect on the circumstances so I won’t. I also don’t want to romanticize my behavior. There was nothing glamorous about it.

I consider The Membranous Lounge my “LSD” book. A lot of the stories use acid as a metaphor to convey my state of mind at the time. More the overwhelming weirdness than any sense of an expanded consciousness. At around this time Antique Children published a novel of mine, Conservatory of Death. It is an angry novel about snuff films and death as pornography. I don’t know where this stuff comes from. Sometimes I hate my proclivities.

The stories I wrote around this time were eventually collected in Bleak Holiday, published by the Paraphilia imprint, Apophenia. Bleak Holiday is uneven but contains some of my favorite stories. I continued to toil at two jobs, carry on a back-and-forth drinking career and write. I don’t know how I did it. I wasn’t a kid anymore either...

Then I got laid off from both jobs and was diagnosed with cancer. A lot of the stories I wrote at this time were about facing death and losing my mind. I could feel my sanity slipping away. My anxiety reached fever-pitch. I welcomed death.

Sadly, both Paraphilia and Antique Children had folded their tents so I published my third collection of stories myself under the title Leaves from the Smorgasbord. Stories about death and insanity (more than usual) and recovery.  In some ways it’s my darkest book. One story, Parole, is based on the life of “coed killer” Edmund Kemper. I wrote it for an anthology called Sick as Fuck that never materialized.

I eventually sought help and achieved a precarious sense of stability through therapy and drugs. I haven’t had a drink in over two years. I don’t go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I consider this my AA “share.” Also, my cancer is in remission.

This leads me to Pancreatic Carburetor, the final book in my mental health saga. There’s one story, Umbilical Berries, that I wrote years ago (and you can tell) but everything else was written recently. My concerns are still the same. I try to use humor to combat my nihilistic tendencies, which is a difficult endeavor for me.     

I no longer consider myself an “aspiring” writer or an “underground” writer or whatever euphemism I can come up with to make me feel better about myself here in the dead of night. This is my hobby. That’s all. I write because I want to. I release this stuff because otherwise it would just turn yellow and rot. A few people like what I do and I find that immensely gratifying. I try my best.

Pancreatic Carburetor will be available in June.