GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #504: SPLATTER WESTERNS

 

Look at that! The cover of my next (probably) book!

Many of you may have been wondering where that splatter western I was talking about a while back went to. I swear, it's finished and almost ready. Even if I die tomorrow, it will still be published at some point, as it is waiting in the folder I have called IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH. And goddam! That's a beautiful cover from Luke Spooner! But oddly enough, that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

For a very brief period of time the splatter western was all the rage, and as I suspected, it ran out of gas pretty quickly. That's what happens with a lot of sub-sub-sub genre stuff. I thought the phrase was pretty laughable, and I still do. This is actually a book I originally wrote in 2003 and was doing a huge overhaul on, but I knew there was no way it would be out in time to cash in on the Great New Thing, which wasn't all that new, anyway. I much preferred it when it was called the Weird Western Tale.

Regardless, my topic for tonight is my disdain for publishing labels. Or any marketing labels, really. I think it diminishes the work because humanity just absolutely cannot stop themselves from classifying everything. I understand it when it comes to science, but when it comes to art? No thanks.

You may also recall me talking about my splatter SF book, and I'm here to assure you it was very much tongue in cheek. Who the hell writes a splatter SF book, anyway? You might mention the movie, Event Horizon, which would qualify if I didn't despise labels so much. But when you think of SF, you mostly think of hard SF or social SF, and even those labels are too much for me. To quote Heinlein, "Specialization is for insects."

I get the need for some categories. Horror, SF, mystery, fantasy, so on. But when you start splitting those up into sub-categories, that's where you lose me. Must we turn every single fucking thing on this planet into a marketing scheme? I guess the answer is yes, but very few see it as cheapening art, which it is doing.

I remember when I first heard of Korpiklaani, which I simply consider to be metal. But because everyone loves labels, I started going around calling them Finnish folk metal, just to see if anyone would bite. Imagine my surprise when, a couple of albums back, they had a sticker on their CD cover proclaiming them to be Finnish folk metal. I doubt they got that from me. I hope they didn't. But if I started something, I really need to stop talking about splatter SF before some fool takes up that banner and waves it like a lunatic.

Maybe I'm just being ye olde stick in the mud. Perhaps I am. But this situation is almost as bad as people calling art "content." I fucking hate that. If art really is content, maybe I should give up writing and become a YouTube star. To quote Jello Biafra, "Is my cock big enough? Is my brain small enough? For you to make me a star?"