THE DREADED “GABRIEL HART CHAPTER”
Chapter one of the non-fiction book about outsider lit niches on twitter
Chapter One
Drafting Off Dissidents : Gabriel Hart
There are many gamers in this scene, which skews younger, male, and nerdy, talking about this or that game or system, and being from Generation X and matured out of games long ago I am not one of them; I am about to illustrate the point by using a stale metaphor. I can’t be the only commentator to notice that the constant onward flow of tweets that disappear like lumber down the flume is likened to the constant right-ward scrolling motion of the screen in certain ur-video games like Super Mario Bros, where once you progress to the right along with the screen, you can’t go back and pick something up that was overlooked off screen to the left. In some cases in those ancient first generation games, making contact with the left margin of the all-devouring screen spells death. I can hear the awkward embarrassed laughter of scores of millennial readers at the retro-mawkishness of this comparison: games have progressed so far since the 80s, spatial limitations and barriers have been broken down, movement is much freer. I am just trying to say that, with much social media locked in one-way streets of time, there is a forced march scenario and trying to look back beyond a certain point doesn’t work. The cultural historian seeking to describe the curvature of the times is largely blinded by the horizon, the formal realities that the media is shaped by.
I have forgotten when I first made contact with the Misery Loves Company reading series; I didn’t keep a diary about it, and trying to look back through the heaps of the Twitter haystack for a single historical needle would be madness. The enormity of conducting even very recent archaeological digs into data is daunting.
However, Misery Loves Company is recorded each week, and the recordings are kept in the ageless archive of YouTube. So now my mind crumples with horror at the thought that I may have to review hours and hours of recordings to get my fingertips around an appropriate outline of this recent past.
My best guess is that I would have encountered the zoom reading series in spring of 2021. I think I found out about it from following Gabriel Hart, who lives in the high desert outside Los Angeles, and who tweeted at that time that he had started to go to MLC “religiously.”
Gabriel Hart, who I had met in the group chat at Close to the Bone since we both had books coming out from that publisher, occupies an important role in this study since, let’s be frank, I have been drafting off of him for the past year or so. Remember the image of the Tour de France cyclists, one following closely behind in the aerodynamic wake of the other? It’s harder for those in the lead, who are breaking a path, than it is for the second person in line, who in the athletic extended metaphor may be using less energy and waiting for the right moment to surpass the leader—or at least gain lateral independence and face the wind.
The case could be made that with this book I am truly following in his wake, as Hart is a legit cultural commentator and chronicler of the times, the same times I am in my own way attempting to trap in a cage and analyze. I hope that this zone of Twitter criticism is big enough for the both of us. Hart is a formidable journalist, interviewing leading lights and writing articles for such publications as Lit Reactor and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In a field full of writers who can only muster up the energy to regard themselves under the talismanic sway of self-promotional Twitter, he cleverly reviews other writers’ books in hybrid fictional form for Bear Creek Gazette, one of the newer collective hubs of hot writers coming from the niche of outsider lit that I have seen in 2021. The term “influencer” has queasy connotations but I would describe Hart as a true influencer, at least in this environment I am setting out to describe.
Hart, in addition to being a journalist, writer of fiction and poetry, plays the role of the often possessed frontman for “death doo wop” punk Wall of Sound band Jail Weddings which has been described as “Nick Cave meets the Shangri-Las” and which seems to exists at the cultural crossroads between crime writer James Ellroy and black magician/rocket scientist Jack Parsons. Jail Weddings have put out three records (Meltdown might be my favorite), won “Best LA Band of the Year” awards, and spawned countless polished music videos such as “Dead Celebrity Party” and “What Did You Do With My Gun?” These videos with their high concentration of stylish knockout women and retro mod style were the first incarnation of Gabriel Hart that I encountered in early 2021 as I tried to familiarize myself with my co-conspirators at Close to the Bone. I eventually bought all the Jail Weddings records.
I feel apprehensive about listing his credentials and bona fides lest it sound like I’m a star-struck fan, which, from a certain very real angle I can’t exactly squirm my way out of, I am. I will move through the hagiography as quickly as I can, although its aura like a stubborn apparition will probably remain throughout this book in some form. I consider him to be a friend and a mentor. He edited my first novel, challenged the weak dialogue of its characters at crucial points, and suggested I change its name (since my original one, Wet Up, was too obscure—Blood Trip as a title was clearer, more visceral, and seemed to evoke the grisly directness of ‘50s pulp crime novels). He counseled me to take the harsh measure of rewriting the manuscript from scratch, which I did. Writers change over time, he reasoned, implying that as you change, you won’t make the necessary changes in a manuscript by just editing-by-surgical-scalpel; sometimes you have to edit by completely tearing down the house and rebuilding from nothing: frame, mortar, upholstery, furniture. “You’ll thank yourself for doing it later,” he told me, and it was true, as true as advice can be in this often competitive world of writers. He warned me against tagging lit mags on Twitter after they rejected me, saying that it’s poor form.
Influencers also affect cultural thought as well as the ground-level, practical behavior of online litterateurs. In an interview he gave on the occasion of the publication of his collection Fallout From Our Asphalt Hell in fall of 2021, he said something which has informed a great deal of this writing project: the idea that some of the most interesting writers in this niche (alt-lit, transgressive, outsider: pick your nomenclature and cringe) are what can be described as “genre refugees.”
“Genre is like a scavenger hunt,” he later told me on the phone on Dec 26, 2021, explaining that writers, to make obeisance to genre, have to put in “A, B and C.” “It’s extremely suffocating…You should never never think about what section of the bookstore your book will land until after it’s done.” He cited the LA writer Chandler Morrison as one who has forged his own genre based on the singularity of his own name. Genre fiction, as I saw from my time treading water amongst crime writers, is competitive and peopled by writers “trying to make the best story that you’ve heard a million times,” in Hart’s words. By contrast, the outsider lit “scene” (high school and music connotations be damned), as exemplified most starkly by the weekly activities of Misery Loves Company, is characterized by individual voices not playing to genre. Of the “cyberwriters” materializing on zoom calls and in group chats around the Twitter alveoli, Hart said, “I still don’t think anyone resembles anyone else.”
It was resonant with me as I felt a dissatisfaction with seeing myself as a crime writer who did not belong, couldn’t cope with the tacit conformities of the crime fiction genre. I liked many of the people in the crime fiction group, and still do, but I had a vague distaste for enough of the other ones, saw enough of the embattled Thunderdome clique taking shape, to feel alienated by them. This isn’t to say that I’ll never write another crime novel again; I may cross over the border back to that country again at some point. But I have seen the “international zone,” the post-genre frontier land where you have to have your wits about you, where colleagues may be more welcoming but your ideological and aesthetic safety seems like a dicey affair. These writers are making literature on the cusp of a new resistance to risk-averse old models and capitalist genre-taxonomies as calcified by booksellers like Amazon, who are programmed to scan you, figure out what genre will make you happy, and “give you what you want” and not to give you art. More on the influence of Amazon on the “genrefication” of popular literature later, as I met with another dissident who attempted to exploit the system of Amazon genre fiction from the inside with a hacker’s cold calculation.
Back to the Gabriel Hart kaleidoscope: he was nominated for a Pushcart prize for a short story he published in Terror House (another dissident press) recounting his experiences as a peep show janitor mopping up jizz for three days, the second job he had in LA in 1999, and the kind of real-life tale a writer could dine out on for years. Hart told me that as his agent shopped his novels around to publishers he was working on a dystopian novel about a Los Angeles turned into carnivorous swampland of “botanarchy” and inhabited by packs of sex-crazed musicians hunting the only women left in the post-apocalypse, leading to a kind of war of the sexes.
And yet I am sure that it will most likely defy the suffocating A-B-C of genre. I say this because I have read the man’s fiction and seen the ways it takes genre as a starting point and then spirals into other zones. Hart professes admiration for Harlan Ellison, who would sneer at anyone calling him a sci-fi writer. Two of his books have been reviewed on the admittedly shabby but earnest book review site Goodreads, and are reproduced her with an appreciating eye for their unique voice and genre-warping process in the forge of outsider lit.
DRUNKEN OBSESSIONS
Gabriel Hart's linked novellas Virgins in Reverse and The Intrusion concern themselves with the drunken obsessions of their narrator, Caleb, an alcohol-soaked, somewhat mad denizen of Los Angeles and environs. Caleb is capable of having the most epic public freakouts you can imagine—then rendering them later into dense prose description that often reaches heights of such eloquence that you are left with a sense of Caleb's perhaps wasted potential. The inner topography of drunken mind-escapades, the hallucinatory bad vibes and evil presences hovering just off screen, are put into sentences which unfold, at their best, like origami sculptures on fire.
The first novella, Virgins in Reverse, deals with (spoiler alert) Caleb's relationship with a bewitching woman named Cecilia who he meets working at a silent movie theater. They eventually move in together and from there begins a development that I can only say is heavily inflected with a toxic dose of Cronenberg. What starts out as the early trappings of love turns into a ghastly parasitic infestation on a psychic level; in fact, every chapter, the two characters are compared in heavy epigraphs to the emerald wasp which lays eggs in the body of the cockroach. The parallels between romantic love gone sour with the macabre contortions of the insect world are very well established.
I found that I preferred the first novella to the second, if only because the conflicts and depth of suffering were perhaps dramatized better, in the relationship, dialogue, and action between the two main characters. The Intrusion contends with a narrator who we eventually learn with delight is also Caleb, still reeling from the aftermath of his relationship with Cecilia. Up until that narrative corner was turned, the first part of The Intrusion was a little harder to follow because its reflections on alcoholic blackouts are so deeply abstract, internal, and poetic. The 3D space of drunkenness, its habits, and its metaphysical significance are mapped down to the smallest tributary.
It still was compelling and the eloquence of the written passages formed enough tent poles to keep the tent aloft, but I found myself perking up when things got more concrete, as Caleb meets James, a psychologist who wants to get to the bottom of Caleb's demonological apprehensions about his blackout drinking. The two men form a kind of strange dialogue around thinking and debating about (and imbibing) alcohol, until an old conflict begins to manifest itself between them and drives them to extremes. The climax of this novella, as with the first one, was alarming and dramatically rewarding.
LITERARY MACHINES VS GENRE CONTRAPTIONS
First of all, let me say that Gabriel Hart’s Fallout From Our Asphalt Hell is a fun book. It consists of twenty short pieces that are pretty consistently vivid, entertaining, and widely varying. Reading the book, I felt as though I were in my old hometown video store in the 90s, Village Video, looking through the shelves for a flick to rent on a Saturday night. There is something pleasantly schlocky and outré about Hart’s offerings; we are in a world where the horizon is composed of magnificent trash, death is always in the neighborhood, and you can almost see the foul droplets of alcohol-sweat on the temples of the desperate characters, as well as the periodic glitching of the old videocassettes we insert and eject as we go from story to story. Hart excels at psychotronic nightmares, outlaw mind-states soaked in alcohol, drugs, often sick humor, and distinctly American cultural detritus of the post-rock-and-roll variety. This is continued and fragmented in Fallout From Our Asphalt Hell.
The twenty stories in the book vary in length, some merely a few pages long to other self-described “novelettes.” Hart begins the collection with an introduction giving detail and context for the creation of the pieces, where they came from, and where they were finally published. (It is interesting to read this introduction as a guidebook to where in the world of indie lit things are “happening,” what publications, editors, modes, genres set the Geiger counter of coolness clicking furiously…)
A collection should present a multiplicity and a unity at the same time. There should be stylistic and thematic differences between the constituent elements but a feeling at the end that there was a singular vision, theme or sensibility that came through. The singular vision that I got from all these cross-sections and slices was that of someone who is operating within the chipped, beaten parameters of genre in order to forge their own new genre. Neo-pulp writing, pulp writing for a digital age, seems to be the terrain of writers wanting to engage with the market while not betraying their own sense of style. Hart writes crime, sci-fi, horror genre contraptions but imbues them with literacy and originality and emotion, the quest for the passages of artistic flair in the trashy late-night anthology on channel z.
Highlights for me include “The Space Between Two and Three” and “Artificial Midnight,” two of the more substantial stories in the collection. The first is a kind of heartfelt sci-fi treatment of the afterlife, positing that when someone dies, something of them is not permitted to leave, enmeshed in a net of energy put out by their online social media presence. The shrines we construct to the dead, in an updated tech form, keep them anchored in place. Jaxon is mourning his friend Skye and using an experimental drug called UPLYFT he has an encounter with her ghost? spirit? soul? who explains this mechanism of the afterlife to him, how it is akin to “a doctor refusing to cut your umbilical cord, just staring at you while you scream.” Typographically the dialogue between the two characters is represented in a very unique, otherworldly way that puts the reader in that twilight zone.
“Artificial Midnight,” I can’t describe without giving away crucial aspects of the plot and structure. It’s an extremely well-done piece of suspense fiction that I’d put up against anything by Stephen King in his best Night Shift/Skeleton Crew mode (some of my favorite King). The short story form suited this tale in a very satisfying way as it set in motion a tense, brutal countdown. I could see the mind-movie of “Artificial Midnight” so clearly in my head that I could make out the graininess of the film-stock, the grunts and wheezes of the gravediggers.
Short stories are famously hard to execute well; they’re an art form all their own that require their own economy and sense of pacing. Not all of these stories hit with me, as some seemed to be sprints, too slight and unfocused in comparison with the concentration and “dream integrity” of the other longer 5Ks. Virgins in Reverse and The Intrusion, with its prose excursions and deep characterizations, gives some strong clues as to what a future sustained literary novel from Hart would be like, as it was effectively like a novel. This collection of stories gives clues as to where the fiendish, fevered imagination might go next, what shocking cards are left in the deck.