A VICTOR RENQUIST MISSION STATEMENT

The good news for those of you who like this kind of thing is that the novel currently designated Renquist V is now underway. Every day I write the book. But, needless to say, everyday I also debate with myself as to the prevailing degree of my comparative psychosis. Each time I prepare to hunch over the keyboard, I tremble at just how recklessly I am flying in the teeth of economic common sense. The Renquist Quartet, at best, has a cult following. And now I want to do a fifth book that takes it one or more steps beyond, into an extra dimension of string-theory, pan-galactic surrealism? Plus I am doing all this in the grim depths of a dying world economy, and when bright young people in cocktail lounges claim from the depths of their lipstick that fiction is just soooo dead. And all I can do is thank the lord I drink my whiskey clear.
I have uneasily to admit I start this work with no idea how it will be transmitted to the reader, but I believe I may keep those of you who are interested posted with dispatches from the process. I even debate posting the odd teasing excerpt. But teasing for what? All I know for sure is that the thousand year-old Victor Renquist must finally face his makers – and even his infinitely prolonged mortality – as the nephilim finally return to check on their planetary experiment after an absence of twelve thousand years. And the really neat contrivance will be, in the course of the writing, to pull out every trick I know and also invent a few more until – I profoundly hope – I have shaken down a high-energy, high-impact, rapid-fire, cunningly destructed style of fragmentation (with some fancy post-Uncle Bill fabricated language) which I hope will make reading more fun than crystal meth, but failing that, might just drive both of us crazy.
At times I ask myself why I don’t be done with all nosferatu fiction and just dig in and write a whole crypto-history of everything since the extraterrestrial genetic intervention around 10,000 BC – just when we were thawing out from the last major ice age – and descend via Baalbeck, the Dionysians, the Albigensian Cathars, the Shogunates, the Black Hand, Antarctic Nazis, MKULTRA, HAARP, and the Lizard Kings to the present and beyond. If I was to keep a straight face and pretend every fucking demented word of it was true, I’d be in the goddamned Graham Hancock business. But screw that. I mean, where would be the poetry? Where would be the bop that just won’t stop? And whence would go my artist’s soul? Then a small quiet voice suggests I could maybe do both and my whole body aches for a cigarette.

There may be more of this…