It’s October, the weather is cool and cloudy with rain in the forecast, the book is coming together sexily, and I’m happier than a pig in shit.  I don’t think I need to remind my dear reader that this is the beginning of the half of the year when my mood elevates, the writing gets better, and everything is just generally, nebulously better (the other half of the year, is, of course, during those hot and rotten months between April and September, during which months I become quite cranky and tend to by prone to long fits of bitching).  The night are getting longer and cooler, and the overall spookiness level is increasing.

Speaking of spooky, guess who kicked the bucket on October 7, 1849?  You guessed it.  The curtain dropped with a fucking thud on the epic, booze-soaked opera of Edgar Allan Poe.  It’s a tad ironic: despite being the man who pretty much invented the modern detective story, his own final act remains the most unsolved, messy whodunit of them all.  No neat and tidy conclusion here…no.  Poe’s exit from this mortal coil was a masterclass in gothic squalor, a final poem written in gutter water and cheap whiskey.

In case you’re fuzzy on the details, let’s rewind the tape.  Four days prior, our man Poe – the architect of premature burials and talking ravens, the illustrious potentate of existential dread (fuck yeah!) – is discovered face-down in the Baltimore muck.  He’s not in his own clothes, of course, but some poor bastard’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs, looking like a scarecrow that lost a fistfight with a hurricane.  He’s delirious, babbling incoherently, and repeatedly calling out for a ghost named “Reynolds.”  It’s exactly the kind of scene you’d expect to find in one of his stories…a perfect, sordid tableau of a live lived on the jagged edge of brilliance and ruin.

And that man knew how to live.  He wasn’t a typical, delicate flower of the literary scene.  Fuck no…this was Poe.  He dueled with critics, swam against the current of public opinion, and funded his own genius out-of-pocket while dodging creditors like a man who couldn’t pay his bills.  He mainlined his opium-laced nightmares directly onto the page, creating worlds of horror that would later inspire whole generations of writers from Lovecraft to King.  He gave us C. Auguste Dupin, the original armchair detective, and laid the foundation for every Sherlock to follow.  He was a literary machine, churning out stories of such psychological depth that they make most modern thrillers look like kids’ bedtime stories.

So what was it that finally punched his ticket?  The official record is a blank stare…the bureaucratic shrug.  So, of course, there are theories: was it rabies?  A brain tumor?  Or was is something far more fittingly sordid?  Keep in mind, Baltimore in the 19th century was a snake pit of political corruption, and election days were notorious for “cooping”  – a practice where unwilling citizens were drugged, beaten, and forced to vote multiple times.  The image of Poe, the ultimate anti-authoritarian, being dragged from polling station to polling station by a gang of political thugs is almost too darkly poetic not to be true.

He died in a hospital bed, still ranting, still lost in the labyrinth of his own mind.  His final words were reportedly, “Lord, help my poor soul.”  A fitting, desperate plea from a man who spent his entire career mapping the darkest corners of the human spirit.  He was only 40.

Fortunately for us, death didn’t silence Poe.  It immortalized him.  It transformed his obituary into the ultimate noir thriller, an eternal riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a bottle of shitty gin.  His end wasn’t a tragedy; it was his final literary contribution.  A perfectly crafted, perpetually maddening, and profoundly badass disappearing act.  Quoth the Raven, nevermore?  Horse feathers.  The bird is still flying.

N.P.: “7th Symphony – Second Movement – Lofi Version” – ClassicFi, Ludwig van Beethoven

Happy Saturday, dear reader.  And what a glorious Saturday morning it is.  I slept my ass off last night.  I’ve been missing a lot of sleep the last few weeks, staying up late or waking up early to work on the book.  And it’s absolutely been worth it, but it’s been not without its drawbacks, the main one being I’m tired all the goddamn time.  So last night was much needed.  Woke up fresh as a fucking daisy.

Speaking of using the night for things other than sleep, the Badass Literary Calendar tells us that on this day in 1941, in the sultry, jazz-soaked, and decadently decaying heart of New Orleans, Anne Rice was born…the woman who would go on to redefine vampires, gothic fiction, and, really, the entire concept of brooding immortality.

Anne Rice conjured her worlds with a floridity that many found to be a bit much, but given her subject matter, I think her rococo style, going on for pages about the décor of a room, worked.  She gave us worlds where the night was always young, the wine was always red (and occasionally hemoglobin-rich), and the existential crises were as thick as the fog rolling off the Mississippi.  She gave us Lestat, the rockstar vampire with a God complex and a penchant for melodrama that made Hamlet look like a well-adjusted life coach.  She gave us Louis, the original sad boy, who could out-emo any eyeliner-wearing, Cure-listening teenager in the 80s.  And she gave us a New Orleans that was equal parts haunted mansion and hallucination, a place where the line between the living and the dead was as thin as one of her overly-described lace curtains.

But Anne didn’t limit herself to vampires.  She tackled witches, mummies, and even Jesus Christ himself with the same fearless, no-holds-barred approach.  She was a literary badass who didn’t give a damn about genre conventions or what the critics thought.  She wrote what she wanted, how she wanted, and in doing so, she inspired generations of writers, readers, and goth kids who finally felt seen.

So today, we raise a glass (or a goblet, if you’re feeling fancy and really want to get into the spirit of things) to Anne Rice.  Her genius, her audacity, and her ability to make the macabre feel downright sexy.  Happy Birthday, Anne.  The world is a darker, more deliciously twisted place because of you.

And to the aspiring writers out there: take a page from Anne’s book.  Write fearlessly.  Write passionately.  And for the love of all that is unholy, don’t be afraid to get a little weird.
Cheers to the Queen of the Damned.  May her legacy live forever – just like her vampires.

N.P.: “A Funeral Of A Provincial Vampire” – Jelonek

These goddamn calendar pages are just flying by these days, dear reader.  Suddenly, somehow, it’s October 3rd.  If you’ve been properly maintaining your Badass Literary Calendar, you know today is a day for pouring some out in honor of two absolute juggernauts of the American sentence who decided to check out on this very date, exactly century apart.

First up is George Bancroft.  The O.G. died October 3rd, 1891.  If you were educated before the Indoctrination began, you’d know him as the “Father of American History,” which is a title that sounds as exciting as a purgatorial tax seminar.  This badass decided to write the entire history of the United States, from its grubby colonial beginnings right up to the messy, post-war present of his time.  It’s a multi-volume, life-swallowing epic that he chipped away at for half a century.  Just like we like it: audacious.  It’s the literary equivalent of deciding to build a pyramid by yourself, armed with nothing but a rusty shovel and the caesarian certainty that you, and you along, can wrestle the sprawling, chaotic narrative of a nation onto the page.

Then, exactly one hundred years to the day later, the universe does it again.  October 3rd back in ’38, Thomas Wolfe cashed in his chips.  Dude was a human volcano, spewing forth a torrential lava flow of prose that threatened to consume everything in its path.  And he was not a man of quiet contemplation.  Nope.  He was six-and-a-half feet tall who wrote standing up, using the top of his refrigerator as a desk, scribbling furiously into ledgers.

His book, big behemoth bastards like Look Homeward, Angel, are sprawling, autobiographical fever dreams.  Wolfe seems to be attempting to devour the entire world and spit it back out as art.  He gets the loneliness of being a giant in a world built for smaller men.  His sentences go on for miles, looping and spiraling intensely.

What do these two have to do with each other, other than sharing a birthday?  Not a goddamn thing, I’m guessing.  One was a historian who wrote his nation’s story, and a novelist who wrote his own, but both had a uniquely American brand of ballsy, lunatic ambition.

Pour one out.  For George Bancroft, the architect of a national myth.  Then pour another for Thomas Wolfe, the badass who tried to put the whole human experience into words.  Cheers.

N.P.: “Way Down We Go” – Rev Theory, Art of Dying, ashpvnk

Hot damn, dear reader!  Finally, after long last, it is October!  The degree to which this pleases me cannot be overstated.  Honestly, I’m fucking giddy.

There were some dark times over the summer when I doubted we would get here, but got here we did, dear reader.

So here we are again, staring down the barrel of October 1st, a date that hangs in the literary calendar like a loaded question mark, dripping with both high-octane dread and the faint, sweet smell of decay.  A real Janus-faced bastard of a day.  It’s the kind of day that makes you want to pour a tall glass of something brown and unforgiving before the sun has even bothered to punch its timecard, just to steady the hands, but that could be said for any day, lately.

On this day, back in 2013, the big man himself, Tom Clancy, cashed in his chips.  He checked out, shuffled off this mortal coil, and presumably went to that great Situation Room in the sky.  Pour one out.  The architect of the modern techno-thriller, a man who could probably field-strip a nuclear submarine with his eyes closed, left the building.  His books were like weaponized instruction manuals wrapped in plot, and I remain a big fan.  Page after page or acronyms, ballistics data, and the kind of geopolitical chess games that make your teeth ache.  He was the undisputed king of a certain kind of meticulously researched, hardware-heavy America mythmaking.  A legend.

Also on this day, way back in 1915, a quiet, neurotic Czech genius named Franz Kafka unleashed The Metamorphosis upon an unsuspecting world.  While Clancy was building worlds out of steel, sonar, and sheer patriotic will, Kafka was busy documenting the quiet implosion of one.

Think about it, dear reader.  On one hand, you’ve got Jack Ryan saving the world from nuclear annihilation with a clear-eyed certainty that is a refreshing thing these days.  It’s a universe of good guys, bad guys, and the unbelievably cool gear they use to blow each other up.

On the other hand, you’ve got poor Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who wakes up one morning to find he has become a monstrous insect.  Not a hero.  Not a spy.  Just a guy, now a goddamn bug.  A giant, disgusting bug.  His big conflict isn’t stopping a war; it’s trying to roll over in bed without his new carapace getting stuck.  His existential crisis isn’t about the fate of nations; it’s about his family locking him in his room and occasionally shoving scraps under the door.

October 1st gives us both the ultimate external thriller and the ultimate internal horror show.  The hero who controls everything, and the victim who controls absolutely nothing, not even his own body.  It’s the duality of the modern condition served up on a single, surreal platter.  One narrative is about mastering the complex machinery of the outside world, and the other is about being utterly betrayed by the simple machinery of your own self.

It’s enough to give a man whiplash.  One minute you’re deep in the Pentagon, mapping out strike patterns, and the next you’re stuck on your back in a dusty room, wiggling your new antennae and wondering if your dad is going to try to kill you with an apple again.  It’s the whole damn human experience, from global domination to personal disintegration, all crashed together on a single autumn day.

So today let’s raise a glass to Tom Clancy, the master of the mission.  And raise another to Franz Kafka, the patron saint of waking up and realizing the mission is FUBAR.  They’re two sides of the same debased coin.

N.P.: “Thor” – Errrilaz

Apologies for my absence, dear reader.  The book has me busy, life is constantly happening, and I had unusual social obligations to meet.  They were unusual because I usually ignore most social obligations, since they seem to me to be pointless and silly.  Anyway, I’ve been busy.  More on the book soon, but for now…today’s business.

September 30, 1924.  Somewhere in the humid, gothic sprawl of New Orleans, a baby was born who would grow up to be the kind of writer that makes other writers want to either quit or drink themselves into oblivion trying to keep up.  Truman Capote, the man, the myth, the walking contradiction in a bespoke suit, was born on this day.  And if he were here, you can be your last cigarette he’d be holding court at some dimly lit bar, sipping something expensive, and eviscerating everyone in the room with that razor-sharp tongue of his.

Capote was a goddamn spectacle.  A high-wire act of wit, charm, and venom, all wrapped up in a voice that could cut glass.  He gave us Breakfast at Tiffany’s, an almost perfect novella, and In Cold Blood, a book that basically invented a whole new genre while making us all question whether we’re the good guys or just slightly better-dressed villains.

But let’s not kid ourselves – Truman wasn’t just about the words.  He was a true scenester…he was about the drama, the show.  He threw parties that make Gatsby look like a PTA meeting.  He burned bridges with the kind of flair that made you want to applaud even as the flames licked at your own feet.  He was the best kind of genius: a troublemaker, a provocateur, a man who knew that being boring was the only real sin.

So here’s to you, Truman…the man who taught us to turn your life into art and turn that art into legend.  Like any great author, he made us laugh, cry, and occasionally want to punch him in the face.  Happy birthday…the world’s a little duller without you.

I might go re-read Music for Chameleons and drink something that burns on the way down.  Because, as Truman taught me, life’s too short for cheap booze and bad prose.

N.P.: “Skulls” – Pearce Roswell

Some days are for quiet reflection, dear reader.  This is not one of them.  This is a day for the guys who bet the whole goddamn farm, the ones who drew the maps, and the one who chronicled the beautiful, roaring decay of it all.  So pour a glass of whatever vintage your desk whiskey is this month, and let’s get to it.

First up: 1493.  Christopher Columbus, not a year after stumbling upon what he insisted was the scenic route to India, decides to double down.  Forget one rickety voyage; this time he’s back with a goddamn armada.  Seventeen ships and 1,200 men, all chomping at the proverbial bit to colonize the New World.  It was a high-seas hostile takeover bid, funded by royals who were probably just tired of hearing him talk.  This second trip was about planting flags and laying claim, a sort of primordial manifest destiny with more scurvy.

Fast forward to 1789.  The smoke from the revolution has barely cleared, and the ink on the Constitution is still wet.  So, being on a bit of a roll, the founding fathers created the Judiciary Act.  They conjure the Supreme Court and the Attorney General out of thin air.  With these, the founders created a legal framework meant to put a leash of the very power they’d just fought to seize.  It’s the moment the wild, screaming spirit of rebellion put on a robe and picked up a gavel.

And then, the main event for our kind of degenerate: 1896.  F. Scott Fitzgerald is born in St. Paul, Minnesota.  This is the origin story of the man who would document the glittering rot at the core of the American Dream.  Mainlining the Jazz Age, Scott and Zelda burned through life with the kind of glorious, self-destructive velocity that lesser souls can only read about.  His prose was sharper than a broken champagne glass.  And his life was a cautionary tale wrapped in glamour.  He partied with Hemmingway, wrestled with his own demons in public, and wrote it all down in sentences so perfect they make you want to drink and cry.  He was an amazing failure, and the patron saint of anyone who’s ever believed that a little excess is the only way to live.  Amen.

So here’s to September 24.  A day that reminds us that neither history nor great art are made by the timid.

N.P.: “Back in Black (Soul)” – FAKE MUSIC