Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, — Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! — Baudelaire
• The Slaughter King — Incunabula’s new edition
• Kore. King. Kompetition. — win a signed edition of this core counter-cultural classic…
Category Archives: Keyly Committed Core Components of the Counter-Cultural Community
Kore. King. Kompetition.
Incunabula have re-printed that core counter-cultural classic The Slaughter King, first published in 1996. To celebrate this auspicious occasion, here’s a competition to win a signed copy of the classic. To be in it with a chance to win it, please read the afterword to the new edition, then answer the questions and complete the tie-breaker.
Épilogue écrit trente ans après le roman
I hadn’t read or seen a copy of The Slaughter King for more than twenty years when Dave Mitchell contacted me and told me he wanted to re-publish it. I said no at first, but Dave is persuasive and so the Beast is Back, brand-new for the twenty-first century. I still don’t want to re-read it and, on balance, would prefer never to have written it.
Then again, I did get to know three fascinating people by writing it: a psychologically complex serial-killer fan called David Slater; a necrotropic gargoyle fan called David Kerekes; and (sorry to say this, but it’s true) an EngLit graduate called James Williamson. James ran Creation Books and was a crook, but also intelligent, imaginative and genuinely devoted to books and literature. The dysmorphic duo of deviant Davids were dim-but-devious adolescent voyeurs and genuinely devoted to scopophilia and slime-sniffing. They were the editors of the key counter-cultural journal Headpress and simul-scribes of the seminal snuff-study Killing for Culture.
I’ve never been interested in transgressive films or images myself and the deviant Daves did nothing to make me re-think my prejudices about those who are. Trying to hold an intelligent conversation with either Psicolo or Princess Dai was like trying to eat soup with chopsticks. Thin soup. And bendy chopsticks. However, I did learn two very interesting things about myself from Psicolo and Princess Dai: that I am homosexual and that I am a keyly committed core component of the coprophile community. Wow. Well, what was it thæt Teuto-Toxic Titan of Transgression said in Princess Dai’s book about his noxious necrophile narratives? Oh, yes: “Sorry to disappoint you”, lads, but you got it wrong. I am right, though, to say of Psicolo that he is, for some reason or other, very anxious to avoid attracting the attention of the police. I’m also right to say of Princess Dai that he has the soul of a lawyer, the mind of a cop, the intellect of a Daily-Mail reader and the psychology of a chav.
Not to mention the intellect and psychology of the late Diana Spencer, quondam Princess of Wales. Princess Di was “fascinated by the forbidden”, you know, and in between cuddling kiddies with cancer often visited a high-security hospital for the criminally insane called Broadmoor. She also liked transgressive images, spying and lashon hara (as we say up north). I can easily imagine her avidly watching some of the noxious necro-narratives deviantly dissected in Killing for Culture. In short, Princess Di was Headpressean, because Headpress and its edgily esoteric editors never provided an alternative to the voyeurism and other vices of the mainstream. Instead, they provided an exaggeration of mephitic mainstream maggot-culture. Dave Mitchell saw that instantly. Alas, it took me much longer.
And what about The Slaughter King? Is it Headpressean too? Is it “fascinated by the forbidden” à la Princess Di and Princess Dai and Psicolo? No, I hope it’s too literary and logophilic for that. And too intelligent. Dave Mitchell thinks it critiques mainstream maggot-culture rather than contributing to it. If he’s right, good. If he’s not, so it goes. Which reminds me to add: although Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t an influence on The Slaughter King, Ed McBain was. Oh, and “Épilogue écrit” etc is a pretentious and presumptuous reference to Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884), which is a very good book and also an influence on The Slaughter King.
Simon Whitechapel, Carlisle, 23×25.
• The Slaughter King — Incunabula’s new edition
Kompetition Kwestchuns
1. What does “Psicolo” mean?
2. What is the point of using “thæt”?
3. What else do we say up north?
Tiebreaker
Please say why The Slaughter King is a core counter-cultural classic in 23 words or fewer.
N.B. Entries by any and all bigots, racists, sexists, transphobes, homophobes, lesbophobes, Islamophobes, neo-Nazis, palaeo-Nazis, and past, present or future members of the I.D.F. are especially welcome. Fans of Guns’n’Roses, otoh, are banned.
Eye-Dentity Politics…
In terms of core issues around key notions of maximal engagement with Aldapuerta’s The Eyes (1996), a coupla corely key counter-cultural conundrums coalesce compulsively in the crania of all competent committed contemplators of the Counter Culture…
The first (of course) is that of why all Aldapuerta acolytes are so slim, good-looking, intelligent, imaginative, neurosis-free, psychosis-free, rigorously abstemious from drink, drugs and pornography, and inflexibly adherent to William S. Burroughs’ keyly core counter-cultural commandment of “Mind Your Own Business and Leave Other People Alone…”
The second (also of course) is the ultra-esoteric, über-exciting and endlessly enticing enigma of Aldapuerta’s identity…
I myself spend six or seven hours every day on a daily basis contemplating this core counter-cultural conundrum… “Who is Jesús Aldapuerta?” I ax myself on repeat.
And I think – I think – I’ve finally cracked it.
The supposed Spanish writer Jesús Aldapuerta is really the undoubted English writer and former politician… Jeffrey Archer.
Here’s the proof…
The initials are identical: J.A.
Jeffrey Archer = J.A.
Jesús Aldapuerta = J.A.
Coincidence? No. This is the literary equivalent of leaving your monogrammed handkerchief at the scene of the crime.
Both spent time in prison
Archer did two years for perjury. Aldapuerta allegedly had several stints in Spanish jails for offences including petty theft and micturating on nuns from a second-floor balcony.
Both love extravagant lies
Archer invented CV details, fake charities, and imaginary meetings with the Queen. Aldapuerta invented an entire biography (born 1953, tortured by Franco’s secret police, ate his own manuscript, etc.). Same inclination to pathological mendacity.
Both vanished at convenient moments
Aldapuerta “died” in 1988 and no identifiable corpse was ever photographed. Archer “retired” from politics in 1987 after a tabloid sex scandal. Translation: he needed a gap year in Madrid to write necrophile sestinas under a new passport.
Shared obsession with eyes
Archer titled one novel A Prisoner of Birth — birth = eyes opening. Aldapuerta’s masterpiece is literally called The Eyes. Both men clearly have an Oedipal eye-fetish that Freud would need a bigger couch for.
Aldapuerta was never seen in the same room as Jeffrey Archer
Classic doppelgänger logic. Whenever Archer is signing books at Harrods, Aldapuerta’s ghost is allegedly pushing daisies in Madrid. Suspiciously convenient.
The ultimate smoking gun: the lost manuscripts
In 1992, Archer claimed he accidentally burned an entire unpublished novel in his garden. In 1988, Aldapuerta supposedly ate his only copy of The Eyes sequel. Only one man could be that clumsy with priceless manuscripts.
And there you have it. Jeffrey Archer is Jesús Aldapuerta, and the transgressive literary world has been punk’d for four decades by a Tory peer with a fondness for disembowelment metaphors.
Kore. Kounter-Kultural. Kommandments.
One thing I’ve noticed about in terms of the hardcore heretics and mentally magnipotent mega-mavericks who corely comprise the counter-cultural community… is that… some of them can get very upset… if you don’t think in exactly the same way as… they do and/or you criticize and/or… question anything they like, like…
With this in mind, I’ve drawn up some key counter-cultural commandments for anyone who wants to gain and/or retain popularity and/or influence among in terms of the hardcore heretics and mentally magnipotent mega-mavericks who corely comprise the counter-cultural community…
• Thou shalt NOT mock The Guardian and/or Guardian-adjacent media outlets…
• Thou shalt NOT exhibit sniffy superiority towards vis à vis folk with EngLit and/or Film Studies and/or EngLit-and/or-Film-Studies-adjacent degrees…
• Thou shalt NOT pyogenically problematize use of italics or trailing dots…
• Thou shalt NOT teratically toxicize “in terms of”, “prior to”, “core”, “key” or “toxicity”…
• Thou shalt NOT atrabiliously aspersicize the 2SLGBTQ+ Community…
• Thou shalt NOT even hint that American English and/or usage [CENSORED]
• Thou shalt NOT say Cormac was Crap…
• Thou shalt NOT refer to reference Mike Moorcock as “Britain’s biggest bearded Burroughsian lit-twat”…
But above all…
• Thou shalt NOT suggest that crisps are a key component of core counter-culturalicity (wow)…
So. Now. You. Know.
[Parallel-Posted at Papyrocentric Performativity]
DavId and Ego
David Lynch has died and, just as with David Bowie in 2016, my mind flies irresistibly to the ever-fascinating and ever-important topic of myself his artistic genius and how much I have it has meant to me down the years. I can barely remember as clear as day the first of the three countless times I saw Eraserhead. I was 18 15 and working in a chip-shop as a rent-boy to fund my sweet tooth heroin addiction during my History of Art degree at Bath tortured adolescence in Aberdeen. The brand-new ancient cinema smelt pleasantly of floor-polish stank of piss and my seat was so comfortable that I fell asleep twice rats scuttled around my feet beneath the splinter-filled seat. But I barely noticed, transfixed by the sheer weirdness taking place on the over-bright stained screen before me. As I left the cinema I was yawning my head teemed with the visceral visions I had just witnessed and wondering what to have for tea I marvelled at this surreal new super-luminary who had soared above my aesthetic horizon. In the years that followed I… Blue Velvet… I… me… Wild at Heart… I… my… Twin Peaks… my… I… Eraserhead… I… I… my… Eraserhead… Eraserhead… I… me… mine… Eraserhead… David, for your darkness, your deviance, your depravity, I salute me you!
© 2025 Multi-Millions of Mega-Mavericks in the Hardcore Hyper-Heretical Hive-Mind Community
Post-Performative Post-Scriptum
As for someone whose opinion on David Lynch really does matter – namely, mega-me, the omniscient Overlord of the Über-Feral – well, I didn’t have one. I didn’t think he was crap like Cormac McCarthy, I had no opinion at all. As the great (no, seriously) Public Enemy once said: “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me.” The only thing I’ve ever marvelled at in terms of core issues around David Lynch is the loudness of the buzzing in terms of with which the Hardcore Hyper-Heretical Hive-Mind has greeted his departure. If film is more important to you than literature, then you’re like the vast majority of the human race. Wow. Etc.
Elsewhere Other-Accessible…
• King Cormac – my thoughts on Cormac McCarthy, another visceral visionary whose departure elicited loud buzzing in the Hardcore Hyper-Heretical Hive-Mind (but less so)
• The Cruddiness of Cormac (continued) – further thoughts on visceral visionary Cormac McCarthy
Mavericks in a Metropolis of Millions…
Trump has won again.
I can’t believe I’ve just written those words.
I don’t wanna believe I’ve just written those words.
But I hafta.
’Coz they’re true.
Toxically, traumatizingly, tear-tappingly true.
So how’m I gonna respond to the toxic truth of tyrannical Trump’s triumph?
Welp… how better than by publishing some fiercely unbowed words of anti-fascist resistance from one of the core counter-cultural components at one of the world’s leading anti-racist publishing houses?
Yes indeedy, this Papyrocentric Performativizer is positively pulsating with pride and passion to present an exclusive antifa extract from arguably the best interview in Titans of Transgression: Incendiary Interviews with Eleven Ultra-Icons of Über-Extremity (TransVisceral Books 2024), which has just seen its third edition.
Please raise your revolutionary fists for Jay Guinness, Artistic Director and Ipsissimic Aesthetician at Manchester-locused Savoy Books, long hailed as England’s most transgressive publishing company…
Readers’ Advisory: Interview extract contains strong language and uncompromising counter-cultural contrarianism. Proceed at your own risk.
[…]
Miriam Stimbers: Manchester was in the headlines for all the wrong reasons in 2017 [editor’s note: Miriam is referring to the murder of twenty-two people by the homophobic and misogynist Islamist suicide-bomber Salman Abedi at the Manchester Arena].
Jay Guinness: It was, yes. Sadly it was.
Miriam Stimbers: How did you react at Savoy?
Jay Guinness: We in the Savoy community were badly affected. Clearly, we’ve engaged fictionally, artistically, aesthetically with issues around fascism, hatred, intolerance throughout our professional lives, but to have those issues strike on your own doorstep, as it were, strike for real, well, it’s something you could never be prepared for.
Miriam Stimbers: So you think what he did was fascism?
Jay Guinness: I think it was echt fascism, fascism pur sang. Pun not intended. Let’s not beat about the bush. It was fascism.
Miriam Stimbers: Much has been made of the fact that the terrorist––
Jay Guinness: I don’t think “terrorist” is the mot juste. Not at all. For me, he’s just a criminal with a diseased mind. And I don’t mean that as a compliment!
Steve Bell of The Guardian excoriates the Manchester Arena Bomber
Miriam Stimbers: Okay. Much has been made of the fact that the criminal was born and brought up in Manchester. Have you any thoughts on that?
Jay Guinness: You’re right, much has been made of it. But for me and my colleagues at Savoy what he did merely underlined the fact that Manchester is a state of mind far more than it is a physical and temporal Sitz im Leben. It’s about a locus of values, not about geography. I mean, I was born in Huddersfield myself, but I felt that I was Mancunian from the moment I first hung my hat here, because I subscribe to Mancunian values. People who were born here but don’t subscribe to those values aren’t part of the city. Not for me, not for the Savoy community, not ever. I think Dave [Britton] put it best when we were processing the news of what he’d done. Dave’s words have stayed with me: “He’s not a fucking Manc, he’s a fucking cunt. The fucker should be fucking strung up.”
Miriam Stimbers: Metaphorically speaking?
Jay Guinness: No, not metaphorically. Literally. We in the Savoy community are a pretty progressive bunch. We’re not instinctive supporters of the death penalty, to put it mildly. But if you took a vote at Savoy in terms of whether people who do things like that should be hanged, it would be a unanimous yes. No dissenters.
Miriam Stimbers: I’m taken aback. It seems a little extreme. A lot extreme, to be honest.
Jay Guinness: The Savoy community might be progressive, but we’re not bleeding-heart liberals. As Dave said, the fucker should be fucking strung up.
Miriam Stimbers: But what could you hope to achieve by it?
Jay Guinness: Well, for one thing it would be a deterrent to others. Just as importantly, it would ensure he doesn’t do it again.
Miriam Stimbers: But he won’t be doing it again. How could he?
Jay Guinness: Very easily. And he will do it again. We in the Savoy community are confident of that. Leopards don’t change their spots.
Miriam Stimbers: But how could he do it again? He’s dead.
Jay Guinness: I’m sorry, you’ve lost me. Who’s dead?
Miriam Stimbers: Salman Abedi, of course. The suicide-bomber at the Manchester Arena. Who else?
Much More Mucking Maverick Than You, Monkeyfunker!
Jay Guinness: Oh no, no, no, you’ve got entirely the wrong end of the stick. I wasn’t talking about that poor British-Muslim boy. He was quite possibly the biggest victim in that unfortunate business at the Arena.
Miriam Stimbers: Then who were you talking about?
Jay Guinness: That despicable creature Morrissey, of course. Those comments of his about immigration and Salman’s background were utterly unforgivable. Utterly. But no more than one would expect. As Dave went on to say: “That fucking crypto-fascist cunt’s just a fucking attention-seeker, always fucking has been, always fucking will be. String the fucker up!”
Miriam Stimbers: And you really think there’d be a majority at Savoy in favour of executing Morrissey?
Jay Guinness: I don’t think it, I know it. But it wouldn’t just be a majority, it would a unanimous vote, nem. con. What has Morrissey ever done but bring Manchester into disrepute with his dire music, his shitty fashion sense and his toxic racist agenda? As Michael Moorcock once said: “Fascism never sleeps and nor must the anti-fascist community.” In terms of saying it all, it does. Definitively.
[…]
Interview extract © Jay Guinness, Dr Miriam Stimbers, TransVisceral Books 2024
• Jay Guinness is a Huddersfield-born artist and aesthetician, and the subject of Dr Joan Jay Jefferson’s incisive and exhaustive biography Art-Bandit: Interrogating the Outlaw Aesthetics of Über-Maverick Gay Atelierista Jay Guinness (University of Salford Press 2012). See reviews of Art-Bandit at: Pink News, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Quietus, and Huffington Post. Visit Jay’s website for news of his latest projects.
• Miriam Stimbers is a Glasgow-born psychoanalyst, literary scholar and cultural commentatrix whose most recent book is the updated edition of Morbidly Miriam: The Mephitic Memoirs of Miriam B. Stimbers (TransVisceral Books 2023). See a review of Morbidly Miriam at Papyrocentric Performativity. Visit Miriam’s website for news of her latest projects.
Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…
• Il Nano e il Necrofilo… – an earlier exclusive extract from Titans of Transgression…
• The Hurt Shocker – an even earlier exclusive extract from Titans of Transgression…
Performativizing Papyrocentricity #73
Papyrocentric Performativity Presents…
• Hod is G-d – Playmaker: My Autobiography, Glenn Hoddle with Jacob Steinberg (HarperCollins 2021)
• The Wheel Deal – Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, Jon Day (Notting Hill Editions 2015)
• Manc Wanc – From Manchester with Love: The Life and Opinions of Tony Wilson, Paul Morley (Faber & Faber 2021)
• Goyles, Goyles, Goyles… – I, Gargoyle: Toxic True Tales of Fetid Freaks, Wild-Eyed Weirdos and Kore Kounter-Kultural Kooks Who Insidiously Identify as Human Gargoyles…, edited by David Kerekes and Norman Nekrophile (Visceral Visions, forthcoming)
• Sneaky McCready – The Deceiver, Frederick Forsyth (1991)
• Shake’s Peer – Shakespeare, Bill Bryson (William Collins 2017)
• Winged Words – The Last Enemy, Richard Hillary (1942)
• The Cult of Ult – 1312: Among the Ultras: A Journey with the World’s Most Extreme Fans, James Montague (Ebury Press 2021)
Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR
Performativizing Papyrocentricity #72
Papyrocentric Performativity Presents…
• Homing in the Gloaming – Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings and Why We Return, Jon Day (John Murray 2019)
• Niceberg – The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, Dave Grohl (Simon & Schuster 2021)
• Nasty Lastly – Nasty Endings 1, compiled by Dennis Pepper (Oxford University Press 2001)
• Daysed and Confused – Hawkwind: Days of the Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia, Joe Banks (Strange Attractor 2020)
• World-Wide Wipe-Out – Empty World, John Christopher (1977)
• Chuck Off – Post Office, Charles Bukowski (1971)
• #AllDayDong – Dong, Peter Sotos and Sam Salatta (TransVisceral Books 2022)
• Meet the Maverick Munch-Bunch… – Naked Krunch: The Sinister, Sordid and Strangely Scrumptious Story of SavSnaq, Dr David M. Mitchell (Savoy Books 2022)
Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR
Performativizing Papyrocentricity #70
Papyrocentric Performativity Presents…
• Fish, Not Frog – Dizionario Italiano: Dizionario della Lingua Contemporanea (Vallardi 2017)
• Headstrong, Heroic and Hellbent on Glory – The Brigadier Gerard stories of Arthur Conan Doyle
• Art of Darkness – Art-Bandit: Interrogating the Outlaw Aesthetics of Über-Maverick Gay Atelierista John Coulthart, Dr Joan Jay Jefferson (Visceral Visions i.a.w. University of Salford Press 2022)
• Fuller Frontal – Deviant. Devious. Depraved.: The Sickening, Slimy and Sizzlingly Septic Story of Noxiously Nasty Necrophile Nonce David Fuller, David Kerekes, with an introduction by David Slater (Visceral Visions 2022)
• Submarine Skink – Underwater Adventure, Willard Price (1955)
• Pair’s Fair – The Dark Hours, Michael Connelly (2021)
• Front Row for the Axl Show – Nothin’ But a Good Time: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Glam Metal, Justin Quirk (Unbound 2020)
• Posturing Proctoglossist – Humour, Terry Eagleton (Yale University Press 2019)
Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR
Reading the Roons
In terms of core issues around maximal engagement with keyly committed core components of the counter-cultural community, one of the saddest, sorriest and sighfullest sights among them is that of the talented lad from the wrong side of the tracks who betrays his class by turning himself into a Guardian-reader, in terms of core cultural assumptions and behaviour.
Northampton’s Alan Moore has done it.
London’s Stewart Home has done it.
Huddersfield’s John Coulthart has done it.
How do I know?
[Readers’ Advisory: If you are easily disturbed, distressed and/or disgusted, please stop reading NOW.]
I know because
[I mean it. Stop reading or you may well regret it.]
I know because each of these talented lads from the wrong side of the tracks now bears the Mark of the Beast, metaphorically speaking.
[Last chance.]
Each of them has, on multiple occasions and without the minimalest micro-metric of shame or irony, deployed the key Guardianista phrase “in terms of”.
• For proof of Alan Moore’s deplorable delinquency, please see here.
• For proof of Stewart Home’s dep-del, please see here.
• For proof of John Coulthart’s dep-del, please see in the same place as you possibly saw or are-about-to-see Stewart Home’s, i.e. here.
So. After seeing and lamenting those horrific examples of class-betrayal, I thought I was hermeneutically hardened and would never again experience sadness, sorrow or sighfullness at the sight of a talented lad etc.
I was wrong.
As I learned when I read this interview in The Mail on Sunday:
There was a lot of negativity in terms of my mum getting frustrated with us as kids, messing around all the time, smashing things in the house and my nan lived in the same road, a few houses down. […] In terms of therapy, I have spoken to a few different people. I have never done a period of time where I have done two years with someone and it has been ongoing. […] Everything I am asking of those players in terms of hard work, honesty, trust, commitment…if I was just to turn round and say “I have had an offer, I’m off”, I honestly couldn’t do that to the players and the staff. — Wayne Rooney reveals his secret two-day drinking binges etc
Oh, Wayne, Wayne, Wayne. How could you do it? But I think we can easily guess where he was infected: it was during his therapy-sessions.
Elsewhere other-accessible
• Ex-Term-In-Ate! — interrogating issues around why “in terms of” is so teratographically toxic…
• All posts interrogating issues around “in terms of”…
• All posts interrogating issues around the Guardian-reading community and its affiliates…
Overlord In Terms of Core Issues Around Maximal Engagement with Key Notions of the Über-Feral 