I’m terrifically excited to announce that my newest book, Splatter von Rainbow, is available for purchase today through the usual monopolized channels. Its genesis and completion was a strange and windy road. It started off as a sort of competition piece for a press that did not release it; they’d asked that I do something inspired by John Waters, Thomas Ligotti, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, if memory serves, which it usually doesn’t. Yet, upon searching an old email from 2015, here was the original proposal: “4. A 70s b-movie adaptation of Thomas Ligotti directed by the love child of Alejandro Jodorowsky and John Waters.
“A mannikin falls in love with a drag queen without arms and a detachable head which has floated away to outer space. They decide to elope, but the mannikin has previously been cursed and made a devilish deal with a headless horseman sorcerer who banishes them to exist permanently in a dream within a dream in order to fulfill his earlier promise of making the mannikin a real woman at long last. They end up as slaves to a monstrous reptile race on an endless desert where they must strip and fornicate with monsters for the enjoyment of the reptiles to gain closer eyeball proximity in their glass helmets at night. Only by killing visions of their unborn children will holographic images of them appear in each other’s cells at midnight so they might one day perform a simulacrum of making love and both retract their souls back to the two eternal warrior women they have lived and loved as through an infinite number of past lives.”
The end result, after years of revisions, second-guesses, is quite different, as the new synopsis will attest (browsable through the usual monopolized channels).
Working on this book has been an unusual and beautiful experience, maybe even more so than other works I’ve attempted to craft, in its various transformations—but what stands out most is my experience working and living and Bolivia, during which I wrote the bulk of it and to which I returned and expanded over the years, reflecting upon and journeying through both the real and unreal feelings I experienced during that time.
I remember one afternoon composing some of its best sections during a feverish daydream while my wife and her art instructor wandered off in Valley de Las Animas. It was an unforgettable afternoon, one which will remind me for the rest of my life of the transformative experience of creating art, the thrill of composition, the endless channelling of chilling yet alluring voices from a beyond, an extension and questioning of what it means to be human, an expansion and treading past the very realms of existence itself.
Thanks to Nihilism Revised, S.C. Burke, and all the writes, friends, and readers who challenged and questioned me along the way.
nicholauspatnaude 