episode icon by Bigmac McCarthy
Rare Candy is a hub of essays and audio projects exploring everything from alternative medicine and spirituality to the moon's true nature and the archives of Art Bell. Broadcast kings Glen Rockney and Crypto Psi host hard-hitting guests across every spectrum, including Whitney Webb, Jeremy Loffredo, Rehmannia Dean Thomas, and for the occasional mental palette cleanser, the Agitator boys.
You can find a lot of collabos between RC and Agitator scrolling through either of our broadcastographies. Most recently, Glen invited your boy back on some book club type shit to chop it up about Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero.
It's a banger episode in which Glen and I share our own (less than) Less Than Zero stories and also go in on why every interpretation of this book as nihilistic couldn't be more wrong.
Of BEE's work, I had only read American Psycho before, and—different as they are in plenty of ways—there's a distinct style present in both novels that have influenced literature to the point of infection. The disaffected voice, the pitch black sense of humor, the existentialism dripped out in material obsession... there's no Palahniuk without Ellis, and there's no anyone else worth reading without Palahniuk.
My own debut novel carries traces of Less Than Zero in its DNA, even though I wrote it seven years before reading Ellis’ spin on a disaffected narrator meandering through drug abuse and transactional relationships before reaching a sort of existential crossroads.
On the crossroads tip, a lot of the meandering disaffectedness and mundane surrealism that was the essence of my hoodrat noir writing remains present in the shit I'm working on now, but it's no longer the framework I'm building on. It's more just part of the raw material as it's mixed together. Since Mercy, I've only been interested in experimenting with pulp and genre fiction. I'll have four examples of this new direction dropping throughout the year.
You can pre-order the first, a sample platter of styles before and after this new direction, right chea.