THE MAN WHO MURDERED HIS MUSE by James Champagne

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16 April 2019
After the Notre Dame extravaganza yesterday, be warned that there is a burning cathedral in this chapbook and a blazing steeple….
THE MAN WHO MURDERED HIS MUSE
by James Champagne
“A writer is someone who gives away that which is most original to him, finally losing, in this manner, his whole substance. That is why writers are so uninteresting as a rule and I mean that quite seriously: writers are people who have exhausted themselves. Only the dregs of themselves still exist; they are pitiful marionettes.”
… and, in that sense, highly appropriate and synchronous, as the last thing I read a few hours ago here was EUREMA’S DAM by R.A. Lafferty that I now deem a literary masterpiece, and I am hoping it rubs itself off on this chapbook that I have chosen to read next. And it sort of does, and vice versa. An engaging, page-turning story with many intriguing references to literary, art and music things, a story about a goth girl called Hamsa Cauldron, with an acromegalic dad, working in a bar to make things stretch as a student, meets Hector Teufel who is a once successful horror genre blockbuster of the 80s now with writer’s block, and if I told you what they talked about and what happened, as implied by this chapbook’s title, and the outcome in the Bungalow House, you would not thank me. Rest assured it is thought-provoking, disturbing and disarmingly inspiring. Tulpas and Blackstar. And I suspect Hamsa partook of the white blood purely to write this.
Left is the drawing referenced in the text that is meant to look like Hector. It also looks like me when younger and my name assonates with Dis in Dante, and, oh yes, my own bungalow house where I have lived for the last twenty odd years is shown to the right, screaming without a door…My previous reviews of James Champagne: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/james-champagne/