TIH 615: Danger Slater on Absurd Films and Books, Getting Weird with Your Writing, and Difficulties Marketing Bizarre Books

Michael David Wilson 0:28
Welcome to This Is Horror, a podcast for readers, writers and creators. I'm Michael David Wilson, and every episode, alongside my co host, Bob Pastorella, we chat with the world's best writers about writing, life lessons, creativity and much more. Today is another special dad is boy episode, although the next few episodes are kind of dad is boy tangential, because what it is is it's me and Bob talking to people who blurb daddy's boy writers who perhaps, if you enjoy their work, you might enjoy my work. Specifically, dad is boy and today, oh my goodness, it's the world's most flammable writer. It is dangerous. Later, he's the author of a variety of books including Starla house of rot. I will rot without you puppet skin. And he digs a hole I love dangerous later, both as a person and as a writer, he does such interesting things, and perhaps of all the writers, it seemed that I feel kind of the deepest kinship in terms of just putting out this absurd and this bizarre work. So this conversation, we were originally going to be talking about Absurdism. We do talk about that, but we go in all sorts of directions. It was a fun one to have. I hope it's a fun one to listen to, but before we get into that, a quick advert break,

Bob Pastorella 2:14
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RJ Bayley 2:46
It was as if the video had unzipped my skin, slunk inside my tapered flesh, and become one with me.

Bob Pastorella 2:55
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Michael David Wilson 3:23
Okay, here it is. We're talking Absurdism with dangerous later on. This Is Horror India. Welcome back to This Is Horror. Yes,

Danger Slater 3:38
thank you for having me back again so soon after the last appearance, too. So, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 3:43
I think before it had been multiple years, and this time it's been about four months, so a considerably quicker turn around. Next

Danger Slater 3:52
time it's going to be one month, then I'm going to be the host of the show.

Michael David Wilson 4:02
You know, I interviewed Bob, then he was the guest host, and that was a guest host. Yeah, you were the guest host, then you became the permanent host. So, yeah, maybe we should just start calling it. This is danger. This

Danger Slater 4:21
is, I'm I'm into it,

Michael David Wilson 4:24
yeah? The The only problem is, if you ever stop hosting, then it all falls apart, because this isn't danger, yeah,

Danger Slater 4:34
change the name of the show. This isn't danger, yeah? Okay, fantastic. This is in danger with Michael, David, Bob master, Ella,

Michael David Wilson 4:48
so I mean, in in the last four months, what have been the highlights? What have been the low lights? Give us your review of life, of anything I'm.

Danger Slater 5:02
I don't know nothing. It feels like nothing can happen in four months, especially with writing, like, you could finish a whole book, but like, it's not like, it's published yet, you know? So it's like, maybe I'm editing things, like, I'm just kind of, this happens when my mom calls me and she's like, Oh, how's the writing going? I'm like, I'm super busy, and also have nothing to report. Like it's there's like, you're kind of in this gray zone 90% of the time, until the moment comes when the book is actually coming out. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 5:34
so I'm inadvertently giving you kind of flashbacks of like, is this mom? Is this mom on the call? Why are you asking me these questions? Are you gonna tell me that you've ordered a Guinness Book of Records? Are

Danger Slater 5:49
you gonna ask me if I'm eating good? Are you? Are you gonna wonder what I'm visiting next?

Michael David Wilson 5:57
The only thing is, we established in the previous time you were on, I will ask about food. Is about kit Kathe that is now the only kind of dietary concern that I have. It's,

Danger Slater 6:10
it's slowed down for me. I haven't, I haven't tried any new ones in the past four months. Like, the thing is, like, we had our a place called Ujamaa in town, which is has all the, all the flavors. It's, you know, a Japanese market, big one. And so they have rotating flavors coming in and stuff. But I've, we've been there so many times doing that, that they are not getting anything new. And at this point, like every flavor that is coming is, is here. I've tried all the ones that I could possibly try in this country of America.

Michael David Wilson 6:48
Do you periodically go in and inquire if they've got anything imported and hello for folks? Yeah.

Danger Slater 6:55
I go. What do you got in the back room? Give me the secret ones. Give me the secret Kit Kats, the off menu.

Michael David Wilson 6:59
Kit. Kathe, yeah,

Danger Slater 7:03
the ones where the two Kit Kats are fucking and they make like an like an unholy hybrid kit. Kathe, give me that. Give me the baby I want

Michael David Wilson 7:13
to eat. I like it. I like it. And I mean, so you know, in terms of the writing? Yeah, you said you could have written a novel in the last four months. Did you? Did you write a novel in the last four months?

Danger Slater 7:31
Yeah, I think I forgot what we were when did we talk last? It was January, right? There's

Michael David Wilson 7:36
a round then, yeah, I think it's that it I'm saying four months, but it's slightly a lazy hand, because I think the episode came out in January, so I looked at

Danger Slater 7:49
that, I finished whatever I was talking about then, and I'm on something else entirely. So it thought, like, that's I just needed, like, a hard line, because that happened at the end of January.

Michael David Wilson 7:59
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we were talking about army hammer and Starla and, oh yeah, cannibalism, celebrity, oh, all the normal topics that we get people on to talk about,

Danger Slater 8:13
I would imagine cannibalism comes up on This Is Horror more often than like This American Life or radio lab or something like that. Well,

Michael David Wilson 8:25
I mean, funnily enough, I brought it up in first 10 minutes of the last episode with Jasper Bach where we were, you know, going deep on daddy's boy, because Dan Howarth asked me what I'd been reading recently. And I'd been reading the short story collection life ceremonies by sayako Murata. And the titular story is basically in this world where people now eat human flesh, that's kind of what you do. So yeah, we're two for two now we need to make sure that we we get the hat trick on cannibalism.

Danger Slater 9:07
I was thinking the other day about cannibalism,like, you know, people don't eat meat because of ethical reasons, right? They don't want to animals to suffer. They don't agree with factory farming, you know, what have you. There's these ethical concerns that keep people from doing that, and most people aren't going to willingly, like, let you eat them themselves. Like, so you can't ethically eat another human being, but you could eat yourself ethically. So you you can self cannibalize. And it's like, you know you're not getting right with you're not getting wrong with Buddha. If you're doing that, like, it's good, it's fine. Like, and I was thinking, if you cloned like your own arm, you could just eat your own. Farm indefinitely, like, just keep cloning it. You know, I feel,

Michael David Wilson 10:04
since there are people that have literally volunteered to be eaten by other people, I mean, I'm specifically thinking about the Ramstein song mine tool, which is about a German gentleman who put out an advert for somebody to essentially come around and literally eat his penis, you know his tool. Well, if there are people who are prepared to do that, that there must be people who have been like, look, I'm I'm saying I cut off the tip of the finger. I'm just gonna like that in some butter, some onions, a bit of garlic, I think Rosemary would go really well. Just to finish that dish, maybe I'm giving too many details.

Danger Slater 10:53
Confession over sounds like you know the recipe already, sir,

Bob Pastorella 11:00
yes. Recipe. It depends on like and, and I'm gonna if you haven't, if you haven't seen yellow jackets,

Danger Slater 11:08
no, I haven't.

Bob Pastorella 11:11
Or red or red survivor type by Stephen King, which is, to me, the ultimate cannibal itself is basically the ultimate self cannibalism story, when you're starving, the smell of cooked flesh is undeniably overwhelming, and it is. It is something that you you will probably find yourself unable to stop, because one, you're starving, and two, it's, it's that. It's a primal thing. It's foop. It's like, oh, that's food, you know. And with survivor type, that was, you know, I don't know if you've ever read the story danger. It's about a guy who's a kind of nefarious guy, gets a in a plane, crashes a single engine plane with a stash of drugs, and while he's starving on this island, he he inadvertently breaks his his ankle while trying to capture a bird to eat, and he's got a little medical background, and decides that after a while, it's like, hey, you know, this, this, this ain't going really doing that good, so I should go ahead and just amputate. And since I'm going to amputate, I might as well, you know, go ahead and eat something nourishing, you know? And it goes from there and turns into basically a nightmare. So, yeah, there's your self cannibalism. It's just, I don't, I don't recommend it based upon story.

Danger Slater 12:56
You pretty much sold me on it until you said nightmare. I was like, All right, this out. You're like, it's undeniable, it's good. I'm like, Okay, I'm fucking curious. I need to know now, like, but then you're like, No, he's, he's in a drug haze, and it's horrible, so maybe I don't want to eat myself.

Bob Pastorella 13:12
Yeah, he and he basically can Cox this over, like a CO or, like a diary. So he writes, he writes that, you know, this, this exploits, and he's so whacked out of it by the end. It's like February 40th. And the last entry says, lady fingers taste just like lady fingers. Yeah. So it's like you, you're kind of wondering, Oh, I wonder what happened. Well, I think I know what happened.

Michael David Wilson 13:41
And I like that you said it turns into a nightmare after the point that, you know, he's amputated himself. So for you Bob that it wasn't a nightmare at that point, but then,

Bob Pastorella 13:54
was actually a joyful story.

Danger Slater 13:59
It's about a guy getting a really good meal. Like sounds good to me? Yeah.

Danger Slater 14:06
So this whole other podcast is about cannibalism, and now this one is too, I guess

Michael David Wilson 14:12
this the whole This podcast is about us describing to you the previous podcast.

is that anything, anything we do here, because the topic is writing the absurd, if we do something absurd, like describing in great detail the previous podcast, it feels like there's a kind of poetry to it. I don't know if there'll be many listeners to it, but it does seem apropos.

Danger Slater 14:52
That is a professional segue, sir. Great. Good job bringing us back around. Thank you.

Michael David Wilson 15:00
Yeah, however, I mean in terms of writing the absurd and writing things outside of, I suppose, conventional genre norms. I mean, how would you even describe what it is your writing? Because I feel that like you know your work it, it doesn't fit into a neat genre box. Is it horror? Is it bizarro? Is it WTF? If WTF is a genre, then how does that distinguish from bizarro? Right? What? What do you say? Or do you don't you don't begin saying, Well,

Danger Slater 15:42
I, you know, I've, I've keep having these like personal reckonings with like genre specifically, because, yes, I'm a bizarre writer and I'm a horror writer, and I'm all in and I write absurd stuff and surrealism and all this other stuff. But like, I feel like none of them are right, like capturing it right, like nothing's capturing it right, especially when I when I think of horror and stuff, and I think people have a very specific expectation. Sometimes, when they go into a book and the publishers will try to market it in ways that they'll think people will be interested in, which sometimes is promising something that I'm not delivering. And you can always see the two types of people, like if you check out your own reviews, or you could see the people who go, this is fucking brilliant love. It gave me something I'd never seen before. And other people going, this is what the fuck was? This absolute trash. Like, I don't get it. What a waste of time. Like, and it's like, always these polar extremes. So like, like, I'm always like, how do I explain in a way that's going to make people feel surprised by what they're getting. But also kind of gives them what they expected in a way that they aren't disappointed by reading it. So, yeah, I'm like genre. I'm lost in genre right now. I'm lost in these terms. I don't really know. I like Absurdism, though, yeah, yeah, that's why we're here. So that's, that's, that's a great term, and satire too, Absurdism and satire, body horror,

Michael David Wilson 17:32
right, right? And that the difficulty is, I mean, I find particularly kind of like with the marketing and the so called selling of the book, because it is kind of, let's say, in this absurd realm like that there isn't a publisher who is doing absurd fiction. There are publishers that have taken on absurd books. But there and there's not like an absurd category in the library or in the bookstore. So it does make, yeah, the marketing and the selling very difficult. And I kind of sense that both, both of us, in the last few months have almost gone through a bit of a crisis of just like, what are we even doing? Because I've certainly had that, particularly at the start of this year, and I know that you put out a kind of similar post on Instagram. We with similar sentiments. So I mean, I wonder if you think about your writing, like, what, what are your aims at the moment? And how are you approaching your writing?

Danger Slater 18:46
Oh, my God, that feels like the biggest question in the world. Okay, I I just like the thing that I value in art, the thing that I want is to feel surprised, to feel something more than what I came for, like my my books feel very much like and I know this. I know they that I'm doing something that is unique to me. And I think a lot of writers do this. You know you, you have your niche that you kind of fall in and stuff, and your voice and everything like that. But, like, I'm kind of, like, just following the muse, I guess, you know, like, I have a feeling. I have a feeling. I have, I mean, I have endless ideas. So it's really about finding of this, this miasma of ideas, the one that captures how I'm personally feeling on the inside, and that I'm able to use to kind of express something to the world, you know, and maybe not necessarily like it's a, it's a it's a vehicle for my own point of view, but it is something maybe I want to explore and I'm interested in. And. On picking that idea out of all the ideas is kind of like where I'm at, like, I'm working on a Western right now, which is like, not something I'm typically would do, you know, like, I'm not, I don't think people would expect that from me, which is part of why I want to do it. But it's also like, It ain't like, it starts in like, 1868 but like, very quickly you realize this is not the 1868 that we all experienced as a human race, you know, 150 years ago. Like this is a whole new version of the west where, where things are going to be very unpredictable in in ways that you know, the book isn't gonna necessarily tell you upfront again, because people are gonna look at the genre, go, oh, horror, Western, and then they're gonna start reading and going, what the fuck is this all about? Like, this is not either of those things right now. I

Bob Pastorella 20:56
think, I think a lot of the pitfalls that we see is that we tend to as writers, because, you know, a lot of times we are kind of like, you know, the original marketers of our work, and we use genre. And sometimes that can be a pitfall in the in the, you know, 90s, Jeannie cavallos was editor at Dell, and she was getting submissions that didn't fit the tropes of horror. Didn't know what to do with them. She was like, I'm getting these fantastic stories. Don't know what genre they're in. And so instead of using the word genre, she described a kind of horror. She called it cutting edge horror. And so when she was pitching this to the executives at Dell, she said, this is cutting edge, and that's the word that she used. And she formed the Dell abyss line, which is when you read a del abyss book, which golly, I wish they were still around, but you knew what you were getting, and part of that was you were unable to describe what you were getting. And to me, I think that's kind of like a brilliant marketing tactic, because it didn't, it's like, well, what genre is it? It's horror. I mean, well, what subgenre it's it's not it's cutting edge horror. It doesn't follow any of the conventional rules. And so when reading like a danger Slater book or even a Michael David Wilson book, you're not following conventional rules. So that is a really cool thing, but also it's a pitfall, because marketers hate that shit. They want things to be in neat little categories, and so that's, that's where we you know, it's like, hey, what? What do you do? It's hard to explain it, because there's not, didn't you don't have a terminology for it, you know, if that does, I don't know if I'm making any kind of sense, but no, you are. You know, it's really, really hard to explain it. You know, I've got ideas that I want to do an antiquity, you know, adventure, cosmic, post apocalyptic. What the fuck do you call it? You know, it's, it's like, well, it's gonna, I don't know. It's gonna be wild, you know, if I could pull it off, it's gonna be like, heavy metal magazine come to fucking life, you know. But uh, and uh, Michael's already smelling. He's like, Yeah, really, really, oh, the science fiction horror, yes. I mean, it's like, what do you call it? There's not a name for it. No more marketers are gonna hate that. Well, we got to come up with a name. It's like,

Danger Slater 23:57
okay, that's your job. And it's hard, because you're you as you know, just the landscape of being an independent writer, an independent artist like you are, you have to evangelize your own book more than anybody. You have to like, be your your biggest marketer, even when you're working with a publisher, even if you're working with a big publisher, you still need to do that like and the thing is, like, there's a part of me, or the biggest part of me, when people are like, Oh, what's your book about? I just want to be like, I don't know, man, just fucking read it like, I just read it like, it's not, I don't know what to tell you, like it's, it's good enough to say like it. You know, obviously that's not plausible if you're trying to sell a book. But that's that's the in the inclination that I have is just like I don't know like, and if I try to put it in a box, it feels reductive to me, right?

Bob Pastorella 24:55
It's like trying to explain what genre you know William Burroughs is. Is, you know, or, or JG Ballard. It's like, what, what genre is that it's fucking burrows, is that that's the name of the genre. It's Naked Lunch. It's inter zone. I don't know what to tell you. It's word virus. You know, it's, it's like, golly, I want to, I want to tap into that vein. And I just feel like as creatives, we want to do that. As marketers, there's that little, there not a little, there's a big voice in your head going, don't fucking do that. Don't, don't do it, because you can't describe what it is. It's indescribable. They're not gonna, they're not gonna like that, whoever they are. They're not gonna like that because you can't describe it. Oh, and it's like, other than just read it good.

Danger Slater 25:47
Michael, Have you, have you encountered any issues or troubles kind of trying to market daddy's boy? Because this, that book, definitely falls into this, this kind of like nebulous space that we're talking about where it's like, if you describe it as a specific genre, it's leaving out so much of what is actually happening in the book.

Michael David Wilson 26:11
I mean, the most succinct answer is yes, it's an ongoing battle. I mean, when I wrote, when I'd written daddy's boy, it's like, Okay, now, what the hell do I do with this? And I mean, the first thing I did was I sent it to my film manager, Ryan Lewis, and his feedback was essentially, I absolutely love it. I don't know how I would sell it. It's like, okay, so funny,

Danger Slater 26:45
because I can see the movie version in my head, right, right. It plays very much like a farce, almost a crime farce, horror. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 26:53
yeah. I need to back up and add the caveat that Ryan specifically meant, because he's well versed in the horror world, and he has horror contacts that he specifically isn't sure where to sell it, not like, Oh, I can't conceive of this very cinematic book being a film. It wasn't that, you know, you'd probably have to reevaluate being in the film world, if that was the case, but no, I do think as well, though, in terms of making it into a film. And I've said this before, I really feel that I've put it out at the wrong time. I think in the noughties or the early 2000 and 10s, this would be perfect for the cinema. But in 2025 I'm not sure that people are, you know that there's an appetite, or there's a commercial enough appetite for a kind of 90 to 120 minute dick joke on the screen, we would all watch it. But, you know, trying to sell that to Hollywood or to Netflix or Amazon for the eight part series. I'm not sure that that there's the appetite, but what, what I do believe is that, like I believe there is a massive audience for daddy's boy, I firmly believe it, but I don't know how to find them. And I think that is the dilemma that so many of us writers have. And, you know, particularly with House of bad memories and daddy's boy as I've really kind of just just become my more authentic self and my true self as a writer, I get largely glowing reviews, but it is just not going wide enough. And so that is the dilemma that I'm up against. I should probably say with daddy's boy, it is more divisive. You know that the House of bad memories, they were largely glowing reviews. Already, I'm seeing people being polarizing with daddy's boy. I did anticipate that. I didn't think, oh no. I think this will be universally love. No, I knew that this was gonna definitely be a love it or hate it book. But yeah, as soon as I'd written it. You know, every time I finish your novel, I think, is this the novel where I query agents or I query big publishers? Because to be honest, I'm really, really tired of doing this alone, and I would like to have an advocate, but I knew when I'd finished writing that the answer was a firm no, no. This isn't the book that you send to an agent like I looked into it in the sense that I tried to look Is there a book that I even think is tan. Gently related to daddy's boy, because if there was then I can query that person's agent very specifically. But if I looked at the the books that I suppose are in that world, either they were bizarro, and as you know, not a massive commercial appetite that bizarro isn't the route to riches and becoming a millionaire. I wish it was so. Okay, so that's one area. If I look at probably my favorite dark comedy writer, it's John Niven. But John Niven writes a very specific social satire, like a number of his books are grounded in the 90s music industry. So there's there's something very specific going on. And I felt every book that I looked at, there's kind of an angle, there's a thing that they're critiquing and they're satirizing, and what daddy's boy is looking at is it's looking at familial relationships. It's looking about at parenthood. It's looking at how far you would go for those that you love and what the limits are. But I don't feel that's not quite in vogue at the moment is like, what? What's the hook? What are you? What are you linking it to, politically or socially? At the moment, that's the kind of comedy where it might sell. So I immediately knew that this is, this is an uphill battle, and I decided, look, I'm going to independently put it out via This Is Horror. But even even with this, there was a kind of conflict or or an awareness, I suppose, because it's called This Is Horror. But I would argue, no, it fucking isn't. This is dark comedy. This is dark comedy with a hint of crime and a little splash of horror. This. This isn't really horror, which is not as catchy a podcast name. This isn't really horror. So I kind of as well, like, for the last few years my social media presence, This Is Horror and Michael David Wilson have all been one and and I had this kind of, I don't want to be falsely advertising, as it were, so I set up a separate patreon to then have, okay, so now we've at least got one place that is Michael David Wilson, specific, because I, you know, I think there will be people who are fans of the Podcast, but they're not fans of what I'm doing in terms of my writing and vice versa. So I just wanted to test the waters and to have some distinction there I'm, I think the daddy's boy I have always known it is the absolute wild card is probably going to be the most comedic thing I will ever write. I might write things that are on that level, but I don't think it will go further. Whereas the previous book house of bad memories, that's probably more, I suppose, a typical balance of what I'll do. So it's gonna be horror or dark thriller or crime, and then there are a lot of jokes kind of peppered throughout it. I've said before, I guess, like I'd compare, or others have compared what I'm doing to a bit like Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino. There's a dark vibe that's humor within but now I'm at this point where I'm just trying to work out, Okay, what's next? What is the next step for my career? And there's this endless battle between I want to do what I enjoy and what brings me joy, and that, that is, that is, without a doubt, the primary reason for writing, because I want to do the thing that brings me fulfillment and feels authentic. But then the secondary reason I want to make some fucking money. This is what I'm doing. This I have, I have made every career decision staking my writing doing well. That is a bet that I placed, like over a decade ago now, that my writing would do well. And there's this realization, particularly when you've written. Something like that is, boy, it's like, Have I gone all in and and it's not going to financially work out, and I've been having that back and forth, but at the same time, my, you know, these are weird internal conversations that I'm having with myself, and it's like, well, let's say that financially, it doesn't do as well as I wanted it to. Did I have joy in the pursuit of doing it? Am I happy every time I'm writing? And the answer is yes, like, this is the thing that I enjoy the most. So then you've kind of won. Yes, I want to win financially, too, but if you set it up so that you're enjoying and you're being true to yourself, then you're winning. It's a battle between creativity and commerce and so, I mean, at the moment, I mentioned this on the previous podcast, but it's okay, because we've already said that we're gonna on this one, and listeners can enjoy the refresh. Yeah,

I said at the moment, you know, as I'd like an agent, I don't, well, I'm gonna write a more kind of commercial supernatural thriller. Wrote in Japan. I planned it out, and I thought this is a pretty good story, but I also thought this isn't a fucking Michael David Wilson story for right now. This is too safe. This. This isn't injecting what I kind of really enjoyed with House of bad memories and with daddy's boy. So I took, like, just the essence of that idea. And I was like, Okay, now MDW, if I hit. And so now, like, I'm pitching that as funny games meets from dust till dawn with the supernatural undertones of the ring. And yeah, it's predictably as well as horror got some of that dark crime. It's got humor, it's fast paced dialog, but this is what I fucking love, and I think as well, you know, if I'm gonna trust that there's an audience for what I'm doing, then I have to be all in with that, not like, oh, well, I trusted there was for the first two books. But now I'm out of fear. No, I gotta push your little chips in and see what happens. So, goodness, maybe I answered your question there. I mean, I answered it initially, we were just like, yeah, it's been very difficult to market. Um, I'm trying to work out what my next steps are, and I think we've just gotta, we gotta keep putting this work into the world that we believe in, and we gotta hope that the right person sees it and and then they look at the entire back catalog, and then then our fame is found, and the money comes in. I don't know how else to do it, but to be honest, the way that I'm marketing this one is I'm mostly going on a load of podcasts, because that's what I enjoy. And I'm planning to dabble with Amazon advertising, because I've heard from people like Adam Neville and Dan how often that's worked for them. But, you know, I've contacted a few people for reviews and stuff like that. But when, when I'm just spending my time, like sending emails and stuff, it it just, it is just so unfulfilling. That's not what I want to do, that that's part of why I've decided I want an agent. Because before I thought, well, all the things an agent does I can do, you know, I've got a lot of contacts because of This Is Horror, but the reality is, it's like, no, I don't want to do those things anymore. I want to write. That's all I want to do. I want to write. I want a podcast. I want to live my private life, and that's it. So the agent can gladly take a cut if it means I'm writing more and doing less of the writing tangent or stuff. Don't know if any of that resonates with you.

Danger Slater 39:28
No, it definitely does. I think the hardest part too, about trying to find an agent, though, is you actually have to pitch your book to them, so that thing that you say is difficult to do and you don't want to do and you want this other person to do it for you, you actually have to figure out the absolute best way to convince one specific person that they want to now make this their problem, essentially, so it. Is it? Is? It's a very frustrating process. I've I've reached out to agents before, too, in the past with books that I've written, and even when they've read it like and liked it, it's it is that answer is, is, like, I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to do with it. And it sucks too, because, as an artist, you know, you know, because maybe, maybe it's because, you know, we take chances on on art more so than the general public. We we look for new things and exciting things. Like go out of our way to find these things most of the time. Like, you know that people out there exist that want it, but people don't know that they want it because they don't know it exists. Or, like you don't have the magic words to convince them to look at it, to say, I'm gonna spend $10 or like it's books you don't got to spend anything get your library to order it. It could be completely free. It's like, it would be fine, like, like, but, you know, just to put, give someone, just to go, some enough to get them to do something like, especially if it's something weird. You know, when you're you, and when we're talking the Absurdism, when you're putting out something absurd, it's like, it is hard to describe, because it can go in lots of different directions and and not just being weird, but like the tone can go in completely different directions too. And, you know, and I think people aren't down for that, or they are down for it, but they don't know that they're down for it until they have it. It's like a it's like a paradox, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 41:54
and there's kind of so much to say about that. I mean, to begin with, like, I think I'm fairly good at convincing agents and publishers to read my work. I think I'm quite good at pitching them to read something, and I can write a compelling pitch, but I don't know if it ever really captures what I'm doing. So for example, dad is boy I pitched a shameless meets guy. Rich is the gentleman with the incompetence of the hangover. That sounds quite good. That sounds like it's got commercial potential, yeah. But then you read it and you realize there's an absurd amount of sausages, both literal penises and actual cooked, frozen supermarket butchers, all sorts of sausages. There's a lot about naked attraction. There's a lot of obscure 90s television references, and there's an argument to be made that it's a 75,000 word dick joke. So they read it, but then it's like, okay, how do you sell it, honestly, how do you sell it, giving the true nature as to what it is and and that goes a little bit back to what Bob was saying about the DAO abyss horror line, and them calling it cutting edge horror. There was a moment where I when I was thinking about the marketing of daddy's boy, and I'm thinking, do I need to literally coin a new genre and like I'm fucking William Shakespeare or something. Just repeat it enough and with enough confidence that people are like, right? That is the genre. And then, because I've coined it, every time they Google that term, my name comes up. I like the way that, you know, sometimes people just put new in front because it's like, you know, this is the new horror. This is the new bizarro. I did think for some time, what, what the fuck can I call this? And like, I was talking to my friend, because, like, I've got another problem with a Japanese book is like, do I call it jazz? It's like, fucking bizarro in Japan. Oh, I don't fucking know what to do with this, because I think, I think comedy of errors, or comedy of incompetence, is probably the most accurate thing. Brian Asman, in his blurb, called it slack and Noir. I did like that label, but, but also, I don't want to have to come up with a new label. Every time I write a novel, it's like, it's not going to catch on if I keep using a. Different genre. So, yeah, I don't know what to call it.

Danger Slater 45:07
I think it's like you got to do like the Joe Lansdale thing, though, where, like, he's just all over the fucking place with his genres and his tones, and there's weird stuff, there's bizarro, there's Western, there's horror, crime, it's all over. But like, people just trust that it's going to be good. And it is. Every book I've ever read by him is good. Doesn't matter what what genre it was. It was great. But like people have, he's built that trust an audience that trusts that he's going to take them somewhere. And it's like, how do you find that? How do you find how do you become a Joe Lansdale type? How do you become your own genre? Like you said before, Bob with, with, uh, with Burroughs too. Like, how do you do that thing where, like, people hear your name and they go, I, I'm in, like, I'm in, oh, he wrote a book, or she wrote a book I'm in, let's, let's do it.

Bob Pastorella 46:04
And even, even with Burroughs, there's different there's, like, different eras, you know, like, you know, Naked Lunch, you know, compared to, you know, like you got his, his later books, you know, that were the cut up novels, which is just, is an art form into itself. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to explain, but you took magazines and newspapers and things like that and cut out sentences and words and arrange them and combine them with the story, and use those to make a story. And so it's, it's an, it's an art form. But even even then, they still didn't know how to describe it. Other than Colin, you know, it was obscene, was probably the biggest thing that got him going. You know, it's like, hey, you know, he had obscenity trials. And it's like, same thing with Henry Miller, which, you know, could, could definitely fall into some of his work. So especially extreme of consciousness stuff would be definitely absurd. When you were Michael, when you said something about, you know, your, your, which you, I guess, your honest comps, you know, you can't, you got it. You got to do your comps commercially. I mean, she can't go. This is the greasy strangler, mix with Sushi Girl, but, you know,

Michael David Wilson 47:29
get Yeah, I want, you know, like to be more honest, would have not even been the greasy strangler, but would have been Come to daddy, which is a more obscure film. Yes, that Toby Harvard, you know, the writer of the Bruce Lee strangler, wrote that would be the most honest, like comp. And it's like, okay, so you wrote a book with Daddy and I haven't heard of, and then you commented with another title of Daddy and I haven't heard of, so it doesn't mean anything, you know,

Danger Slater 48:02
for people who seen that movie, like, I come to daddy, I fucking love that. I've watched that movie multiple times. I love that movie. I think it's so good. Like, like, you I hear that I would get super excited, like, there's enough people out there that would get that. It's just that they're not, there's not a pool that they're all sitting in. They're just, like, spread out little loner weirdos, like, just waiting for your little for your lighthouse to call them home. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 48:34
this is exactly it. There are so many loner weirdos. We just need to get them all together to fucking read stuff.

Bob Pastorella 48:45
We had the same issue with their watching because, you know, I told you know, Michael was like, Hey, this is, you know, very, you know, very much inspired by Body Double. And it's like, we could use it as a prop. He's like, I've never seen it. I'm like, oh, dear Lord, watch Body Double. My God. And then he seen it, and he was like, Oh, it fits perfect. Like, yes, of course, it's fucking perfect. You know, I have a similar issue with the small hours. It's comp this Fright Night meet Suicide Kings. Everyone seen Fright Night? Three people saw Suicide Kings, which is a great movie, and so, you know, even at Google's fest, when I did my reading, Max made me explain what Suicide Kings was, you know, it's like, okay, it's a film. It had Christopher walking in it, you know. But I think that having at least one commercial comp, like Fright Night combined with something that's kind of obscure is how you get away with being honest in your your comps. Because, face it, comps aren't going away. You just, you know you gotta, it's, it's almost like an industry standard. Now, and so I hate it, but we gotta, you know, we have to, we have to use it.

Michael David Wilson 50:05
I don't know if I hate it, because it is at least a shorthand that's quite effective, and we can just do it quickly, you know, like, well, it's like two weirdos, and they like sausages, and their dreams to be on naked attraction. And

Danger Slater 50:28
I think, I think, I think the next time I'm pitching to an agent or I'm just gonna look up whatever their favorite stuff is and say, my book is that no matter what it my book is it just to get them to fucking read it, and then maybe they'll be like, yes, okay, like, I

Michael David Wilson 50:45
this is but with Dick, Yo, that's

Bob Pastorella 50:50
what everybody wants. This is shiners list mixed with Hell's Kitchen. They're like, Hell's Kitchen, yeah. Gordon Ramsay.

Danger Slater 51:05
Go either way.

Michael David Wilson 51:15
This is risky territory, but I don't like risky territory, then you should read affection, ultimately trying to say here, you know when, when you made your original point danger, I had many tangents and thoughts to jump off on, and of course, they've invariably jumped out of my head. Now

Danger Slater 51:36
we didn't really talk about the absurd at all. We've been talking a lot about marketing our unmarketable books. So, like, I don't know if that's something we even need to dive into at this point.

Michael David Wilson 51:50
I mean, in terms of the absurd. I mean, who would you say are your favorite absurdist authors? Let's start there. I

Danger Slater 52:01
mean, I've talked about this many times, but Kurt Vonne gets my favorite author. I wouldn't call him an absurdist, necessarily, but he is definitely using those kinds of he's definitely pulling from the same pot there. You know, like, but when I think of like true Absurdism, like not necessarily comedic Absurdism, but like Absurdism in the is in the fact of like, the universe is a cold place where things aren't going to work out or make sense, and The only thing we could do is sit back and throw our hands up and say, that's what it is, man,

Danger Slater 52:53
like, one of my favorite books, and at least one that I know most people who listen to this I've read is The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, which is an early version, I guess. If people go what's bizarro, and they don't have any idea of what I'm talking about, I'll say Alice in Wonderland and the metamorphosis like, you know, kind of two different versions of the same thing. One's kind of like whimsical and, you know, maybe made for children, but, you know, a little more like light, and the other one is, like, the universe is not going to explain why you're a bug. You're just this, and then no one knows how to relate to you, and then you die. Like, these are, these are the two sides of the same coin, though. Like, I think a lot about, I think a lot about like, because I use humor too. Just like you, Michael, I use a lot of humor in my writing, but I don't necessarily think of my books a lot of times is comedies, because the themes are not usually very funny that I'm dealing with, and the comedy and the jokes are there to kind of like, sweeten the pot a little bit or make people be like, Man, I keep losing my train of thought.

Michael David Wilson 54:20
I mean, if I think about, you know, some of your books, and if I think of puppet skin, for example, I mean it the humor is that the concept is funny, but everything you do is not played for laughs. It's played completely straight. And actually, the situation that the protagonist, Hannah, is in, it's a fucking awful situation. Is terrible. It is horror that's a very difficult one to describe, actually, in terms of genre. I mean, you'd Yeah, it's kind of horror meets bizarro me. Sub sadism, which isn't a Chandra but it's like,

Danger Slater 55:03
it's like, when you're like, you're on, you're on this, like, edge, right? And the so if you're, if you're writing with Absurdism in mind, like, the universe doesn't care, like, that's the jumping off point of all Absurdism. The universe doesn't care about you, and it's not going to give you answers for all the questions that you want, and you're just gonna have to deal with it. So you're on this edge, and it's a very narrow precipice, and you're walking along it, and the story is going along. And if you lean one way, you laugh, right? You go, oh my god, like nothing matters. Like, who cares? Like, let's just have a good time then. And if you lean the other way, it's like pure cosmic horror, like you go, Oh my God, nothing matters, and we're screwed. Like, like, so that that that edge is, like, a very fine line, I think, to walk on. It's something I'm always trying, constantly trying to do. So, like, you're playing with these tones of like, tilting back and forth between, is it funny, or is it the most like, upsetting thing I could possibly think of, you know, like, like that. There's no meaning to anything. Seems is, to me, is true horror like, but at the same time, there's a freedom in it too, where you're like, well, nothing, if nothing matters, then anything is permissible. You know,

Michael David Wilson 56:39
I feel that what we're doing kind of brings to mind just the cliche that like, well, if you don't laugh, then you'll cry, and then throughout the reading and the writing experience is going to be times where you're laughing and times when you're crying, and times maybe where you're simultaneously doing both. And it's like you literally can choose to laugh or to cry at any given moment. And, yeah, I mean, when I pitched this episode to you, I said, Yeah, talking about Absurdism and also talking about, you know, we've written these weird fucking things that are in between the cracks of genre. Now, how the fuck do we sell or market them? So that's why we've concentrated a little bit also on the marketing. I'm not even sure at this point what the what the episode of is gonna be cool, just like free fucking boys shoot their shit on life and genre and Absurdism. But but, but in terms of, you know, you asked me about, you know, selling and where to place it, I mean, I kind of had this, this panic as well, because it's like, for over a decade, you know, I've set myself up as, like, I'm, I'm the horror guy, and it's like, Why the fuck did you form something called This Is Horror when, ironically, you have never fucking written straight horror. You've never written that. It's always like, trended towards dark comedy. So I did worry, and it kind of put me off for a while, even writing that like I was accidentally, falsely advertising I'd fucked myself over. And I mean, even, you know, when I sent the book to you, one of your first reactions, which I loved, by the way, was I didn't expect it to be this fucking funny. And so, I mean, I think just in terms of having this platform called This Is Horror, so I'm, I'm trying to work out, how do I market, or how do I show people like, Yes, I love horror, and I host, This Is Horror, and we do the horror awards and everything related to that. That's one side of me. But also, I write some funny fucking books. How do I even do that? I mean, there's there.

Danger Slater 59:09
Horror and comedy are similar in a lot of ways, right? You're, you're setting up a punch line for for both, what one come follow. You know, you set it up a laugh follows, or you set it up in a scare follows either way, the setup in the in the in the ending is the same thing, right? Like, so I, I don't know. I don't know how you sell it or explain that to people in the way that they get it, but like, for those who know? They know?

Michael David Wilson 59:41
Yeah, yeah. In terms of the genre that I'm writing, I'm writing whatever you and Max booth, and now recently with, say, uncle Ryan C Bradley and probably Luke condor is writing that's the genre I'm in. Not got a name yet. Good fucking fiction that will make you laugh. It's a little

Danger Slater 1:00:03
bit of a mouthful. All that just good fiction.

Bob Pastorella 1:00:10
I don't think that you need to explain anything. I don't think that you to me. It's like, hey, you know. Okay, so I guess because it's, I'm, I'm the only I'm just a co host. I haven't been the face of This Is Horror for, for, for, you know, going on 1213, years now. Look

Michael David Wilson 1:00:31
at the everyone listening. Look at the image Your face is literally,

Bob Pastorella 1:00:36
I know that, but, but what I'm saying is, that it's like, it's, it's, but it's, you, right? And I is, it's like, if I was doing the same thing, and if someone came up to me and said, hey, you know you do, man, you do all this whore stuff. Didn't you write funny shit? You know, it was like, Okay, so, you know, I mean, What? What? What does that have to do with anything? In other words, don't, don't make it a problem. It because it's not a problem. I don't think, I don't think anyone's gonna call you out on it. You know, it's just to me that that's, that's silly. Someone's gonna call, you know, hey. Wrote, he wrote, he does a whole website, but he writes the funnies. They're not gonna do that shit that's that's just silly. And if they do, they can come talk to me and I'll set them straight.

Danger Slater 1:01:40
I will say that when I when I get those, and we were talking about this at the top of the episode, when I get these reviews where, you know, people with a divisive book, and you said daddy's voice, kind of landing in this before, uh, already landing here, where, like, people either are gonna love it or, like, not get it and hate it, or just didn't give them what they wanted. And, like, I have this thing where I like, you know, you get a bad review, and I know it's, it's hard for a lot of writers to see that kind of stuff. It's not hard for me, because I go, well, that person's a fucking idiot. Like, I immediately go, they don't know they don't know shit. What the hell are they talking about? Like, like, I'm sorry the book wasn't what you wanted it to be, but like it, it is what it is like. So, so there is that part of me that's like, that is kind of like that. You know, I do want to be able to give people something that they want, but also I'm like, Well, no, I'm making my thing, and if you don't like it, like, piss off.

Michael David Wilson 1:02:40
Now, I think it's a good way to be.

Danger Slater 1:02:44
I wish I had like, a real clear, like, picture of, like, of that, but I am, like, kind of all over the place. I'm like, love me, but also, if you don't fuck you, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:03:02
It's a problem the field that that's how a lot of writers, honestly are. And you know, we've said countless times before that you can't write to please everyone, or if you do, you will write the most generic, archetypal, boring story ever. And in doing that, you won't please everyone, because you won't please me. So you might what you want to write and what is authentically you and what you fucking enjoy. If you can't make yourself laugh, you won't make others if you can't make yourself get scared, then you're not going to make others be scared of it either. You have to write with some honesty.

Danger Slater 1:03:47
If I could give one piece of advice to anyone listening, it would be to get weird. Just get weird with it, like you might be holding yourself back because you don't think it's it's going to, you know, oh, I don't It's not horror enough. It's not this enough. It's not that. Like, I that is like, such a Creativity killer, exactly what you're saying. Michael. Like, I want people to listen to this and be like, you know, that idea that I thought was too out there, or that plot point that I said that that's that's not realistic, or strange credulity or whatever. Like, nah, make it work. If that's what you're feeling. Make it work like you have our permission to get weird. Yeah, yeah,

Bob Pastorella 1:04:31
definitely, considering the timeline that we're in right now, it's like, if you think that your idea might not float, read the fucking news. Just read the news and think back five, six years ago, going, they'll never have anything like this. Then you realize, hey, my weird idea fucking flies, man. It soars, it sinks. Fucking go. Too weird. Just like danger said, be dangerous. Go to Dan. Be. Dangerous.

Michael David Wilson 1:05:02
You got some day live stuff going on there? Yeah? But,

Bob Pastorella 1:05:06
I mean, here's the thing. It's like, write the shit that makes them clutch their pearls, like, come on, come on, if you're not gonna do it now, when you gonna do it?

Michael David Wilson 1:05:15
So, I mean, in terms of your current project, so are you, are you working on the western set in the 1800s now? Or was that the book that you just finished? No,

Danger Slater 1:05:29
I think I was talking, I think I talked in the last episode about the book I was writing then, which is about this, like yuppie couple that were trapped in their house with these umbilical cords.

Michael David Wilson 1:05:41
You were, yeah. It's just, as you mentioned, the Western book. So I'm just trying to get a picture of the timeline here. So can I finish that one? So the Western book is done?

Danger Slater 1:05:53
No, no. The Western ones, I'm I'm working on the umbilical cord book,

Michael David Wilson 1:05:57
doing it justice. That's yeah, like you sold, you sold us on it in the last episode. So people can go back and listen if they want to know what that's all about.

Danger Slater 1:06:10
I don't have a publisher or anything. I don't really know what's happening with it, but it's written like and it's done. And I don't, I don't about you guys, but I don't really take breaks. I just, like, no from one project to the other. I love doing this, so I don't want to take a break. I just want to do it as much as possible. So I just the second I finished something, literally, the next day I'm I'm working on something

Michael David Wilson 1:06:33
new. I mean, for me too, like, sometimes not even the next day, it's like, this book is done, right? Well, we've got an hour of writing time left, you know. And there's some, I think, as I've said before, everyone should do whatever they want to do, but there's some people who like, you know, they'll be like I finished. Let's take a month off to recharge your let's celebrate it. And if that works for you, then great, definitely do that. But for me, like, I can simultaneously celebrate, yeah, it's fucking done here. That's probably my celebration. And then also go on to the next one, because there's, there's too many fucking weird ideas that I have and not enough time, as it is, I I can't afford to take a month's break.

Danger Slater 1:07:22
The celebration is you finally get to work on that other idea that you've been sitting on for months.

Michael David Wilson 1:07:29
Yeah, so, so at the moment you you finished the umbilical cord book you're working on the western I think you said that you have a film manager. Do you have an agent as well?

Danger Slater 1:07:45
I have, I It's, oh, man, it's complicated. But she, she was a film eight like a book to rights agent, and now she's stopped doing that, and is now my production partner. So we're still working together, but she's taking a more involved role than an agent would. She's actually helping put everything together to the point of like we're gonna actually see what we could do. So we've been working with Starlet. I wrote a script for it, and we have, like, a pitch deck and stuff, and if we've been on it for months. So this is just about ready to go. We're swinging big. She knows a lot of people from when she was an agent, so we're just gonna, we're just gonna get it out there and see what happens.

Michael David Wilson 1:08:37
And so she was a film agent, or she was a literary agent, or she was both she

Danger Slater 1:08:43
was, she was a book to writes agent. So she worked, okay, okay, so she Yeah, she didn't, she didn't sell books, but she sold, she sold books to studios, essentially, okay,

Michael David Wilson 1:08:56
yeah, like IP, yeah.

Danger Slater 1:08:59
But now, but now she's a production, like, as a producer, so that's, that's kind of, she's essentially doing the same role with a lot more, but also is a lot more involved. Like I'm getting feedback from her with my script, like we're she's giving me the notes, being like, we need to do this, to do this, to do this, to make sure these people see it. And that's the right move there. So very minutia oriented with her, instead of, like, I would imagine a book to write agent, or what she was doing before, which is kind of like sending the book out to people and being like, if you like it, we'll talk now we're actually pitching a movie with like, altogether,

Bob Pastorella 1:09:45
she's a lot more hands on than she was in the past.

Danger Slater 1:09:50
Yeah, I think it's I personally, I think it's much better for for me, but also it's a lot slower pro. Says because now we need to. It's not just hand setting the book to people and seeing who writes back essentially or even reads it. It's now like we're doing the whole idea, right. Here's what the movie would look like. Here's our vision, you know, and we're working as almost partners, you know the the Genesis is all mine, my book, but we're working as far as the movie goes as partners. So

Michael David Wilson 1:10:28
like, once you've finished a book, then you'll work with her to look at if this can be made into a movie, and what the options are. So that's kind of the film side of things. What do you do in terms of the next steps, in terms of publishing it, in terms of the book? Does she help you out with that? Or is this something you do? Okay, so, yeah,

Danger Slater 1:10:53
no, she doesn't. She doesn't do that at all. Yeah. So,

Michael David Wilson 1:10:57
so then the Okay, so that bit is solely on you. You can't, kind of ask, Who do you think it would be good to to sell to? Because she's like, well, I don't fucking know. I'm not in that world. Yeah. I

Danger Slater 1:11:12
mean, she worked with a with a with a literary agency, which is how she got the books that she was pitching to these studios. She would they would send them to her, like, they'd be like, here's, here's your books. Like, go sell these. But like, whenever I ask her that kind of stuff, she's like, I don't like, she turned around the one person one time, and they read my book, and then they they, this is, this was a couple years ago. They read the book that I sent them, and then they gave me, like, so many changes that I was like, you don't want the book that I sent you. You have a very clear idea of what you want. It's not what I gave you. And I'm not going to spend the next eight months retrofitting this thing into that, because, like, that's not what I wrote. So it didn't even work out. So I, like you, have been on my own with every every book, like reaching out to the the publishers, myself or or whomever, and trying, trying, whatever I can.

Michael David Wilson 1:12:17
Yeah, I mean, my my general process is like, when the book is finished, I would like, kind of start at the top in terms of looking at, okay, who are the biggest publishers, and then looking at their back catalog and being like, it, is there any conceivable way that they would publish daddy's boy, for example? But also thinking about, you know, if I approach somebody like, let's say Penguin Random House. If it's my first time, then I want it to count. I don't want it to be like, Look, he sent us the dick joke book. Don't read the next thing, because there might be something I have in the future. But this didn't feel like a Penguin Random House, or a Simon and Schuster or a Pan Macmillan, but, but I will look at the top. I will look at like, Okay, what is the most comedic thing that has been written, you know, for one of these publishers? And do I think I stand a chance? And, you know, most of the time it comes down to like, it's gonna be like a more independent press, or it might, might be somebody like Titan, because I find Titan, they take bigger risks than than other kind of traditional publishers. But, yeah, it's a it's a weird position to be in, but I'm systematically going through things, and I think up to daddy's boy, it was like, Look, if I don't feel that the the small press can do a better job than I can do, then I'll just put it out independently. But, you know, I've got to a point now where my because my time is worth so much more. It's like, you know, I think I'm probably going to be publishing less via This Is Horror and just more going with small presses. I don't want the time. They're kind of like, obviously, you know, I'm not deluded. I know that we have to market our own books. There will be a lot of marketing still on my end, but if I got someone else publishing it, I don't have to do the formatting, I don't have to do the accounting, I don't have to contact so many reviewers. It can help, but I know I want to be writing these weird things. That's what I want to do. That's kind of where I'm at at the moment.

Danger Slater 1:14:49
Well, I have faith in daddy's boy. I think it's going to do great. I

Michael David Wilson 1:14:53
hope so. Like I like it comes back to what I said. I think if the. Are definitely there are a lot of daddy's boys out there that would love to read this program. I just need to find them. Just put like a an advertisement in I don't know Times Square. Are you a daddy's boy? Contact me that's gonna get the wrong people. Do

Danger Slater 1:15:18
you have a weird relationship with your father?

Bob Pastorella 1:15:24
I think that just seeing the awesome cover art, if I didn't even know anything about the book, I would seeing the cover art, I'd be like, Okay, this isn't something I normally would read, but I'm gonna read, you know the backup I'm gonna read the first paragraph if I'm in a bookstore and I've even and Michael knows this is not typically the type of book I would like to read. I am though I do like snappy dialog, and I do write it myself, I tend to get burned out by it very quickly. But reading daddy's boy, I didn't get burned out on it at all because it was lively. It kept the story going. It was integral to the characters. It wasn't dialog for dialog sake. It was just it fits, it gels. It's all Pitch Perfect. And so if I read this book, not knowing anything about Michael, not knowing anything about This Is Horror, I would definitely pick this book up. If I seen that cover, and read that first paragraph, and I'd be like, Yeah, I'm buying this book because it's just so fucking crazy. Is like, I want to see how they pull this off, you know? So, I mean, I think that if you can get that cover out there, then, you know, get somebody at some at some good bookstores, and then put it in bookstores and have it out facing, you know,

Danger Slater 1:16:50
there you go, or something that those people on on Instagram want to share on their book or book talk or whatever, want to share, like, because you got a cool cover, They're like, Oh, we should take pictures of it.

Michael David Wilson 1:17:04
yeah. I mean, the Bookstagram community, I reached out quite a lot for my last few releases. I kind of reached out to a few people here, but I'm, I'm so burnt out with everything, and also, like, because it's such a kind of love or hate book, you know, there is literally, whoever I send it to, there's a 5050, what the fuck they're gonna think about this? Yeah?

Danger Slater 1:17:34
But a bunch of people being like, Hey, look at this awesome cover. The book sucks, but the cover is great. You like, you don't want that, yeah, like you want to find the right people, I get what you're saying

Bob Pastorella 1:17:47
also should lean in. I mean, here's the thing, too, dude I've seen, and it's worked, is that if you get, like, a really crappy review or something like that, post it on social media, take their name out and use it to your advantage, because I have personally bought books that have gotten one star of this book suck because X and A and I'm like, fuck, I want to read that. That's right up my alley. When are you talking about? I'm buying that book right now out of spite, really, but I'm going to read it, you know. And so if it's made me who I don't have all the money in the world, but I will buy a book if I get interested, if it something like that made me buy book, then it can make other people do it too.

Michael David Wilson 1:18:33
Yeah. I mean, probably the biggest criticism will be too many Dick yo, son. I'd make the argument that you can never have too many dicks, you know. Just packed one more into that story. But in terms of you know that this umbilical cord book, I want it out in the world, is it with multiple publishers at the moment?

Danger Slater 1:18:57
No, I don't want to talk to get too into like, the theoretical of, like, where it is and isn't it is. It's with a publisher right now, I still waiting on a on a yes or no from them. So it's someone I've worked with before, so I sent it to them first. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:19:19
yeah.

Danger Slater 1:19:20
It's like being like, if you like this, you know, we have a great relationship. Let's go with it. If not, then I'll just kind of weigh my options and see what's going on from there. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:19:32
yeah, no. I wondered if, I guess the question I was trying to ask was whether you kind of systematically send to one publisher. If you just like, send to multiple at a time. But I yeah, I tend to find if I've worked with someone, I want to just send it to them, because I don't know it feels awkward if I send to two that I've that I've worked with previously, and then I have to. Let one down if they both come back with a yes, that's another good reason to get an agent. Is like, well, I didn't fucking know they were gonna send it to all five of you. Like, and once

Danger Slater 1:20:10
it, once you get past the like, your little wish list of like, publishers or agents, you want to send it to like, if you're not getting responses Yes, like, is this has happened to me before, then I just start blanketing, like, let me, let me cast the net wider and throw a few things out and see what's happening, and then wait for those, and then throw more out. And like, so like, it does kind of work with like, where I want to start. And it just keeps getting wider and wider to like, someone picked this up at some point. It'd be great.

Michael David Wilson 1:20:45
All right. Well, do you have any kind of films or books that we haven't mentioned that you'd like to recommend to people who are like looking to get into either absurd fiction or dark comedies or bizarro, any of this kind of weird, I guess, between the fringes work that we've been talking about. Sure,

Danger Slater 1:21:10
I mean, I mean, I'll throw some movie Rex out like it's easy for me. I love movies, so I watch them all the time, but anything written by Charlie Kaufman or directed by the Coen brothers would these are, like my favorite people, so Charlie Kaufman, if you don't know, is Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine is spotless mine, and it's connected in New York. And these like surreal movies that are kind of dark, they're funny, but they're not like, like when I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's a horror it's actually a horror movie. It's, I know it's like, kind of a deconstructed rom com, but the way it's presented, and what it's saying is 100% an action a horror movie. So they're really Charlie coffman's really good at kind of working those different tones in kind of giving you more like you expect something from from from his movies. You go, oh, this is gonna be a wild ride. But giving you more elite in terms of theme or character or whatever the case, is just giving you more than you than you expected. And it's always they're always satisfying, and even if you don't like the movie at the end, they're at least interesting. And then the Cohen Brothers, I think the kind of thesis of almost all of their movies is that the universe doesn't care about outcomes, necessarily, like so they lean heavily into the absurd. Sometimes they play it more comedic with like Raising Arizona, or like the HUD sucker proxy or something, or The Big Lebowski. And sometimes they play it a lot more serious, like No Country for Old Men, or inside Lew and Davis or something. But all of these movies, the literally everyone that I just mentioned, the thesis is we live in a universe where right and wrong aren't trading off one to one. And if you want to find meaning, you're going to have to work at figuring it out for yourself, because the because the world isn't there to provide easy answers for you so and that is kind of what absurd ism is to me. And I feel like they are really great at kind of expressing that.

Michael David Wilson 1:23:38
Yeah, I think they're wonderful recommendations, and yeah, and anytime the Coen brothers have a movie how it has an Instant Watch, because you know that however you feel about it, whether you love it or whether you like it, because I don't know if I ever hate it, but you know wherever it feels on the light to love scale, there's going to be something interesting and provocative in the sense of thought provoking, like it's gonna it's gonna stick with me, and there's gonna be ideas that continue for months. So yeah, and very re watchable as well. You know, you're gonna get different things on multiple viewings. I

Danger Slater 1:24:26
like that. You said Brian Asman described daddy's boy as slacker in Noir. Because I'm like, well, that's basically what The Big Lebowski is. Also, it's like a war movie where, like, the guy is just kind of like floating through it, like, What the hell is happening? Because he's like, stoned. Like,

Michael David Wilson 1:24:42
yeah, yeah, The Big Lebowski might be my favorite Coen Brothers movie, but I I almost feel like a cliche to say that. But you know, sometimes it's popular for a reason. There's a reason why so many people love that. I'm kind of not, not fully absurdist, but almost like flat in that direction. Paul Thomas Anderson movies are always very kind of thought provoking, too. And when you were talking about, you know, stuff like Being John Malkovich, I was thinking about, structurally, how Paul Thomas Anderson movies are put together in a similar way, particularly, taking something that could on the surface be lighter, like the kind of rom com with Eternal Sunshine, and then just yeah, really creating a horror story is what they're doing.

Danger Slater 1:25:43
Well, like, no, not No Country for all man, there will be blood is like, it is a horror story. Like, this guy is in his in this kind of like, his greed is his own prison in a lot of ways, and alienates him from everybody else in the world. And, you know, it's not set up like with scares or anything, but if you think about conceptually, like, what that is doing to him in his soul, like, that's, that's horrible. It's like the most horrifying thing, like, you're like, you can't even get out of your own way and save yourself because you're so blinded by this ambition and this greed, like, yeah, it's great stuff. Well,

Michael David Wilson 1:26:27
thank you for chatting with us this evening. Always fun. We have, you know, jumped into so many times we've been all over the place, dude,

Danger Slater 1:26:38
I don't know if this is I don't know if this is me, but that's just kind of how I all of my conversations go. I can't fucking focus on anything. Sometimes my girlfriend's like, she's like, you started answering some question that I didn't ask, and you're like, talking in the middle of it like, and I'm just like, what like, because I didn't even realize, because I'm my, you know, I've been thinking about other things. And she says a thing, and it leads to this thought, which leads to this thought I have this cascading thing to the thing that I eventually say has nothing to do with where we were before. So, yeah, this conversation is bounced.

Michael David Wilson 1:27:16
This happens with me too. So maybe putting us together is a disaster. It's like, well, both of them spoke for a long time. I'm not sure if you ever ever answered a single question, but I know anytime

Danger Slater 1:27:28
you ask me something, like halfway through my answering, I'm like, this isn't what he asked. Like, I had that thought in my head. I'm like, I'm just saying something completely different. But yeah, you know, at least I'm saying something. I There you go.

Michael David Wilson 1:27:44
You can't have dead air on radio or on the podcast, so we just keep talking, even if irrelevant. But a criticism of myself, not of you, of course. But do you have any final thoughts, any recommendations, any requests to our listeners and viewers before we end this one, I'm

Danger Slater 1:28:12
telling all your listeners to read daddy's boy. So I mean, that's, that's, that's my request.

Michael David Wilson 1:28:21
All right, then my request is to read Starlet. Thank you for joining us.

Danger Slater 1:28:29
Thank you guys,

Michael David Wilson 1:28:35
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