In a black book or someone’s imagination Mike Corrao lays out the corpse of lower-case howling ape allen ginsberg. In a black book or someone’s imagination Mike Corrao lays howling allen ginsberg to rest intoning a funerary oration over the howling corpse howling with it at the ruined moon. Ultimate revenge. Oedipal destiny. Poetic reversal: Saturn devoured by his children. In a dream or someone’s black book Mike Corrao howls out the canon intoning the glamorous accursed lower-case names and the pages blacken with holy holy holy holy holy holy howl holy holy holy horror
In a colourful book or someone’s nightmare John Trefy lays out the corpus of Mike Corrao arranges it in saturated chiaroscuro in impossible floor plans in mapped out ruins. There are voices in the earth, all these buried voices, killed in print, reanimated, intoning their own eulogy.
Mike Corrao is a hydra with a body made of pulped books and multiple heads on long, serpentine necks. Cut off a head, two grow in its place. Each head has a voice. Each voice is Mike Corrao’s voice and not Mike Corrao’s voice, howling, muttering, threatening, snickering, intoning. The heads are detectives, academics, news reporters, deadbeats, poets, people with no faces, people with no skin on their faces, decorated skulls, skulls within skulls, yawning, singing, howling. Mike Corrao gives body to the heads, tongues to the voices, but he does not tyrannise over them. The voices say what they want. The hydra is Satan in Eden, multiplied kaleidoscopically. Eve’s fangs pierce red fruit. Adam acts detective: What have you done? Later, God acts detective: What have you both done?
Smut-Maker is and is not a non-linear novel in the avant-garde tradition. Smut-Maker is and is not a play in 72 acts and innumerable voices. Smut-Maker is and is not a book of visual poetry. Smut-Maker is and is not an architectural plan for a Hadean city. Smut-Maker is and is not your daily oneiric news feed. Smut-Maker is and is not an advert for Day-Glo dirty living. Smut-Maker is and is not a shopping list of inexplicable vices. Smut-Maker is and is not a manual for the horror of writing.
Mike Corrao asked James Knight to write a review of Two Novels: Howl Revisited and Green Detectives. The Bird King cut off James Knight’s reptilian head and laid him to rest. No heads grew back where James Knight’s head had been.
Two Novels: Howl Revisited and Green Detectives is published by Orson’s Publishing.
Smut-Maker is published by Inside the Castle.