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Misanthrope was a magazine that I edited and published in the late 1990s. It dealt with the dark underbelly of society and the horrors and perversions one would expect to find there. The first issue came out at the end of 1997 -- just in time for that Christmas stocking! There was a second issue planned, but as often happens with these things, it never eventuated.
Issue 1 Edited by Chris A. Masters |
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Read Excerpts: Contents: Artwork:
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"Let's talk about hate and humanity." That's how I began my editorial (which I titled as "Rantitorial") in Misanthrope. The year was 1995, I had quit as co-editor of Bloodsongs, and I wanted to start a new project. At the time hatezines like Sverre H. Kristensen's Sewer Cunt, Jim Goad's ANSWER Me! and Randall Philips' FUCK, as well as books like Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho, and Peter Sotos' Total Abuse, were raising many eyebrows. Sewer Cunt and FUCK had both been refused classification, thus banned, in Australia. Bloodsongs #1, American Psycho, and several other publications had been given Category One ratings. Shops, like Polyester Books in Melbourne and Factotum Books in Adelaide, as well as several people's homes, were raided by Police and Customs officials. The climate was beginning to get very oppressive for those that valued free speech and freedom of expression. Australia was becoming a "nanny-country". I figured that things needed a bit of stirring up. After the reaction that Bloodsongs #1 got from the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification, I began toying with the idea of putting out something really extreme, something to really raise a few eyebrows ay the OFLC. That something turned out to be a magazine called Misanthrope. I wanted to shout: "Hey you want nasty? Then get a load of this!" With tongue firmly in cheek I came up with a magazine that would be so over-the-top, so sick, that, I figured no one would take it seriously enough to be offended. Even though the magazine would be extreme, I also wanted it to be of high quality, both in content and production value. It would not only look real slick and stylish, but would also have a noir aesthetic, a certain feel of sleaze, horror, violence, depraved sex, and hidden dirty secrets. The name I came up with was Misanthrope, and the tag was "The Next Step Beyond Horror!" There were a couple of stories that I was holding onto that Steven Proposch didn't want to use in Bloodsongs, but which I thought were very good and deserved to be printed. I contacted the authors and asked them if they would be willing to let me hang onto their stories while I put the new magazine together. These, together with a couple of interviews that I conducted and a few articles, as well as my own story "Bus Ride to Hell", which I later used as the Prologue for my novel Dark Music, made up the contents of the issue. By the time Misanthrope was ready for the printer it was December 1997. It was printed using a heavy card stock, with glossy paper interior. Print run was 1000 copies, and for a while Misanthrope was the best-selling magazine at Polyester Books in Melbourne. My next step was to send out a bunch of review copies, both locally and in the USA. Misanthrope got some really cool reviews in the USA, but, with the exception of Fatal Visions Magazine, was almost completely ignored by all the local reviewers I sent it to. After my previous dealings with those wonderful bunch of sweethearts at the OFLC, I got a roll of their Category One stickers, put a few hundred copies of Misanthrope in clear plastic bags, like it was some toxic substance and could not be handled directly, and then glued one of the stickers on the bottom left corner. It added just the right touch. I took Misanthrope to several local distributors and was turned down by all of them after they saw the contents. In the end, I decided to handle the distribution myself. Most shops I took it to refused to stock it, and the few that did always sold every copy I brought to them. After the USA publications and other reviewers reviewed it, Misanthrope sold very well to American buyers. For a while I was selling more copies overseas than I was locally. Misanthrope also seemed to upset a few people. In one bookstore, I was even verbally attacked by one extremely irate young woman, who, after taking one look at the cover, seemed to think that by publishing Misanthrope that I was somehow promoting violence against women. I raised an eyebrow and said, "No, I'm just glorifying it." Sometimes I just can't help baiting these idiots. Gotta live up to their expectations I suppose. About a month after Misanthrope hit the stores I got a phonecall from another irate woman who wanted to know if I was responsible for "that filth!" as she put it. After establishing that said "filth" was indeed Misanthrope, she went into a rant -- I wish I could have recorded this, it was hilarious! -- about how evil I was and that I would be punished. Over the next few months I received many regular hang up calls, sometimes several a night. On another occasion the same woman called (well, I think it was the same woman), who began gloating about how clever she was that she had located me. (I did point out that I was not exactly hiding and was listed in the phone book.) She then began to threaten me that she would send someone over to beat my head in with an iron bar because I was evil, promoting violence, and other unnamed perversions. When I pointed out the hypocrisy in her threat and then taunted her by making some extremely lewd comments about how I wanted to tie her up and spank her, she kept crying "filth! filth!" I told her that she did not have to listen and could hang up anytime, and even pointed out that if she was getting off I wanted to be compensated for the fantasy. It was really hilarious listening to hear scream "Filth! Filth! Filth!" repeatedly. After I told her that I was recording the phonecall (I wasn't), and would be printing a transcript in the next issue, she hung up. I never heard from her again. What a nut. Around the end of 1998, I started planning on a second issue, but put it aside as I was in the process of moving. By the start of 2000, I had collected some material but nowhere near enough to fill another issue. 2001 went by. So did 2002. By 2003, the material I had was either no longer relevant or, in the case of the fiction, the authors had found other publishers (which I had told them to seek as I wasn't sure there would be a second issue), so I decided to fold Misanthrope after only one issue. Well, even though it is no more, Misanthrope was fun to do. Who knows, maybe it will become a bit of a collector's item. |
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All material on this site is Copyright 2007 to Chris A. Masters
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