Thanks for returning if you’ve already read Part 1, my ruined reflection on Mr Unpronounceable’s early years. If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here.
In the last post, I talked about the origins of Mr Unpronounceable and my first book 'Mr Unpronounceable Adventures'. In this post I want to delve a bit deeper into some influences and how they apply to my second book 'Mr Unpronounceable and The Sect of The Bleeding Eye'.
I think there must have been a bit of a hiatus between ‘Adventures’ and ‘Sect’, however I’m pretty sure it wasn’t long after the former came out before I started work on the next book.
I was feeling really happy with Mr Unpronounceable as a character, and with the worlds he wanders through in pursuit of his esoteric quest for forbidden knowledge. I had a lot of confidence in myself after the reception that ‘Adventures’ received. I had won several awards here in Australia, and it led to my attendance at both The Adelaide Writers Festival and the UBUD Readers and Writers Festival in Bali as a guest. I am extremely restless though when it comes to my creative pursuits and I’m always trying to outdo myself. It had taken me more than a decade to amass the first 200 pages, and because of that there was a disparity in quality and the whole thing came across as a collection of interrelated short stories. Which is what it was, and that was all well and good but I wanted to do something a little more cohesive for my second book.
I don’t ever really know what I’m in for when I let Mr Unpronounceable off the chain. I often start writing stories from the middle and work my way backwards and forwards in time. Stories that feel like they are going to be one-pagers have expanded and expanded until they run for 30 or more. I have a very ‘decentralized’ approach to the Unpronounceable stories and a lot of it comes from dreams, and I really try and let myself be carried away by the narrative. I didn’t know exactly what this book was going to be about, until it was half done. I didn’t plan it. However, because I was working on all the different narrative threads at the same time, I was able to really connect them to each other in more pleasing ways, at least to me.
Over that long period of time that I’d been working on and off on Mr Unpronounceable, as well as other comics, I’d grown as a person, and moved on from certain ways of thinking and held different beliefs. I’ve always been interested in religion as a subject for my work.
If you'll bear with me, I'd like to go back to what I have come to see as the very beginning...
When I was 10 years old, I’d got very interested in Christianity through Religious Instruction at school and been aghast to discover that even though we were 'Catholic', neither I nor my brothers had been baptised. I insisted to my mother that she rectify this quickly.
So we were baptised and then I began undergoing the initiation into the mysteries of the Roman Catholic Church. I felt it very deeply, and I was the one dragging my mother to Church. I loved the incense and the stained glass and the singing and I loved God. I read my Bible and I believed it to be true. I was particularly interested in the Book of Revelation and scared of Hell. I think by the time I was 12 or 13 I’d decided that God was everywhere and that I didn’t need to go to Church, so I wasn’t getting Communion anymore or confessing my sins. I still felt really guilty all the time though. I think that’s a central part of Mr Unpronounceable, this supernatural dread that his thoughts and deeds are being reviewed and that there is a mechanism and a framework behind the scenes that every little thing hangs on.
I lost my faith one afternoon when I was 13. It all revolved around the idea of Hell and the teaching that not believing in Jesus earned you a one way ticket there. I understood the idea of a Trinity, but I also saw Yahweh and Jesus as separate spiritual entities. I was also beginning to feel a little queasy about some of Yahweh’s actions in the Old Testament. The Genocides and child killing and such.
What really did it for me though was the idea that an altruistic Atheist (or in fact anyone from any other religion) who lived a good life would end up in Hell in eternal torment, but someone like Jeffrey Dahmer would gain entry to paradise because he’d found Jesus at the end of his life. It wasn’t so much the forgiveness that bothered me, it was the punishment. It felt like in an instant my concept of God had flipped.
No longer was he the benevolent creator, suddenly he was a malevolent tormentor. For that afternoon I rebelled in my mind, and I renounced the religion, which had really become a sort of self-motivated kind of Catholic-Heavy Christianity. I still believed in it all, I just didn’t want any part of it.
It wasn’t until later that I realized that I’d stumbled upon something akin to the gnostic idea of the Demiurge. This particular concept is the direct inspiration for The Uncaused Cause, a character that appears towards the end of ‘Sect’.
Because I wasn’t going to Church, I had no one to talk to about this. I wasn’t seeing a Priest and I didn’t really talk about this with my friends.
I think I was experiencing some pretty heavy cognitive dissonance, and it wasn’t long before my mind flipped all the way over and I stopped believing in it entirely. I still believed in something though, and I kept reading the Bible, but I expanded my parameters for spiritual knowledge to a very wide degree and begun reading about other religions and the apocryphal, the esoteric and the Occult. I’m not sure if it’s entirely to blame but the arrival of the X-Files threw gasoline on my smoldering brain. I rekindled my fascination with the paranormal, devouring everything I could on the subject of UFOs, Cryptozoology and Ghosts.
At the same time I was devouring stacks of horror paperbacks and falling in love with Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and marveling at the way it connected to all of his other work. I was getting into HP Lovecraft and countless other things which all fed this Unpronounceable soup, stewing in my mind.
I was on an armchair journey into the hidden side of history and Mr Unpronounceable was at first a proxy for me, even as he became a form of self-parody. I think it’s probably also of interest to mention some real world characters like Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons and even Matthew Hopkins as they were of particular inspiration (in hindsight), again especially for some of the developments in ‘Sect’. I think of Crowley’s callous indifference to his climbing partners on the Kanchenjunga expedition after an avalanche, and his abandonment of the Abramelin Ritual at Boleskin House as very Unpronounceable.
The story of Jack Parsons is a wild ride. The Rocket Scientist by day, Occultist by night ended up dying in a mysterious lab explosion. A very Unpronounceable way to go.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is the period of my life where I laid the groundwork for creating the Character of Mr Unpronounceable, and in particular the main themes of The Sect of The Bleeding Eye.
All that said, the book I was writing ended up being about the clash and loss of conflicting ideas, Heretical thought and the circular, self-fulfilling nature of the ‘spiritual’ journey.
With that rather lengthy preamble aside, I suppose it is high time to launch into an exegesis of the book itself!
Sect of the Bleeding Eye begins with Mr Unpronounceable making his way back to the City of The Ever Open Eye, ‘the noble city of his youth’. He has been gone for an age and intends to prostrate himself before the Silent Monks and ask for forgiveness. Here we are immediately at the crux of the matter.
He hitches a ride with a blind and mute creature, possibly a corpse. After retrieving the Shrivelled Homunculus from the cars intestines they go on their way.
The Shrivelled Homunculus is the closest thing to a sidekick that Mr Unpronounceable has. Encountered and lost by many different selves, the Homunculus seems to have a gravitational pull on Mr Unpronounceable across the multiverse. It is an alchemical tool for obscene magic, a ‘wizard’s doll’, a pet and sometimes friend.
Upon returning to the City, Mr Unpronounceable arrives at the Basilica of the Silent Monks (who do not appear at all in the book) but immediately finds things amiss. After an encounter with a crowd of blasphemous children, he meets a skull faced Monkey who enlists his help to combat the rising tide of Heresy in the City.
The Bleeding Eye Cultists are undermining reality itself with their blasphemous dreams. On a submarine journey through the flooded vaults under the Basilica, Mr Unpronounceable takes a solemn oath to become an Inquisitor in the name of the Silent Monks and in turn the Uncaused Cause. In light of the background I laid out before, the Monks had become in my mind a sort of loose metaphor for the Church that I had abandoned in my early adolescence, and the Sect is sort of a stand in for that subsequent, 'heretical' way of thinking.
The Early Christian Church is still of interest to me. The Apocryphal Gospels and Gnostic texts. This all fed into the creation of the Sect. So in a sense, they aren’t the ‘Villain’ as such, just something that is upsetting the status quo. Mr Unpronounceable, guilt-wracked coward (and traditionalist in his own way) decides to align himself against them.
Upon reentering the city proper, Mr Unpronounceable comes across a huge crowd of cultists and through some strange magic escapes into ‘the firmament’, a system of solid mechanical clouds. It is there that we meet another version of Mr U, the former ‘King Beneath The Waves’ from Mr Unpronounceable Adventures. After being decapitated by a demon, this version of Mr Unpronounceable was able to concentrate on centuries of ‘purely cerebral meditation’ and free himself from his former, wilder passions.
This aspect of Mr Unpronounceable has come in handy for expository purposes, even though his younger selves mostly ignore his wisdom. After being ushered though an ‘Oblivion Gate’, a sort of portal between layers of Dreaming, Mr U wakes up disorientated and naked in a filthy apartment back in the City.
He quickly finds himself on the run after murdering a sanitation worker and takes refuge in a place familiar to him from his former occupation as a Necromancer; The Cemetery At The Edge of Town.
We learn from yet another Severed Head that the Sects influence is spreading with even more rapidity in this part of the City and has turned the usually civilized dead quite savage. I’m not quite sure what the symbolism is here, but it’s worth bearing in mind that in the Gospel of Matthew it is claimed that after the Resurrection many bodies of the saints arose from their graves and went walking through Jerusalem.
I’ve also always loved Zombies. Here I reference the death of Captain Rhodes in George Romero’s Day of The Dead as Mr Unpronounceable is torn apart by a horde of his undead doppelgangers.
The next part of the book is called ‘The Desolation of the Suburbs’ and is inspired by my time as stay at home Dad to my son Louis when he was a baby. I used to push him around in a stroller in my old neighbourhood and it was during one of these long walks down the empty streets in the middle of the day that this narrative presented itself to me. I was absolutely in love with my little boy and had an immense sense of gratitude about being able to have all that time with him, and essentially I started wondering if sort of inverting the experience might be a good start to a story. I wanted to see what kind of trouble Mr Unpronounceable might get into living his version of a domestic life in the deserted outskirts of the City.
Here, the stand-in for my son is the Homunculus and Mr Unpronounceable is pushing it about in a stroller when he encounters some masked children. They lead him to a rotting house where he discovers an unconscious man engaged in some sort of intravenous drug use. Blood flows from an eye on a TV screen and into the arm of the man, whose face is writhing with worms. I think my Cronenberg is showing here.
Even more worrying, it seems the man had been wearing the flayed face of a doppelganger as a mask.
The Homunculus goes missing, and rather than face its ‘mother’ who has also become addicted to the Bleeding Eye, Mr Unpronounceable flees. The swimming pool in his back yard (we had one in ours too) is also another portal and he dives in, taking his chances with what is likely to be a random destination.
The next part was begun as an utterly separate story, but as I developed it I realised I could tie it in to the events I’ve just described.
The scene jumps to a distant planet, and we are introduced to The Synthetic Sorcerer in a silent sequence as he wanders through his palace. We know very little about the Synthetic Sorcerer, other than that he is some kind of Science Wizard. His face is infested with the very same worm disease as the junkie in the previous chapter. Thinking about it now, I think the Sorcerer might be an echo of the extreme case of Acne Vulgaris I suffered in my early teens.
He inspects the work of a subordinate, (she seems to be growing a baby Deity in a tank) he finds that his aquarium has a new addition. The version of Mr Unpronounceable who leapt through the pool portal in the preceding pages has been transported here. The Sorcerer steals his face and does some dimension hopping of his own. After a stopover in a Moebius/Fifth Element inspired Alien City (where he takes the life of a convenience store clerk before making use of his clandestine, backroom Oblivion Gate) The Sorcerer makes a brief stopover in a scene from Mr Unpronounceable Adventures.
This was a really deliberate way to really tie the two books together. At the end of ‘Adventures’ Uncle Stan (an inscrutable, cigar-smoking, satanic adversary) wanders through a secluded coastal area and finds a small child floating face down in a Rock Pool. This is me.
When I was very young, I wandered off at the beach and my father found me floating face down in a rock pool. I don’t think I’ve ever come closer to death.
This seemed like something that I should enshrine in these stories, as morbid as they are.
And here, in ‘Sect’ the Sorcerer walks through the same scene. Nothing has changed, suggesting that he arrives only moments before or after Uncle Stan.
The Sorcerer leaves me to drown and finds another Oblivion Gate on the beach. He arrives at his final destination, the same desolate suburb where the story begins. The Masked Children lead him to the rotting house from before where he meets Uncle Stan, who provides him with the means to hook himself up to the narcotic, bloody tears pouring from the television.
I employ a favourite trick of mine here and the perspective pans out to reveal that we have been reading a comic book that yet another version of Uncle Stan is also reading. With him are the Mandrill Philosophers (first mentioned in passing in ‘Adventures’.)
They give him another comic to read, ‘Mr Unpronounceable and The Uncaused Cause’ and we once again forced to endure the ceaseless chattering of our titular hero after 44 pages of silence.
In this story, I wanted to express that adolescent loathing of the Demiurge and maybe try and finally put my childhood Catholicism to rest. I remember at the time that I was engaged in an online debate with a Christian Pastor in the USA. We’d actually taken our conversation off social media and we were communicating via email. He was trying to use the Thomas Aquinas argument of Causation and so I was reading a lot of refutations and I essentially found the whole thing both ridiculous and very useful for writing dialogue for this part of the book.
Mr Unpronounceable is birthed via a sort of exotic plant-womb into a serene and beautiful Garden. Essentially, Mr Unpronounceable is Adam and he is in Eden and very soon he meets my version of Yahweh, The Uncaused Cause. The Uncaused Cause turns out to be an adult version of the Deity that the Synthetic Sorcerer was growing in the tank, thus undermining The Uncaused Causes claims of Uncausality.
These concluding Chapters of ‘Sect’ were conceived of as a parody of the beginning of the Bible, and Mr Unpronounceable (the irrepressible seeker of Occult Knowledge) is forbidden to venture to the Magic Tree at the center of the Garden. Its moist polyps are tended to by a Witch and to eat them would to be to consume divine knowledge. Of course, Mr Unpronounceable immediately goes there, so that he can commit Deicide after becoming equal to the Uncaused Cause.
His plan goes awry, as always, and like Adam he is cast out of the Garden, and he wanders in the desert until he becomes old and gray.
The book concludes with him using a telescope to spy on his younger self and the Dead Man from the very beginning of the book. The broader narrative has finally swallowed its own tail.
The ancient Mr Unpronounceable/Adam is spotted by the Dead Man, who shows him the Sigil of the Bleeding Eye.
Mr Unpronounceable utters the words ‘I am forgiven’ as bloody tears roll down his cheeks.
And that is where ‘The Sect of The Bleeding Eye’ concludes.
If you’ve stuck with me, I really hope that you’ve enjoyed this long haphazard Exegesis. It’s been fun for me to revisit this stuff and try and unpack it all. It feels a little like going through an old family album, and a little like airing my dirty laundry. So thanks for listening!
In part 3 (which I imagine will be much shorter) I will unpack the third and final volume in the trilogy ‘Mr Unpronounceable and the Infinity of Nightmares’.
If you’d like to own copies of my books you can buy them direct from Milk Shadow Books, or you can visit the Beinart Gallery Bookshop or even get them on Book Depository!
May the monstrous Dream-Worms of Eternal Nightmare Haunt your Nocturnal Sojourns!