I had a cousin who killed himself. I didn’t know him very well, but what I knew terrified me.
He was older than me by forty years or more and seemed a kind and decent man. Once upon a time he had been a writer, possibly the only published author his tiny town had ever produced. It was a pulp book full of lurid sex and violence and became a bit of an urban legend many years after it fell out of print. Word has it that William (that was his name) had based many of the characters on people he knew. The local response to the book was quick and ruthless. It was banned from the library and local stores. He was ridiculed and threatened. He never wrote another novel.
When I met him he was an old man living alone in a small shack in the country. I don’t think he’d ever married. A sense of loneliness and isolation soaked the environment around him and its source was clear.
By this point in his life he'd resorted to raising rabbits to pay the bills. This enterprise didn’t last long, though, because he grew attached to the rabbits and couldn't stomach selling them for slaughter. He did give one of the rabbits to my brother, though. It was a stubborn pet.
Even though I sympathized with William, I could also see that he had internalized the emotional violence he'd suffered after the publication of his novel ... and that he'd decided to do what was necessary to win back their acceptance.
He became complicit in the death of his own dreams and ultimately took his own life with a rope. He was alone when it happened. The lesson I learned from William's fall was this: Nobody really cares if you live or die, so you might as well live life on your own terms.
Years later, as an adult, I met an attorney who had a copy of William’s book. It was well-read, to say the least. The pages had fallen out of the spine and the book was stored in a zip-lock plastic bag. He loaned it to people occasionally and it made me happy to see that William’s book lived on, even in secret.
I think anyone with a creative streak would have looked at my cousin and immediately recognized the terrible narrative etched into his face. I didn’t like myself for steering clear of him, but I felt my reasons were sound. He had betrayed himself and I could see how easy it would be for me to travel the same path.
And what the fuck does this have to do with Mary Shelley Overdrive, you ask? Penny Dreadful Valentine stewed for more than a year as Mark Wood and I kicked around music and lyrics for our second LP. After cranking out two EPs and a full-length album in a year, the next 18+ months felt like an eternity of silence. As usual, the new songs were written with no clear idea of what we were doing, but a common theme began to emerge in the lyrics: Insanity. That clinical corruption of reason that recognizes no master and either warps reality into something unrecognizable, or reveals it for what it really is.
You’ll see insanity rear its ugly head a lot in these new songs. I’ve come to think of it as a necessary ingredient in the creative process and something to be embraced ... even when those terms make absolutely no sense to anyone else.
— Simon McCorkindale, 2010
