Clearing out my inbox I came across dozens of messages sent to me that I didn’t bother to answer – mostly they had come in via the webmail form on this website. Here are a couple of examples – sadly the abuse sent by these haters is very often homophobic….. Subject: stewarthome: The Tragedy of S.H.(I.T.) This is an enquiry e-mail via http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/senior/ from: Sewage Homo henry_haller@yahoo.com It’s truly a sign of the times that “artists” like S.H.(I.T.) can actually get devoted fans to waste their time by forming “societies” dedicated to their “work.” People like S.H.(I.T.) make up for their lack of intelligence and talent by living on the crud that has accumulated on the surface of our petroleum-intoxicated, suicidal, decadent civilisation, where they can amuse others whose are as tasteless as themselves by pulling “art” out of their assholes which titillates peoples’ lowest instincts, causing them to think that they’re actually doing something significant, when in fact you’re all just filling the howling emptiness of your lives with more garbage.

We were to meet in a pub that’s name is a mash-up of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death – concealed identities, immorality, disassociation, depersonalisation and Gothic materialism – and the trending critical theory of hauntology all retro/futuristic absence/presence, the past inside the present. But the Masque Haunt has no postmodern pretences and the closest it gets to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx is the library named after the 19th-century revolutionary socialist a ten-minute walk away in Clerkenwell. The Masque Haunt is a Wetherspoon’s boozer – low on prices, high on pissheads and it’s located on the corner of Old Street and Bunhill Row – Silicon Roundabout and William Blake, Bunhill Fields and the bodies of plague victims – hauntology a go-go.

Stewart Home is a writer, artist and filmmaker living in London, England. His latest novel, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane, came out on February 26 2013. Here’s an email interview I did with Stewart about this book. Unfortunately, we did not discuss Three-sided Football, King Mob, bread dolls, Lucio Fulci or Punk rock from Finland this time around. There’s always next time. What is Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane about? Stewart Home: Among other things the book addresses delusional thinking and in this particular novel it is manifested through the narrator Charlie, who is a hack academic with a drug problem. Charlie also has an obsession with porn and likes to have sex with unconscious women.

My new novel Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane (published on 26 February 2013) was in part inspired by certain reviewers suggesting some of my earlier novels might be English equivalents of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. The books that particularly attracted this comparison were Come Before Christ & Murder Love, 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess and Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton. The reviewers concerned were trying to place me in a mainstream context and were doing no more (and no less) than what was expected of them as journalists. However, I know I’m a far better writer than Bret Easton Ellis – who I still view as unusual for a successful writer because he can actually write reasonably well – and so I decided to make a burlesque parody of what critics were saying about me.

Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane by Stewart Home is published February 26, 2013 by Penny-Ante Editions: Charlie Templeton, his wife Mandy, and student mistress Mary-Jane Millford survived the London terrorist bombings of 7/7, but history has yet to be made. To save the future of western civilization, Charlie, a schizoid cultural studies lecturer with a penchant for horror films and necrophilia, must fight the zombies of university bureaucracy and summon the will to become the last in a long line of mad prophets announcing the end of art. And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!