The Voidoid

by Richard Hell

Russian Book. Publisher: AST. Pages: 94. Year: 2004. Cover: Hardcover.

Genres: Music, Novels, Literature, Fiction

79 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Born in 1949, Richard Meyers was shipped off to a private school for troublesome kids in Delaware, which is where he met Tom (Verlaine) Miller. Together they ran away, trying to hitchhike to Florida, but only made it as far as Alabama before being picked up by the authorities. Meyers persuaded his mother to allow him to go to New York, where he worked in a secondhand bookshop (the Strand; later he was employed at Cinemabilia along with Patti Smith) and tried to become a writer.
He arrived in the Big Apple at the tail end of the hippie scene. He took acid (and later heroin), but sought to develop a different sensibility in the manner of what he later referred to as 'twisted French aestheticism', i.e. more Arthur Rimbaud than Rolling Stones. He printed a poetry magazine (Genesis: Grasp) and when Miller dropped out of college and joined him in New York, they developed a joint alter ego whom they named Teresa Stern. Under this name they published a book of poems entitled Wanna Go Out?. This slim volume went almost unnoticed. It was at this point that Meyers and Miller decided to form a band. They changed their names to Hell and Verlaine, and called the band The Neon Boys.
During this hiatus, Hell wrote The Voidoid (1973), a rambling confessional. He wrote it in a 16 dollar-a-week room, fuelled by cheap wine and cough syrup that contained codeine. He then played in various successful bands: Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids.
Hell recently returned to fiction with his 1996 novel Go Now.

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this “novel,” Hell begins with a scene set in a small town that appears to be based on a personal memory. Before he has brought that scene to any kind of conclusion—before he has even gotten his reader interested in it—he shifts to a different action and a different location: New York City and a rock and roll playing vampire and his zombie friend. There appears to be no connection between this scene and the one that preceded it. It is like a surrealist film. However, the vampire and the zombie appear to be two of the “main characters” as much of the rest of the “narrative” is about their experiences (there are subplots, too, one of which is about a pair of women killing one another).

It would be difficult to say what the “story” is, and whether what the book depicts is some objective but fantastic fictional world or the world with which we are familiar, but which has been distorted by the perceptions of the narrator who sometimes interrupts the story to include surrealistic or schizophrenic little asides and essays.

There may be some point Hell is making, whether about America and its violent history, or about New York City as an urban experience, or about the rock and roll lifestyle, or about the kinds of ideas one gets when one combines late-night B films with the poetry of Gerard de Nerval. I am not sure whether it is about one of these things or some or even all of them. The book is raunchy, excessive, unfocused, confusing, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Acquired Mar 14, 2011
amazon.com

[Frank Farrell · Rating 1 out of 5]

In the afterward Hell explains the book was written on wine, cough medicine and codeine. This probably explains why it’s such utter garbage.

[B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Put a gun in your ear and fuck what you heard about it. This book has it all. It's Hunter S. Thompson hopped up on codeine and insane amounts of self-hatred. A schizophrenic internal roadtrip with no road between each dizzy shattered one-night stop. An overwhelmed narrator trying to convey something to you about a boy who is a vampire who is the gaping hole in his own chest and frequently getting distracted. Love & desperation. Identity confusion. It's all about sex, right? It's all about loneliness, right? Loneliness; I mean emptiness. It's all about the relative referential position of every person and feeling and what a disorienting weight it is. Right? Thank you, I'm sorry, thank you, I'm sorry, making such a nice vampire's spiral tunnel, year after year, like a worm, eating his bloody dirt.