Laughing in the face of the Apocalypse

Had local author Victor Gischler kept writing, he might have a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award. Maybe Oprah’s Book Club would have given him a call.

Thank heavens he didn’t.

While writing his fifth and latest novel, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Gischler had been face-deep in the pages of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Child of God. Inspired by these gritty tales, Gischler set out to write a dark, post-apocalyptic novel.

“I thought, ‘You know, I would like to write in that style, the feel of McCarthy,’” Gischler says. “Got 20 pages in, and I couldn’t do it. I kept thinking of jokes and satirical things.”

Then he received a call from a friend who told him McCarthy was set to release The Road, a novel set in—you guessed it—a post-apocalyptic world.

Gischler laughed at his first derivative attempt, and then with a list of influences from “creature features” to Kurt Vonnegut, he decided his primary goal would be to entertain.

“Just because I want somebody to be entertained doesn’t mean it has to be shallow or dumbed down,” Gischler says. “It can be smart and have a good point. When somebody’s finished with one of my books, I want them to think, ‘Wow, that was fun.’ Then later think, ‘He’s got a weird point.’”

So Go-Go Girls became pulp fiction. And while you laugh at the book’s Mortimer Tate trying to escape from cannibals, you realize that this is indeed about the apocalypse. These are real cannibals, and the nation’s saving grace might just be a chain of strip-clubs with built-in hotel rooms, plenty of ammunition and a refusal to accept anything but “Armageddon dollars.”

Now, Gischler, who teaches screenwriting and composition at Baton Rouge Community College, has finished a new novel, Bad Alchemy, and a four-issue arc for Marvel Comics’ The Punisher titled Welcome to the Bayou.

Can he chalk up his full slate to good early reviews? Could it be the Quentin Tarentino or Christopher Moore comparisons? Gischler thinks his faithful servitude to the grindhouse style will suffice.

“How horrible would it have been to do a McCarthy novel?” Gischler muses. “It would have been a huge mistake. I just got lucky that I got only 20 pages.”