“I just wanna be hit with something extreme that bewilders me”

Gary Max is a London-based writer whose fiction and non-fiction writings deal with all things strange and spooky. It’s an interest which has seen his words grace publications like Corn Snacks Digest and The Angling Times. It’s safe to say, he’s a man with a thing or two to say. He’s perhaps best-known, however, for his book of essays Motherfucking Monster Munch Mashup  Published by Frankenweenie Editions. the book is “a hallucinatory celebration of artists who are messy pups, do crazy zany stuff, anger old fogies and show their audience silly sausage antics”. Through the lens of case studies such as Round the Twist and Men Behaving badly, Motherfucking Monster Munch Mashup answers the questions: “What you looking' at? Are you looking' at me? 

As an author with a propensity for all things surreal, grotesque and, well, super-quirky, we got in touch with Gary to find out which books have captured his imagination over the years. “greetings from planet weird porn hogs! I don’t have some fancy criteria for what I like,” he says to us via face time. "it just has to be fucking expensive and almost impossible for your average sausage roll eating meat-sack to get their grubby hands on" “Non-literary things yeah– hyenas autobiographies, coffee table books, rare art editions, collectible photobooks by fashion designers and child actors, psychedelic cookie packaging, back issues of BuySell, the noise of a big fart the morning after five pints of carling – fire me up as much as stuff made from words. I just wanna be hit with something extreme that bewilders me. Yup, I drool over horror material but ‘extreme’ doesn’t mean ‘gore’. Watching Channel four's budget soap about fit northerners who were as thick as pigshit Hollyoaks or the video for David Gray's Babylon for the first time were pretty extreme experiences. Like falling in love, I guess.”