Matt R. Allen

The mashup--the combining of two or more disparate pieces of music or video or software to create something new--is an iffy proposition. Although the end result is always going to be new, can it really be said to be original? The act itself is creation, of course, but is it truly creative? Starting with music sampling in the eighties (art or plagiarism? clever post-modern self-referentialism or lazy shortcut-taking?) the debate has raged, even as the purveyors--true believers and lazy bandwagon jumpers both--have practiced and refined their craft (or art).

The literary mashup is a newer form even than that of music and video. At its best, the literary mashup takes a known, preferably beloved, entity and through the thoughtful insertion of material something new and wonderful is born. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, published earlier this year, is just such a work. In it, co-author Seth Grahame-Smith takes the mannered world of Regency England and layers upon it a well-developed alternative 19th century in which zombies roam the earth and Miss Bennett and her friends are bad-ass ninja zombie fighters. The original text of Pride and Prejudice resides comfortably--and hilariously--beside the new material, and the result, as Monty Python would say, is something completely different.

On the other hand, Fucking Frankenstein is an example of the mashup as expensive practical joke fallen very, very flat. Fucking flat, as juvenile prankster Matt Allen would say. In the only truly creative fucking portion of the book, Mr. Matt Allen purports to have discovered the manuscript of Fucking Frankenstein, "one of the most peculiar and earliest works of fan fiction in literary history" while researching Mary Shelley's work for a fucking film project. He goes on to assert that a rabid fucking fan of Mary Shelley created the work as an act of traumatic homage to her idol after the birth of a stillborn child.

One can picture Mr. Matt Allen cackling childishly over his keyboard every time he fucking inserts the word fuck somewhere in the classic text. One can imagine that this would be kind of a funny inside fucking joke, something that Mr. Matt Allen would email excerpts of to his equally juvenile fucking friends. What one can't fucking fathom, though, is the fucking dedication to such a moronic fucking project that would impel him to cough up the fucking money necessary to self publish it.

One hopes that Mr. Matt Allen's film projects have more fucking creative impetus and originality of execution than this fucking work does. If not, he's going to go broke in pursuit of his fucking joke...and I hate to say it, but we'll all be fucking laughing at him, not with him.… (altro)

This Fucking Frankenstein shit is what Mary Shelley might have written back in her day were she possessed by the washed-up spirit of Andrew Dice Clay. It's that bad: Crass, unfunny vulgarity for crass, unfunny vulgarity's sake. Stooo-pid!

Fucking Frankenstein is the Jackass or - worse - Beavis and Butthead of a terrible trend occuring with alarming regularity in recent literature: the mashup, er, perversion and distortion of classic literature, be it the disrespectful drivel of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or some dumbed-down graphic novel version of a classic, so abridged as to be unrecognizable and irrelevant to the author's original intentions.

If you're a skinny boy of thirteen, you'll probably guffaw your pimply little face off, you dweeb, once you see the "F" word in all it's magnificent variants: "fuck," "fucking," "fucked," "fucker," - inserted indiscriminately - for no fucking artistic purpose whatsoever - every other fucking sentence or so, in Fucking Frankenstein. Mary Shelley, I'm sure, cannot be lying peacefully in her grave over this fucking travesty - over this senseless and embarassing butchery of her macabre masterpiece.

Why would somebody write this shit, let alone go to the exorbitant expense of procuring a legitimate isbn for it and the cost of publishing? As a goof? As some inside joke that nobody gets? Because nobody's laughing, except for the dweebs (and nobody's going to buy Fucking Frankenstein either), because it's not funny, and it's not fresh, and it's not the real Frankenstein! Though it is infantile, if you're big on infantile. Even the bookcover stops eliciting laughs after you've looked at it a dozen times or two.

And note that the word, "Fucking" in the title that prefaces "Frankenstein," is not to be read as an active verb for all you twisted sickos out there who'd probably enjoy attempting doing to Frankenstein what the title suggests. Fucking Frankenstein, again, is not some demented how-to sex manual for monsters. What fucking monster in their right fucking mind would want to bonk Frankenstein anyway? The Creature from the Black Lagoon? The Wolfman maybe?

So what's next in this depraved new world of the mashup? Harry Fucking Potter? Sounds like gay porn to me. How about A Tale of Two Fucking Cities? That sounds catchy! Yeah, I like that. Or maybe Mr. Matt Allen (don't you love how very formal and classy he is with that "Mr." before his name?) could next compose, The Fucking Idiot.

The title, The Fucking Idiot, could serve for Mr. Matt Allen, both as a "cool" (though unconscionable) disparagement of Dostoyevski's famous novel, while also serving as the title to Mr. Matt Allen's future autobiography.

Yeah. Now that sounds good. That makes some much needed fucking sense.… (altro)