Malone has opted to keep his secrets secret, so we can't shed much light on his mystery.
We can tell you that he built up the cultiest of cult followings with his annual contributions to men's magazines in the 1970s, from underground fetish magazines to such luminaries as Hustler and Penthouse. Of course he doesn't have the monopoly on this, such prominent writers as Stephen King and Norman Mailer, have famously contributed to the top shelf. And Jack Ketchum's Jerzy Livingston years are now well known.
But what set Malone apart was the strangeness of his prose, and the truly surreal nature of his stories.
These commissions are said to have come about due to his involvement in the burgeoning 1970s XXX industry in America, at the time still largely controlled by the mob.
The closest thing ever documented to a novel was, And the Grave of Your Ancestors Will Call at dawn, a 70 page novella put out by the long since defunct Mythos Pornagraphica Press. Original copies are rumoured to have sold on ebay for in excess of a thousand dollars.
Then at some point during the 1980s he vanished without a trace.
The epic 800 page novel, which he is said to have destroyed at the peak of a mental breakdown, due to a minor disagreement with the publisher regarding typeset?!
Who knows?
And what of the thousand and one other rumours which have surfaced over the years: that he was on the run in Mexico, that he had gone into underground film making, and was now (under a pseudonym) working successfully as a popular Indie director, that following successful treatment in a mental health facility he began a successful career as an educator in the public school system, that he was dead, that the cause had been violent suicide...
Well, there are only two things we can tell you with any degree of certainty:
1.That Malone is very much still alive, and experiencing something of a creative resurgence.
2.That we are more than proud to have him in the Devil's Wax stable.
Pantalla :
