“We are being erased,” asserts American writer Bruce Wagner, but he’s far from sensationalism, even breathing a certain amount of relief. His latest book, The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories, weaves fables of broken characters and updates his biting, satirical take on the world of entertainment, bringing it into the era of social media. Raised in Beverly Hills, Wagner went to school with the children of film and TV stars, and drove ambulances and limousines until, in his mid-20s, he became a Hollywood screenwriter. And found success. A lot of it. “I became a hack,” he tells High Times, without blushing.
“Fiction was my way out,” he shares. “I had always wanted to be a prose writer. It wouldn’t have mattered where I grew up; I would have written about the same obsessions but with a different backdrop.”
In his books, his characters often use all kinds of drugs. However, Wagner has been sober for about 15 years, without so much as touching them. He says he’s “too old now to use them, though if I could get a guarantee that I wouldn’t die, I would probably again become the addict I once was. Too old now. I must want to live!”
And while weed is legal in Los Angeles, where he lives, he doesn’t consider himself a heavy smoker. “It’s very helpful to many people I know. If I get the Big C [cancer], I’ll enjoy the gummies. I’ve had extraordinary mushroom journeys. In fact, the earliest book I remember reading and adoring was called Voyage to the Mushroom Planet. I was probably seven or eight years old. On my first psilocybin trip, the goddess who oversaw her student, the mushroom, told me, ‘Let go of the mast, it’s already broken.’”
At one point, he also took quite a bit of ketamine, which he considers “extraordinary, in a different way.” In his own words: “It put me in a thousand-room palace. I spent a short while in as many rooms as I could. I went into one that was clearly Hell. A voice said, ‘God made this room, but refuses to come here.’ One of the mercies of ketamine is that it doesn’t allow one to linger.”
Likewise, on that chemical and deeply perceptive journey, he maintained a close relationship with Carlos Castaneda, master of psychedelia and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Wagner shares that, for him, Castaneda represented “a profound influence. And because we’ve spoken of drugs, there was zero usage in the ten years I was in close association before his death. He was very much against that kind of exploration. In his case, he was bombarded with plants, because Castaneda was hard-headed and his teacher was running out of time. When I was with him, he was all about accessing awareness to what he called ‘the second attention’ via energy work, which required complete sobriety.”
By the by, we also asked Wagner his opinion on High Times: “I was never a big reader because the leaf had generally left me behind. It impressed me because it was transgressive; absolutely no one was doing what the magazine did.”
At the time, Wagner can’t trace the origin of his trippy and mind-bending novels. Although he detects that the titles do emerge first. “The Marvel Universe was all-encompassing to me; both poetic and ironic,” he writes. Years later, he added Origin Stories as a subtitle, something equally ironic but with a slightly more poetic tone. “After the title, the form presents itself. Will it be a single narrative? A trilogy of stories? A quartet? Will it be in short chapters? Will characters reoccur? How long will the book be? The answers to those questions are ultimately beyond my control but I maintain the illusion of control. You have to, otherwise you’d never be able to write.”
For example, The Marvel Universe is a public domain book by choice. The story goes that an editor signed a contract for a novel, but canceled it after a few months. He was even labeled as “problematic.” His take on the matter? “It’s a word that came into heavy use in the last few years, during the era of the wholesale censorship of writers’ work. There is a character in the book who is 800 pounds. She calls herself Fat Joan, and the publisher said to me, ‘Not even a fictional character can call themselves fat.’ The Marvel Universe ended up on what I call the Cancel Ward, my variation of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward.”
He considered self-publishing, but ultimately preferred to release it into the public domain. Versions appeared from Felix Farmer Press in Los Angeles, which released a limited edition of 500 copies; another from a Las Vegas publisher specializing in printing public domain works on demand; another from a fan who made it a $2,000 collector’s item; and also the beautiful Argentine edition, by Walden, a label that often publishes international gems. “I’m honored that it’s available in Argentina… The Marvel Universe is the only one of my fifteen books that will never go out of print.”
As such, he carries a long resume that includes some twelve novels and the screenplay for one of Freddy Krueger’s best films, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), and Maps to the Stars (2014), by David Cronenberg himself. “I love David. He’s like a brother to me and so many of our fixations are the same. By the way, he’s a writer, and has always said that books were a bigger influence on him than movies. It was a high point in my life to watch the filming of Maps to the Stars,” he recalls.
So how did he come to write the script for Krueger? Through Wes Craven, the character’s creator, whom he considers “a good friend.” Craven read a script of his called They Sleep By Night, which was a variation on the title of a film noir called They Drive By Night, and which he considers to be of his darkest works. “Somehow, Wes read it and asked me to co-write Dream Warriors. He was very generous and fearless that way.”
Meanwhile, his work combines the grotesque and the poetic, though he often balances excess with a certain delicacy, a constant in his work. “I suppose it mirrors my inner life,” he acknowledges. “Since memory allows, I’ve walked through this world with a heightened, nearly erotic sense of the grotesque and the poetic, the comic and tragic, anguish and awe: in short, the sacred and profane.”
And in the case of The Marvel Universe, his characters are presented as extreme, marginalized, and broken. “The nature of being human is to be broken,” he states bluntly. “To live is to break. There is great benefit in the breaking. Not to have suffered –or attempted to heal from one’s brokenness– is the greatest sin. ‘Go for broke’ is the literal phrase. It means to make the leap, the metamorphosis, without giving thought of consequence; to plunge carelessly into the hallucinatory, yet necessary state of change, discovery, transcendence, without guarantees.”
Along these lines, some authors appear as unavoidable references in his work: François Rabelais, Jean Genet, Franz Kafka, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, Henry Miller, and Jack Kerouac. However, he considers his work “singular.” In his words: “That’s not a boast. If one was raised by many fathers and mothers, it’s difficult to trace who you take after… A good writer can be identified by scent.”
Throughout The Marvel Universe, cameos by popular figures like Kim Kardashian and Leonard Cohen emerge, championing the idea of hyperrealism. “Why not? I always loathed the idea of inventing cheesy pseudonyms for well-known people,” he says, adding that novels are like “dreams that can move us, startle or frighten us, or leave us puzzled.” He continues: “Many books I’ve read have moved me tremendously yet I can’t remember much about them. It isn’t predementia, that’s just how it is. (Unless you’re Harold Bloom.) This life is a dream. The idea of books lasting forever is a dream too. Nothing does, nor will.”
—If someone were to read The Marvel Universe 50 years from now, what would you like them to find in it?
—Solace.
