Hardcore Mother

by Maxon Crumb

While answering the call of an injured girl, Oakland police officials uncover an eerily dark and disturbing family. Although their intervention halts the immediate danger, it does little to effect long-standing change. Destructive patterns of interpersonal interaction are viewed from the perspective of each family member as the girl and her brother endure the hardship of living with an overbearing and sadistic psychotic mother. The psychosexual stressors culminate in the son's intense, gut-wrenching confrontation with his ill mother ... Robert Crumb, famous Underground Comic artist, comments on his brother Maxon's new "One of the strangest, quirkiest pieces of literature I've ever read. "It is bizarre in the extreme ... well written, interesting, entertaining even ... a bit harrowing ... where do such ideas come from? "[HardCore Mother] is on the outer edge of utter strangeness, perversity, and inverted human imagination ... not digestible for the general public, certainly ... only for a very small elite of aficionados of such stuff ... "Beautiful work ... [Maxon]'s in his creative prime."

120 pages, Paperback

First published May 18, 2001

About the author

Born in 1945, Maxon Crumb is the youngest brother of Charles (deceased) and Robert Crumb. Although Maxon has been drawing, painting, and writing for over 25 years (early work appeared in Weirdo, Liquidator, and his self-published Crumb's Brother's Magazine), it is only since the publication of Maxon's Poe (Word Play, 1997) and HardCore Mother (CityZen Books, 2001) his first novel, that his artistry has been accessible to a wide audience.

From 1997 Maxon has earned his living solely through art sales, book royalties, and private commissions. Despite his busy schedule he still takes time to enjoy long walks in the country and explore his inner self. He still meditates a few hours a week on the streets of San Francisco.

Maxon's worldview is in his art. He is well versed in classic art and literature, as seen in his references to European masters and exotic images of Aztecan/Mayan architecture and sacrificial rituals. Suppressed sexual tension and curiosity are expressed in searching, sometimes graphically violent, compositions. Throughout his work runs a current of sophisticated, subliminal social commentary.

Maxon is a quiet genius; eccentric, perhaps, but practical aplenty (he's very computer savvy, for instance) to balance his creative gifts.

Reviews

[Nick LeBlanc · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a vile book with no literary merit. I picked it up after watching Zwigoff's CRUMB documentary hoping that it would provide some insight into what the hell might have been going on in that household. Anyone who has seen the documentary will know exactly what I mean. I had read on Wikipedia that it was study of sadism and incest. After seeing that, I had assumed the book would either be a thinly veiled account of what might have been happening to the Crumbs when they were children or an account of sexual fantasies written by a very damaged guy with questionable proclivities. Unfortunately, it was the latter. The writing is some combination of screenplay and prose written by someone with zero dramatic sense that has a strange and flawed idea about what constitutes "intelligent" writing. The tenses and dialogue make less than zero sense and the narration is awful. This is a self important diary entry that was bolstered by the author's connection to his brother and his admittedly impressive visual art skills. Don't read this and don't recommend it to people. It will just make you feel bad.

[Kyle Gunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mildly interesting if you’re curious about the Crumb family’s work outside of Robert’s; but it’s mostly hard to follow and largely lacking in narrative. Neither shocked nor entertained me a whole lot. Yes, it’s dealing with dark subject matter, but without anything that feels like a genuine depth of human curiosity or even as an exercise in exploitative comedic absurdity, it just drags, even at a mere 112 pages. It starts with what seems like a setup to a legitimate story but quickly detaches and dissolves into a hodgepodge of structureless mean-spirited moments that feel more like a stream of perverted consciousness than anything literarily worthwhile. Even as edgy smut, it does little to delve into the dementedly pornographic in any even guilty, dirty erotic style.

It’s no Dennis Cooper or Story of the Eye, that’s for sure.