CHAOS RIDDLE PROSE  -

Derek Hunter writes in a style he calls Chaos Riddle Prose in order to penetrate, shake up, and distort not only language, narrative, and character development, but perceptions of reality as well.  Storytelling is still the driving force behind the stories, but the way in which they're told not only gives the reader another way of enjoying a story but another way of looking at life.

Chaos Riddle Prose is indebted to writers of the past, such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, James Joyce, Goethe, Arthur Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Charles Baudelaire, Sylvia Plath, Mallarme, Samuel Beckett, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Dante, August Strindberg, Moliere, Jean Genet, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allen Poe, Georges Bataille, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Anais Nin, Alexander Pushkin, John Wilmot, Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, Antonin Artaud, Robert Anton Wilson, Franz Kafka, and more.  

After some exposure to Chaos Riddle Prose, some might say it has affinities to Breton's ideas for Surrealism or Burrough's and Gysin's Cut-Up technique.  While definitely influenced by Surrealism, the Cut-Up technique, and other aesthetic schools of thought, Chaos Riddle Prose separates itself  by it's systematic anti-system approach to language and storytelling.

Chaos Riddle Prose sees life itself as one big riddle, having within it an infinite number of individual and distinct riddles.  Unlike the standard riddle, with a proposition/question leading to a concrete answer, Chaos Riddle Prose often expresses itself as an enigma, yet an enigma pointing to deeper truths.  Other times, to avoid redundancy, and "predictable chaos" (which would then no longer be chaos), Chaos Riddle Prose presents the story in clear, easily understood language.  The Demands of the Moment are Key.  


* AUTHOR'S NOTE ON THE USE OF ELLIPSES *

Readers over the years who’ve read my fiction have sometimes wondered why I use ellipses ( … ) so much. Besides the fact I like how they look and they are a nod to Louis Ferdinand Celine’s prose (just as a lack of quotation marks and use of dashes for character dialogue a nod to James Joyce), they are also part of a larger literary and personal project I have been on for decades and will continue on, hopefully for more decades.
This literary and personal project of mine is heavily inspired, but definitely not exclusively, by the alchemical maxim - Solve et Coagula.

Solve - dissolution, deconstruction, breaking up objects, subjects apart to better understand them. The … ellipses in the stories is part of that process.

Coagula - unifying, bringing the broken apart, separated elements together, a harmonization process.
The plan is that the first half of my literary output (except the novel Life, which was written in naturalistic and not chaos riddle prose) which includes E.I.E., Black Light White Dark, The Story of Us All Trilogy Black, White, Red, Parzival, The Divine Chaos, and Faust are all part of the Solve period, which by the end leads into the next step, Coagula.
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The future books, starting with this year's (2023) first part of the Shakespeare trilogy, will no longer have the heavy use of ellipses and will be the beginning of the Coagula period. The surreal nature to chaos riddle prose will still be used and the bizarre will still be mixed with the normal like the previous books, but the ellipses will be a thing of the past, stylistically and thematically.

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THE BOOKS THUS FAR :

- Faust
​- The Divine Chaos
​- Parzival
​- Red: Book Three of The Story of Us All Trilogy
- White: Book Two of The Story of Us All Trilogy
- Black: Book One of The Story of Us All Trilogy
- E.I.E.
- Black Light, White Dark
- Life

There is a page for each book on this website.  Move the mouse over "Stories" (this page) and a drop down menu will show up listing all of the titles.

Explore and enjoy!