Diary of a Mad Man

Ex-murder junkie Rich Hillen swaps his red crayons for Yellow Socks.

by A.D. Amorosi

Jessica Kourkounis

Rich Hillen Jr. knows how to raise hackles. Take his old band, The World Famous Crawlspace Brothers, who in the mid-aughts played crunchy, catchy, shockabilly ditties called "Bundy Beach," "Speck," "BTK," etc. "We sang about serial killers," says Hillen matter-of-factly. "I don't condone murder in any form and looked at what I did as art. Maybe it was distasteful art to some, but it was art."

Before that, the Haddonfield native was the man behind The Serial Killer Coloring Book series. Released between 1999 and 2002, the thick-paper comics had a world-weary tone — as if Hemingway or Bukowski had tried to squelch Thomas Harris novels into bite-size bits.

Now, the release of his debut novel, Yellow Socks: Confessions of a Non-Don Juan, and a collection of poems, stories and ravings called Dangers of a Confessional Mind, mark the dawn of a new Hillen.

New, but not unrecognizable: He's reprinting The Best of the Serial Killer Coloring Book. And Yellow Socks — the diary of a young man dealing with "emotionally unbalanced women" — has some graphic sexual content. Hillen's upfront about it. "At first I was afraid it would come off as sexually gratuitous, but the responses I've received show otherwise."

Meanwhile, The Serial Killer Coloring Book, a copy of which was famously purchased by John Waters, is and was more than just Crayola crudeness. "I added activities to the coloring book — like, 'Help John Wayne Gacy find a new place in his crawlspace to bury a body' — plus articles, reviews, interviews, and even recipes and letters from the killers themselves. I even sent my books to, and corresponded with, famous real-life serial killers."

"I wondered what made these killers different than you or me," says Hillen about his music and comics days. "It seems like we are all one spanking or one gene away from being a psychopathic murderer. I've been accused of glorifying murder with the coloring books, just as I was with The Crawlspace Brothers."

No sooner famous for his morbid exploits, however, Hillen lost interest in murder culture. With a passion for sarcastic rants, Hillen kept on writing.

Similarly provocative, but much more personal, Yellow Socks got its start as a piece Hillen wrote about his birth mother's paranoid schizophrenia. Like much of what he does, that piece was born online. "When I started writing stories, blogs and poems online, what appealed to me was that there were no rules. No taboos. No one to please but myself," he laughs.

That's the Hillen we know and love — the one who just won't color within the lines.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Hillen reading/signing, Sat., Dec. 18, 2 p.m., free, GERM Books & Gallery, 2005 Frankford Ave., 215-423-5002, germbooks.com.