Hope Where There Is No Hope

"It’s basically like this: the world is horrible and it sucks but you can’t give up,” says Michael D. Williams on the seemingly contradictory threads of desperation and hope strung throughout his first book, Cancer as a Social Activity: Affirmations of World’s End (Southern Roots Publishing, www.Southernrootspub.com). "I throw stuff in there like that because that’s how I truly feel. I have a survival instinct about me — everybody does — that no matter how negative and nihilistic everything is, you can’t help but struggle.”

Williams has been struggling, battling demons of addiction and abuse while surviving and preaching the "end time message” for close to 15 years with pioneering Southern doom/sludge legends Eyehategod. And for almost that entire time, some form of Cancer has been in the works. "There are two different stages; there’s ‘working on it,’ and there’s ‘working on it,’” Mike laughs. "There’s stuff from lyrics I’d written, from ’88 to a week or two prior to it coming out. It’s been in the works for a long time, mainly because I’m a procrastinator; I wanted it to be perfect.” For fans of Eyehategod’s subversive truths or Williams’ various writings (which included a stint as Associate Editor for aggressive music bible Metal Maniacs), Cancer is the perfect medium, expanding and documenting the broken, fractured, beautiful stream of consciousness prose Williams has become infamous for. Of course, when someone pours their heart out about the struggles of existence, and actually lived it, the urge to tag them "a voice of the disenfranchised” is hard to resist, but Williams sees it as a compliment.

"I never want to be fake; I couldn’t sleep at night if I wrote something fake. I don’t feel that I am that, necessarily, but I would love to be.”