Kindle lending library – some interesting titles available in the UK

Just noticed that some jolly interesting books are now available for borrowing in the Kindle lending library, if you're an Amazon Prime member. (I have been for a couple of years – very helpful for those of us with a tendency to leave Christmas to the last minute.)

Here are PS Publishing's ebooks (many of which are very cheap anyway).

And here's a link to the Chomu Press titles.

You can only borrow one book per month, so if you have any trouble deciding which to choose you might find these reviews of relevant titles helpful:

The Babylonian Trilogy by Sebastien Doubinsky
Gilbert and Edgar on Mars by Eric Brown
Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod
The Library of Forgotten Books by Rjurik Davidson
The City in These Pages by John Grant
Living With the Dead by Darrell Schweitzer

The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children by Brendan Connell
The Orphan Palace by Joseph S. Pulver Sr
The Dracula Papers by Reggie Oliver
I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like by Justin Isis
Revenants by Daniel Mills
Celebrant by Michael Cisco

Celebrant, by Michael Cisco – reviewed by Stephen Theaker

Celebrant, Michael Cisco (Chômu Press, pb, 340pp). Although he isn’t quite sure why, deKlend is on a pilgrimage to the fantastical city of Votu, where time works in odd ways, remembering can be fatal, and books are read from east to west, not right to left. The irony is (or at least it seems to be – this isn’t a novel that gives the reader much firm ground to stand on) that he is there already, and he refuses to believe anyone who says so. At least his reluctance to accept it gives him time to work on the magical sword brewing in his lungs, and gives us time to get to know the city and its inhabitants. The book alternates, more or less, between deKlend’s story, thoughts and streams of consciousness, and encyclopaedia entries about this thought-to-be imaginary city (which sometimes end in incoherence themselves) and snapshots of the lives of those who live there.

The usual purpose of pilgrims to Votu is to worship the five natural robots, who are believed to have formed through “a very unlikely succession of complications in the process of stalagmite formation”, and have the oddest sex this side of Samuel Delany’s latest, all drills and grinding and exchanges of components. Two packs of feral children roam Votu: rabbit-girls with long teeth and hinged backs, and black-eyed pigeon-girls who cluster on rooftops. (Depictions of sexuality among these groups may make some readers uncomfortable.) Other chapters introduce us to Phryne, a lead addict whose only escape from plombotic side-effects lies in soaking up the emanations of incestuous sex, and Adrian Slunj, deKlend’s would-be adversary, an author and cult leader who doesn’t open his teeth when speaking. (So of course it is great fun to read his dialogue out loud, teeth clenched.) By the end most stories have connected, often in unexpected ways.

At least that’s how I interpreted what I read, what I managed to take in and remember. Pitfalls await the reviewer of Celebrant who is too sure of their ground. One passage late in the book has fun with the idea of reducing its events to a simple summary: “if you look on the back cover of this book, you won’t see anything like ‘so-and-so discovered another world and now he is no longer so sure which one is real dot dot dot’”. One might say the book features this or that character doing something or other, only to have missed a key word or phrase revealing that character to be a phantasm or a joke or a thought experiment or their actions to be a dream or a hallucination. It is a book where almost every sentence – and in some passages every word – is rich with information, and for at least the first hundred pages or so readers may have to accept that they can’t possibly take it all in.

The key to reading the book comes, perhaps, when Phryne tells deKlend that he is already in Votu, and he thinks, “there’s no point trying to make them understand you mean the real place, the actual physical spot. They’re just lost in metaphors.” Readers could treat the book as a metaphor, or as an exercise in surrealism, but it might be more rewarding to treat it as an attempt to describe literally the complicated and confusing nature of existence in Votu. The writing isn’t obfuscatory or knotted; grammatically, each sentence is perfectly clear (except where, like certain bits of Godot, they are deliberately not); it’s the unusual experiences and thoughts they describe that are difficult to apprehend. It’s a book that will reward second readings; pages that baffled first time around were easier to follow after finishing the book. (Well, except for the chapter where the police burst in on a family of pillows…)

Those reading Celebrant for pleasure, free of the reviewer’s unsympathetic need to arrange it in logical patterns that can be summarised and communicated, are likely to enjoy it even more than I did, and I liked it very much. Better a book that overwhelms with the quantity and complexity of its ideas than a book that has none at all. It is challenging, but readers should approach the book with confidence that it does, in the end, come together in a kind of sense. Many will appreciate the echoes of Borges’ magnificent “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in its early pages; imagine Borges collaborating with, say, James Joyce to expand upon that story: this is a chance for adventurous readers to read a full novel along those lines, and it’s a chance they should definitely take.

The Orphan Palace by Joseph S. Pulver Sr – reviewed by John Greenwood

What would be an effective method to convey a character’s emotion of overwhelming hatred, say for his parents? Here’s how Joseph S. Pulver Sr goes about it in The Orphan Palace (Chômu Press, pb, 376pp):

“The HATE…The HATE…grinding…The HATE…LARGER…LARGER…hatehatehatehatehate…”

These are techniques that Pulver uses throughout the novel: ellipses (more than in any other book I’ve read), sentence fragments or just single isolated words, words capitalised for emphasis, words run together, and of course repetition (of the fourteen words in this fragment, eight are just the word “hate”). It doesn’t express, it just reminds us what the author should have found some means of expressing.

To describe The Orphan Palace as experimental fiction doesn’t give much of an indication of how Pulver organises his material. “Stream-of-consciousness” isn’t a term that helps much either, because the chains of sentence fragments, strung along long threads of ellipses like a funky gothic necklace, are not merely an attempt to reproduce the inner monologue of the protagonist. This is fairly typical:

“The stiff wall of Nightblack frozen forever takes all of you into its disaster of old rage… 

The monster mask growls, hungry knife-thorn swallows dawn.

Smears ointments of blind worm seed and dead tongue curse on crouching hearts smashed on Null…

The blind moon-tempest mask ringing with translations of All Fall Down-rises, its seven torch-eyes writhe…shines as a shadow drinking the tear-miles of open blood veins…”

I suppose you could call it a prose-poem, or beat poetry, but what it brings to mind most readily is the lyric sheet of a heavy metal band. Like an extended rock opera, there are whole pages where no line reaches the other side of the page, and no sentence finds its full stop, on occasion even using the “/” character to break the line. Pulver quotes Springsteen before the book gets going, and lists his preferred soundtrack at the end. Since the advent of Spotify it would be possible for readers to listen to Pulver’s recommended tracks while working through the book, but the artists he cites (from Kronos Quartet to Steve Earle) have little in common with his unvarying vocabulary of blood, death, sexual predation and insanity, familiar to me from early eighties metal bands (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Accept, Dio, early Metallica) but no doubt still the core business of contemporary metal and goth bands. When not staring into the Abyss, Pulver has us adrift in a small-town America of sleazy bars and cheap motels, whisky slugged from the bottle and cold coffee from paper cups, easy girls drawn to the mysterious drifter (morphing into the iconography of Hair Metal).

It’s not all improvised coda: there is a plot, and it concerns Cardigan, ex-inmate of an occult, abusive orphanage, hard-drinker, arsonist and serial killer, who is making his way East across the USA, shooting up lonely gas stations, burning down motels, picking up women in bars before murdering them and mutilating their bodies. He’s on a mission of revenge against the evil Dr Archer, whose obscure but depraved experiments on the kids in his charge have turned Cardigan into a monster. Along the way, Cardigan tries to penetrate the mystery of a series of pulp noirish novels he finds in every motel room he visits, and is advised along the way by a number of supernatural or perhaps hallucinatory mentors.

A lot of strange things happen: plot devices are introduced (such as a coin to magically detect lies, and a ghoulish impregnation) and are promptly forgotten about. Stranger still, Cardigan, who is seen casually slashing up women for fun in the first half of the book, is by the second half almost one of the good guys, at worst troubled, if rather more than misunderstood. An old friend from the orphanage urges him to give up his quest and settle down to run a beachside bar with him, as though we had switched channels from American Psycho and found ourselves in the closing scenes of The Shawshank Redemption. His violent outbursts start to take on a more moralising intent. He murders a man who tries to hit a dog in a park, and I got the impression that I was invited to applaud this vigilante justice. He confronts a violent pimp and sets the prostitutes free, imploring them to go and seek the light. Oddest of all, Cardigan shoots the pimp’s bodyguards, only to find them alive and well on the next page, and slays them again.

Over and above such slips, any reader without amnesia or psychopathy should be wondering how this is the same character who was driving around with a woman’s severed nipple in his pocket just a few days previously. And despite over three hundred and fifty pages of impulsive slaughter, theft and arson, the police only appear in the book once, and show no interest in Cardigan’s rampage. While I wasn’t expecting social realism, the complete lack of consequences in The Orphan Palace gives it the feel of somebody who has discovered a cheat to turn off the cops and gain powers of invincibility in Grand Theft Auto.

The best that can be said of The Orphan Palace is that it has a restless, grotesque fecundity, like the random strings of images and words that one is aware of just before sleep descends:

“…a face in the bridal chamber mirror…Baby…HER FACE…BABY…a serpent with seven eyes…I LOVE YOU…the skull of an angel kissed by the mysteries of the worm…she bellows…I will possess your demon art…I knit gloom with your October fables…fly back to the Stygian dew of my texture spread in regal luster…”

But the language sticks so closely to the clichés of Lovecraftian gothic horror that it becomes predictable. The slackness of the narrative, combined with these long stretches of formless ranting about the Hounds of Tindalos and other such touchstones of weird fiction, make The Orphan Palace a slog through well-trodden territory with little compensation other than the grim satisfaction of having made it to the last page.

Still, you have to hand it to Chômu Press. Since 2010 they have been publishing unclassifiable out-on-a-limb fiction on a punishing schedule (twenty books at my last count), in elegantly strange covers that ought to be the envy of mainstream publishers. Like specialist species of insect hiding away in their narrow ecological niches, small presses have traditionally thrived in very well-defined sub-genres where there is a limited but proven supply of readers. Chômu (Japanese for “dreaming butterfly”) is a different creature altogether, willing, one might even say anxious, to take chances on authors who are similarly drawn to such risky behaviour in their writing. Sometimes these risks pay off (see the review of Justin Isis’s collection of short stories from TQF35), but not here.

A Chômu Press happening: Thursday night in London

The ever-interesting Chômu Press have organised a unique book launch for Jeremy Reed’s novel Here Comes the Nice, with two bands playing: The Ginger Light, fronted by the author, and Lord Magpie and the Prince of Cats.

Admission is five pounds, which will be refunded upon purchase of a copy of the book (as long as stocks last).

So that's at 8.00pm till 11.00pm on Thursday, November 31, at Jamboree, 566 Cable Street, London, E1W 3HB.

Sounds to me like an event well worth supporting. Really: if I went to something like that I'd feel like I were in a film. But then that's how I feel whenever I'm in London!

More information about the book here.

I’d also like to draw readers’ attention to Peter Tennant’s lengthy and fascinating interview with Quentin S. Crisp, one of the prime movers behind the press, over on the Black Static blog: Chomu Press in Focus. I love that they have a secret aesthetic, and that somehow Quentin manages to seem both idealistic and practical.

One last point. Perhaps some of you think I’m too fusty to use a word like “happening” and get away with it? Well, I’ll have you know that as I type this I’m wearing a necklace of huge pink beads. Thank you, daughters! I’m with it!

The Dracula Papers, Book 1: the Scholar’s Tale by Reggie Oliver – reviewed by Michael W. Thomas

Tricky matters, they are: sequels, prequels, pastiches, hommages. Essentially, they depend upon two factors: that the original narrative is engaging and robust enough to withstand such re-visiting; and that the re-visitor is skilled enough to convince the reader that the enterprise was worth it. If anything, the second factor is rather more important. The literary landscape is strewn with, as it were, crushed light aircraft that have attempted to fly in the slipstream of the “master narrative”. There they lie, all the Sherlocks, feckless (and, actually, not that bright); the pantomime Crusoes; the ever more bestial Frankenstein monsters, each betraying more emphatically than the last that the re-writer has not grasped what Shelley’s original was really about.

And then there’s the Prince of Darkness – bloodied (always to his satisfaction) but unbowed after all the years. It could be argued that Dracula’s best re-visionists appeared early on – Nosferatu, the creations of Hammer in its pomp – and that, latterly, quality control has been removed. It has been argued that the likes of Twilight are actually updates of the 1950s “beach movie”, with fun and sun being replaced by dim alleys and forests, by leading fang-meisters designed to appeal to the Justin Bieber demographic. This reviewer couldn’t possibly comment.

Reggie Oliver’s interest is far removed from the above. Though supposedly presented to the public a little time after the events of Bram Stoker’s novel, The Dracula Papers purports to weave together “a number of documents … relating to the early history of the person whom we knew as Count Dracula”. Our guide in this matter, the weaver himself, is Dr Abraham van Helsing, whose Foreword comes to us across the years from University College, Oxford, December 1894. This alone reveals the breadth of the task that Oliver has set for himself: to establish factual credibility around the Papers themselves; to maintain tonal credibility in a narrative which will doubtless feature many characters; and to handle the Papers, and the history that flows from them, in a way that avoids parody on one hand and an uninspired plod through Stoker terrain on the other.

Other demands arise: van Helsing’s interest is particularly piqued by “the Memorial of Martin Bellorius (1553–1635), one of the most outstanding scholars of the Renaissance”, and it is this material that gives The Dracula Papers its narrative. Bellorius must develop into a fully-formed character; he must, of course, make a daunting journey – as he does, prompted by a mysterious letter which comes into his hand and leads to the events recounted in the Memorial; he must trust some characters, accidentally encounter others, gamble with his life when yet others make their dark moves; he must, given the figure at the heart of his quest, become embroiled in Gothic perils; he must dissect Transylvania, focusing on particular elements in its discomfiting history which will provide a… well, life-story is hardly the phrase, but a cogent, engrossing narrative of the being who now lurks, perhaps discontentedly, at the back of the Twilight sets. Aside from all that, Oliver has to invoke the linguistic tones and registers of the seventeenth century and earlier, feed them into Bellorius’s account and then, as it were, hand them on to van Helsing; the whole narrative cannot be levelled out in the voice of an Oxford scholar at the close of the Victorian era.

That Oliver manages all of the above with some brio is a testament to the novel’s plotting, to the period of time during which the idea presumably gestated in his mind and made its way through notes and first drafts to the book we now have – and to the enduring appeal of (or appalled fascination with) the Dracula tale itself. Oliver demonstrates a capacity to bowl his story along in a straight line; the book’s bulk is offset by his sprightly style. And he is to be commended for ringing changes in Bellorius’s character. Though appealing as a seeker, Bellorius is not without bumptiousness, a sense of self-importance reminiscent of Marlowe’s Faustus. At one point, he bestirs himself to confront the fiery, unpredictable Prince Vlad in a way that the latter’s character really doesn’t encourage:

“I had embarked on a mild but dignified remonstration when he suddenly stood up, eyes blazing with rage, a little pulse racing in his neck, left leg trembling. He shouted:
‘How dare you interrupt us, old pedant!’ Old! I was twenty-three at the time!” (p. 183)

As Dr van Helsing’s Epilogue informs us, Book 1: the Scholar’s Tale is the result of but one packet of documents that have come into his possession. The Doctor was inclined to destroy all of them, so shocking are their contents, but his hand was stayed by “my old and valued friend, Mr William Ewart Gladstone”. The real and the unreal, the known and the unimaginable, the touchable world and the halls of nightmare – these sit one on top of the other in this first part of The Dracula Papers, offering existence as a palimpsest, layers of words and action that can be peeled away to reveal… well, not the whole story of this most Undead of undead – yet. Oliver is working on packet two of van Helsing’s documents, intended to become The Monk’s Tale. It is to be hoped that his touch will remain as sure.—Michael W. Thomas

The Dracula Papers, Book 1: the Scholar’s Tale, by Reggie Oliver. Chômu Press (www.chomupress.com), pb, 470pp.

Revenants, by Daniel Mills – reviewed

Revenants is a novel that confounded my expectations. Set deep in the woods of 17th century New England, it tells of Cold Marsh, a village founded by a religious community, one whose members have been responsible for some dark deeds, and one whose young women have been going missing.

Given the setting, the plot, and the subtitle – A Dream of New England – one might expect tortured, knotty, overlong sentences and endless streams of adjectives, but in fact this book features some of the cleanest, clearest prose you could find, with few words wasted, the narrator almost as terse as his buttoned down characters. It's written in the present tense; that's been done before, many times, but it was a clever choice for this story; flashbacks to earlier events slip naturally into the past tense. This makes for a marvellously readable text; I've read few books that felt quite so polished.

The author has a degree in Environmental Science, and the environment plays a huge role in this novel. The villagers have cleared their space in which to live and build, and plan to expand, but fear the surrounding woods, fear the ghosts of those who once lived there. So one might expect lengthy, dull descriptions of trees and nature. But no: there are descriptions, but somehow they never bore, perhaps because they do not present nature as a still life: "The grass is matted underfoot, stitched by frost into yellow beds that crackle like straw." Even when the novel stops to smell the flowers, the book is still in motion.

It is a novel about religious zealots and their repression, of themselves and others; Isiah Bellringer is the great-grandson of a witch finder. Young women, strange behaviour, rumours of witchcraft: one might think the ending easy to predict, but once again the novel surprises. The plot drives these poor characters on, and the sense of fate unleashed is tangible, but it's a novel that never goes quite where you'd expect. Sometimes, the book seems to reflect, belief in fate is just a way of excusing our failure to act against it. This was one of my favourite books of the year so far. From any author this would be a notable book; for a first novel it's quite remarkable.

Revenants by Daniel Mills. Chômu Press, pb, 294pp. Amazon US. Amazon UK. Reviewed from print ARC. Note that we published a story by Daniel Mills in TQF36, The Photographer's Tale.

The Life of Polycrates and other Stories for Antiquated Children, Brendan Connell

"Neo-Decadent writers will honour the fragmented, the contorted, the unfinished, the unpublished" writes Brendan Connell in his manifesto. With the obvious exception of the latter, many of the stories in this collection fit the first three categories, although to call them "unfinished" might seem churlish. I wouldn't want to suggest that they are unfinished in the sense of having splinters and unvarnished surfaces - clearly a great deal of attention has been paid to getting the tone of each piece right, and generally these efforts are successful. But quite a few of the pieces end on an arbitrary tangent or drift into a fantasy.

Again from his manifesto: "Story arcs should only be used to hang oneself with. Nothing is ever resolved. Nothing progresses." That's not always true in life, or in this collection. Many things progress: tumours, obsessions, men's fates accumulate momentum, leading to their ultimate downfall. Connell has indeed studiously avoided any traditional open-and-closed story arcs. In fact, some of the pieces can hardly be called stories at all. In some cases, the possibility of a story is all that is glimpsed behind layers of obfuscating fragmentary texts and references.

"The Search for Savino" begins in typical gothic style with dark hints at the peculiar habits of an obscure artist related by one collector to another. But the narrative quickly breaks down into a series of lists, catalogues, letters, dialogues and transcripts of interrogations. Somewhere behind all of these partial evidence there may be a story, but Connell is not going to give us enough clues to work it out. There is something to do with painting on skin, on eyelids or eyeballs, but that's as close as you're going to get and, one suspects, if that frustrates you then you've missed the point.

The title piece of book is by far the longest. From my initial bafflement at what seem to be invented "sigla" (e.g. "conjectural conceptions" or "offstage comments") and the slight irritation with which I always meet untranslated quotations in languages that I cannot easily translate, I began to get a sense of what the text was pretending to be. Taken partly from classical sources (such as Herodotus), "The Life of Polycrates" sometimes does just what it says on the tin, narrating the rise of fall of the tyrant of Samos in an approximation of the exotic austerity of classical Greek style. But the straightforward narrative is interrupted by fictional fragments of epistles, excerpts from the catalogues of libraries, lists of the contents of a dressing case, ancient graffiti. There are absurdly lengthy footnotes to rival Flann O'Brien's asides about De Selby in "The Third Policeman". Connell seems to revel in playing with the architecture of academic discourse: the "sigla", when the do make their appearances, seem arbitrary, there is a great deal of indentation, numbered and lettered lists and chronologies.

It's an epicurean tale too, which delights as much in the descriptions of feasts and of unusual dishes (e.g. fried daffodils), of the perfume of young men's oiled hair, of the exotic specimens in Polycrates' garden, as in the actual plot, which feels of secondary interest. Connell is more interested in the texture of ancient Greek life than in ancient Greek lives. Clearly a huge amount of research and a lifetime of erudition has gone into so dense a piece, but occasionally the tone is betrayed by an out-of-place chattiness: "a boat-load of goodies" does not strike me as a line that could have been lifted from Herodotus, if that is the intended effect.

Elsewhere "The Life of Captain Gareth Caernarvon" recounts the adventures of a nineteenth century English Colonial, hunter, transvestite and uber-carnivore that wouldn't have looked out of place as an extended Monty Python sketch (with Graham Chapman as the bewhiskered and corseted Captain).

Less successful is "The Slug". A handsome man deliberately sets out, over the period of his lifetime, to make himself repellent, for reasons we cannot properly understand. Here Connell's use of sentence fragments and single sentence sections seems self-indulgent and designed to shock. "Section VIII" of the story simply reads, "The colour of vomit", which is neither shocking nor interesting, merely adolescent posturing.

Connell has a gift for the kind of phrase that looks out of place, but which nevertheless jolts the reader to attention. In the otherwise unexceptional piece "Molten Rage", the narrator looks and the traffic and describes "men willing to kill, not only each other, but babies, old men and women, in order to feed these creatures in whose bellies they perched like half-digested herring." Neither does he shy away from raiding the dictionary for what primary school teachers now call "Wow Words": altocalciphiliac, acousticophiliatically, frotteurism. Usually I raise my eyebrows at this kind of extravagance, but Connell does it with such chutzpah that in the end I gave up minding.

In "Collapsing Claude" a bank clerk becomes addicted to an emasculating, obese and sexually voracious woman. In a superficially similar piece, "Maledict Michela", an elderly German man falls for the magnificent ankles of a similarly poisonous female, but in this (superior) story the battle is more poised, and the story takes an abrupt corner before ending at a Chekovian impasse as the German husband's immunity to his wife's spite leads to the last line: "She despised him. Her walled-up spite was for him the very fountain of youth."

As in his other books, Connell is only interested in extreme characters, wholly gluttonous or predatory women, completely spineless, abject men, or impossibly, fantastically carnivorous. There's also a common thread of disgust for crowds, for the mass of unremarkable humanity, which many of his self-marginalised characters share, and which seems vindicated by the last line of "The Slug": "Everyone is vulgar".

"There’s nothing wrong with writing a lousy book," states point 10 of his manifesto. Just make sure it’s really lousy. There is nothing worse than competence." This book is by no means lousy, and Connell is too addicted to risk-taking to risk mere competence. I didn't think all of the risks paid off, but I'm glad he took them, because without the deliberately grotesque stylistic flourishes, and the fragmented textures, the thinness of the characters and conceits would have been glaring. Like a bike ride in the Lake District the terrain of this book is uneven almost to the point of fatigue and irritation. There are one or two nasty ditches, but the views from the tops compensate.

The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children, by Brendan Connell will be published by Chômu Press on the 23rd March 2011. Pb 266pp. Available from Amazon UK.

I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, by Justin Isis

“If I know one person who is the future of writing, it is Justin Isis”, writes Quentin S. Crisp, in his introduction to this debut collection of ten short stories set in contemporary Japan. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s a good thing for editors to be genuinely enthusiastic about the authors they publish. Indeed, one could make a pretty good case that many substandard books on the bestsellers list are the result of cynical, risk-averse publishers. Editors should love books and writers more than they love making money from the aforesaid, but this kind of puff piece does neither Justin Isis nor Chômu Press any favours. For one thing, it gives the impression that the writing can’t stand on its own merits (which it can), and for another it makes the publisher look desperate and amateurish, which is a shame when the rest of the book is so professionally produced.

The kind of praise that Quentin S. Crisp lavishes on the work he has himself selected and edited is usually reserved for the introductions to 25th anniversary editions, or Penguin Modern Classics. Justin Isis, we are told is “as playful as Borges, but not as intellectually mechanical (I mean that with no disrespect to Borges)”. Crisp is confident that in a hundred years’ time, readers will still be lauding the acuteness of Justin Isis’s prose. The introduction ends with some impressionistic images generated by reading Justin Isis: “an iridescent boot in the heart of the brain, kicking the pineal gland”, “a question mark fashioned out of razor blades”, “aesthetics as a form of WMD”. I imagined Nathan Barley rapping these toe-curling epithets over some squelching Warp Records beats.

After such an introduction, I was ready to despise these stories. It’s as good a testament as any to the author’s talent that I found myself unable to. The best of them are among the most memorable short stories I’ve read in the last year. All the stories here are set in modern-day Japan, but the location seems arbitrary. Refreshingly, Justin Isis isn't much interested in trying to explain Japan to us, to make it seem either fascinatingly alien, or to prove to us that we’re all the same under the skin. In fact, what the stories show if anything is that everyone, Japanese or otherwise, is fascinatingly alien. Most of the protagonists are unrepentant obsessives who, far from wanting to escape their obsessions, are bent on following them into the heart of madness, whether their appetites are for J-Pop idols or, as the collection’s title suggests, for the taste of human flesh. Those who are not willingly infatuated are glacially indifferent to everything that goes on around them.

In the best of these stories, Justin Isis has achieved an understated elegance of style that draws the reader effortlessly along without having to raise its voice. Occasionally there are shock-tactics that seem out of place. “It was the first time he’d cut a woman’s face” observes the narrative casually as the protagonist prepares to mutilate a giant woman’s face that has blotted out the sky. The implication is that this won’t be the last time (although we never find out) – clever, but perhaps a little attention-seeking. “Nanako’s tears, thick and inelegant, stained her cheeks like dribbles of semen” – ho hum.

In an interview (with Quentin S. Crisp again), the author said, “All that really interests me is texture … I'm only really interested in writing that is like jewelry”, and at their best (“The Garden of Sleep”, “I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like Etc.” and “A Thread from Heaven”) the stories have a deceptively smooth, polished patina that many more experienced writers fail to manage. But when the author says, “definite verbal meaning, symbolism (of the one-to-one correspondence kind), cliches, ‘redemption,’ ‘epiphanies,’ character development, social commentary etc. seem to destroy the "jewelry" effect that the writing I enjoy has” I have to disagree. The stories where Isis has abandoned “definite verbal meaning” and the rest of what might be called the traditional virtues of fiction, are the ones succeed least. The first story in the collection is a mere stringing together of alternately provocative and banal statements leading nowhere particularly interesting. In “Nanako”, one of Isis’s atomised protagonists becomes obsessed with the face of an old schoolfriend, but the tension of their jangly reunion dissipates into hallucinations and unreal violence. As I read “Manami’s Hair” I began to wonder whether any of Isis’s protagonists were enmeshed in the world, or would they all be like Miyabi – simply drifting through life in exquisite ennui?

I needn’t have worried: despite what Isis himself claims about his lack of interest in character development, his better stories are all about character. Indeed, without character, what kind of “texture” is possible in writing? They’re mutually supporting: texture is a function of characters interacting. Perhaps he is right that there are no “epiphanies” here (apart from the mock-epiphany in the rather silly “Quest for Chinese People”), but even at their most grotesque, the stories are about human motivations, the extremes that people will go to in order to find satiety. Isis mentions Yukio Mishima as an influence, and while I’m no expert on Japanese literature, the writer who seems to have left his mark most strongly on Isis’s work is for my money Junichiro Tanizaki. “The Garden of Sleep”, the story of a crapulous and unexceptional middle-aged man who finds his life’s work in the adoration of a teenage transvestite, brought back to mind Tanizaki’s “A Portrait of Shunkin”.

There are three stories here with variants of “I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like” as titles. The one suffixed “etc.” is by far the best, and does what it says on the tin: an unattractive, unpopular teenage girl, raised in a strict vegetarian family, makes it her mission to try all the available varieties of meat, and follows this passion to its logical conclusion. The prose is wonderfully controlled throughout, right up until the efficiently appalling last line.

The story “I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like” (tout court) is more obvious in its grotesquery: an adolescent boy of uncertain age meets a female nihilist on a park bench, and they have various repellant and inconclusive adventures. There’s a very dry, black sense of humour: while the woman is drowning a stray dog in a public toilet for reasons unstated, the boy “worried about how present he was. He felt the need to assert himself, but the light pressure of Hidemi’s hand on his wrist, her fingers barely long enough to encircle it, restrained him”. Later, “He felt he had to say something, but nothing came to mind. Finally he said: –When we were watching it die, I think we really shared something. We were alive, I mean.” I did laugh out loud at that point; again the joke depends on the author’s ironic understanding of character.

“A Design For Life” and “A Thread from Heaven” stand out from the collection for their unfixated, detached protagonists. In the first a Singaporean Chinese student at a Japanese university pursues a Japanese girl through various drunken parties and meetings, until he finally loses her to a much older, rather shambolic friend. The story captures nicely the fuggy, half-drunk rhythm of student life, and in that respect makes for the most part rather tedious reading, but it’s redeemed by the last paragraph. Endings are something that Isis seems to particularly excel at, even in his weaker stories.

Far more compelling is “A Thread from Heaven”, the longest in the book, in which a frighteningly self-contained Korean schoolboy navigates his way through the pitfalls of Japanese adolescence, weaving his own private philosophical (or perhaps religious) system along the way. My main criticism of it, which goes for several of the other stories, is a predilection for the idea of suicide as an act with an aesthetic appeal. No amount of “jewel-like” writing that will convince me that suicide is anything more glamorous or philosophically defensible than a tenant who does a runner from their flat, leaving unwashed plates in the sink and unpaid bills on the doormat. Having said that, this is a complex story, certainly the most thematically ambitious in the collection, and the one that whets the reader’s appetite for what Justin Isis will do next.

Quentin S. Crisp writes, “Justin’s ideas never need to be disguised and inflated by pompous verbiage”. I entirely agree, and only wish that he had followed his own advice a little more. You can understand the editor’s zeal, even if its expression is misplaced, because Justin Isis is the real deal, a talented writer with an assured style and original ideas. He may not yet be up there in what Crisp calls the firmament of the imagination along with Borges, Burroughs, Lovecraft, Mishima and the other influences Crisp names, but he’s just got started. I will certainly be watching his trajectory with interest.

I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, Justin Isis, Chômu Press, pb, 335pp, published 12/01/2011.