All That Is Solid, by Rosanne Rabinowitz (Eibonvale Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

This review was originally written in September 2020 for a previous iteration of the British Fantasy Society website, and then appeared in TQF69 (April 2021).

A pair of female friends, a Polish designer and a formerly East German bookkeeper, are living in London shortly after the UK voted to leave the European Union. Over the course of twenty-eight pages we see the impact of our collective decision on their lives: harassment from yobs on buses, work drying up, and fears about the future, though we also hear about people who stand up for them, and who help a shopkeeper after an arson attack. It’s all getting to Gosia, and Ilona thinks she might benefit from seeing a therapist. The therapist suggests expressing her feelings through art, with peculiar consequences.

Tomorrow, When I Was Young, by Julie Travis (Eibonvale Press) | review by Stephen Theaker

I’m often a bit nervous to read books by writers I know, because no matter much I like them, I’m still going to rate their books honestly. I needn’t have worried: this chapbook was terrific. Zanders, a woman who in the present was suffering from the physical injuries left by domestic abuse, has now awoken in the past, on a ship called The Giantess, with the mysterious and rather romantic figure of The Golden Sea Captain, and gains a kind of peace through adventure. Highly recommended. Stephen Theaker ****

Contributor news: Allen Ashley seeking submissions for The Once and Future Moon

Allen Ashley is editing a new anthology for Eibonvale Press, The Once and Future Moon, and it is open for submissions on that theme till 30 April 2019. Pay: £10 per story. Length: 1000-5000 words.

Here's what he has said about the project:

"This will be an anthology of stories set on/dealing with the abiding influence of the Moon.

You can take a literal or non-literal approach.

The 'Once' aspect will deal with how older cultures/earlier civilisations/ people in history saw the Moon, considered and reflected upon the Moon. Think Verne, Wells, Godwin. Think mythology. Think the Sumerians. Think the Ancient Greeks. Think beliefs held by vanished cultures. These stories do not have to be factually, scientifically accurate; the Moon element could be seen as poetic, figurative, imaginative, etc. These stories will likely form one-third of the book. Possibly half.

For 'Future', I am looking at both the liveable near-future (e.g. up to 50 years’ time)and slightly further ahead as well. I want stories grounded in how we will live on/adapt to/use the Moon in the near and further future. What issues might we face – some of which have yet to be even thought of by NASA?

I will also look at stories about how the Moon will affect our lives going forward. Will it be the site of the next war? Will it be the focal point of a conflict between science and religious forces (consider how the Moon is central to many religious practices)? What happens if the Moon starts to move closer to us or to move further away? What if the Moon was badly damaged or destroyed? What if the Moon acquired a companion?"

More information here: https://eibonvale.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/the-once-and-future-moon-open-for-submissions/

A Thread of Truth, by Nina Allan - reviewed by John Greenwood

A Thread of Truth has been available since 2007, but I was keen to take a look at it after reading Nina Allan's story "Bellony", which was for me the highlight of Eibonvale's themed short story anthology, Blind Swimmer (see review).

Small towns, and attempts to escape them, do seem to preoccupy Allan, and she admits in her Afterword that she is often drawn to the "somewhat baleful Victorian spa town". In the first story of the collection, "Amethyst" I felt as though we were in similar territory to that of "Bellony": a gently decaying tourist attraction where unhappy family secrets fester. "Amethyst" are a fictional folk-rock band whose sole hit single names the main street of the town, for reasons that remain obscure to two bored teenage girls trying to unravel the mystery. Allan captures very nicely a desperate adolescent quest to find some mystery in one’s provincial existence. It's also a story of life before the internet, when information about the world had limits: the girls have to get their alien conspiracy theories from the local newsagent. One of the girls is bewitched by the possibility that their drab town might hold a mystical secret, the other is repelled by it. The deadpan humour makes much of their contrasting outlooks:

"Lorna Samway's song wasn't really about aliens, at least not that I could see. A lot of the words weren't in proper sentences and it was hard to work out what they meant. If it was about anything at all it was probably about breaking up with a boyfriend." (p.19)

Bloody War, by Terry Grimwood, reviewed by John Greenwood

I've always thought that the central technical challenge in writing speculative fiction is how to get all that back story across to the reader in a way that feels seamless and unobtrusive. I don't think the problem has ever been really solved. Of course, you can always just whack in a large passage of straight exposition, but I think most writers would consider it cheating, and the received wisdom is that readers will get bored wondering when the characters are going to show up. Not much subtler is to include excerpts from a future history textbook, or even to have the protagonist sitting a history exam which helpfully fills in the reader on what's been happening over the last hundred years (I seem to remember Thomas M. Disch doing this is in the excellent 334). Most speculative writers nowadays seem to try and sneak in clues here and there in dialogue and passing references to the imagined future past ("Professor, you know as well as I do that before Man interbred with fruit bats we were incapable of flight"). The more confident just charge straight in with a barrage of invented slang and technical jargon and expect readers to keep up.

Blind Swimmer: An Eibonvale Press Anthology

Offered the theme “creativity in isolation”, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the authors in this anthology have imagined solitary beachfront or wilderness retreats for their writer protagonists to escape to. One of the most interesting stories here, Nina Allen’s “Bellony”, tells the story of an aspiring writer’s growing obsession with the work of a children’s author. Allis Bennett had escaped Nazi Poland as a child, and then spent her life in seclusion in a dowdy seaside town, producing a series of peculiar books before disappearing without trace. Fond of these books from childhood, the young woman moves into the missing writer’s empty house to discover that Bennett’s official biography is riddled with omissions and deceptions.

It’s the sort of literary and metaphysical detective story that reminded me of Paul Auster. It doesn’t operate on the same level as a book like Oracle Nights: for one thing there is a tendency for minor characters to provide their life stories replete with the next piece in the story’s puzzle, and the author is a bit too keen on interpreting the story for us, rather than simply telling it. However, she gets the ramshackle, sun-bleached atmosphere of her seaside town just right, and the unravelling of the mystery is genuinely gripping. I did begin to think of Allis Bennett as a real author, and could almost visualise the faded paperback covers of her strange children’s novels.

Douglas Thompson also conjures a beachfront retreat, but his writer protagonist is already an enfant terrible whose first novel caused such ructions in society, and made him so much money, that he decides to live as a recluse for the next thirty years, to write more of his scabrous masterpieces and avoid the polluting touch of the book business and the fawning world of fans and critics. It’s a premise that raises interesting questions and gets to the heart of the book’s question: how far can any artist remove herself from the rest of the world and continue to produce relevant art? Is it necessarily the case that the further one withdraws into a shell of work and solitary reflection, the more navel-gazing the output? What kind of crazy stories would really get written (if any) by a novelist who spent thirty years without communicating with the rest of humanity, and would there be any point in reading them?

Coincidentally, on the 26th September on Radio 4’s “Americana” programme, the crime writer James Ellroy claimed:

I don’t read books. I fear stimulation: going to motion pictures … I ignore the world as it is today. I do not follow politics contemporaneously at all. I have no opinions. I am not on the internet. I do not watch television, have a cell phone or read newspapers. I feel no social obligation to keep up with the world today.

But is there a point when retreating from distractions means cutting oneself off from any source of real subject matter, or are the contents of a genius’s head enough to keep him going for a lifetime of masterpieces?
Frustratingly, having stated the question in the premise of “The Flowers of Uncertainty”, and set the thought experiment in motion, Douglas Thompson doesn’t seem too interested in answering it. Instead we have a clever recursive series of nested narratives, a range of alternate universes that the author might have found on his return to society.

Starting in a languid, poised style, the story becomes steadily more bombastic at each layer of the story, until the characters are waving guns and throwing silly Hollywood action-movie put-downs around. It’s an entertaining ride as the carpet is repeatedly pulled out from under the reader’s feet, but it feels like an opportunity wasted.

Somewhere further down the coast, in “The Book of Tides”, David Rix’s writer is using his beachcombing finds as inspiration for his magnum opus, a linked series of stories based on his “readings” of the tides. Like Derek Jarman’s garden, his beach hut is surrounded by driftwood sculptures that protect him from the world. He makes tentative connections between his found objects, like a tarot reader hoping that the vaguer his interpretation, the more likely it will contain some grain of truth. The arrival of a more unfathomable bit of jetsam in the shape of a fugitive girl complicates his meditative existence.

There is something tentative about the tone of the whole story that I found frustrating. A particular lump of driftwood is described as “Barkless and cracked, it seemed to reach out, though he wasn’t sure whether it was in agony or exultation. Maybe both”. There’s a reluctance to assert anything definite, to engage with the world, to make a simple decision. When the two characters find five human corpses washed up on the beach, there is no mention of alerting the authorities, or even of burying the dead. The writer is so caught up in his creative monologue that his response is to assemble another piece of sculpture on the beach.

There are problems with the pace of the dialogue: it lurches from stammering sentence fragments into unexpected outbursts of emotional anguish. Here and there the conversations had a lumpy quality that reminded me of soap operas where people invariably show their anger or distress by straightforward shouting. But the awkward, disjointed relationship between the two lonely characters is sensitively portrayed, and the whole story is attentive to the small, subtle clues in the way two strangers might relate to one another. It’s a serious piece of work, perhaps taking itself just a little too seriously.

Thankfully Rhys Hughes is on hand to provide a welcome slice of levity in “The Talkative Star”, a flurry of terse microfictions about the sun and his oblique conversations with various characters including the author himself. This is, I fancy, the same sun who appears in Aesop’s fable, although he is more eccentric and whimsical here, a less gormless cousin to the Mighty Boosh’s moon.

Like Nina Allen’s writer, Gerard Houarner’s Vietnam Vet in “The Flea Market” finds redemption by rummaging through crates of other people’s stuff, in this case, a stack of pretend, cardboard records drawn by school children which have the power to induce hallucinations and visions of his dead family. It’s a unique conceit, and the story undoubtedly creates a heavy, drugged atmosphere. But there are some bits of stylistic trickery that grated on my nerves, in as much as Houarner tries to wedge large chunks of backstory into a single metaphor:

“The sense of dislocation was as bad as coming home from war nursing a wound, a habit, and the title ‘baby-killer’ from a rich kid in poor drag at the airport.”

Andrew Coulthard’s “Lussi Natt” is an overlong supernatural horror in which the by now familiar solitary writer (this time in the Swedish wilderness) is alternately seduced and terrorised by a trio of birch-tree sprites among other evil presences. I think I could see what the author was aiming at here, and all the necessary ingredients to make a genuinely frightening story were in the mix. The author tries repeatedly to escape his predicament, but apparently mundane circumstances frustrate him over and again. There’s always the possibility that his weird experiences are merely the side-effect of forgetting to medicate for his bipolar disorder. One could imagine this as an effective and subtle psychological horror movie, but there is no snap to the storytelling. Every phone call home is laboriously played out in full, and rather than building to a crescendo of unease, the plot meanders back and forth between apparently unrelated encounters with the evil spirits of the woods.

Underworld clichés abound again in Terry Grimwood’s “The Higgins Technique”, this time about the porn industry, and a desperate writer who tries to resurrect her flagging career by immersing herself in the dark world of rape fantasy porn, in order to write about it. The director is a sweaty, booze and cigarette soaked has-been, the male porn star is a vacuous puppet, and the money men are Eastern European and sinister. Of course the writer has her epiphany, where the hastily sketched backstory of her baby’s cot-death can be brought to closure. The story is almost saved by a disturbingly ambiguous ending – I wasn’t sure whether the protagonist was really going to survive to write her confession.

The story is told from several viewpoints, including that of the lonely, masturbating porn consumer, and I could see what slant Grimwood has taken on the “creativity in isolation” theme. All the characters are isolated from one another by an abusive industry, and all are struggling to create something: the director is still dreaming of being a real film-maker, the actress is trying to find a unmarketed niche to write herself into, even the porn addict is using his imagination. But the characters are for the most part so two-dimensional, and their motivations and hang-ups so off-the-peg that this potentially interesting take on the given theme doesn’t catch fire.

Then there is Alexander Zelenyj’s amusingly dreadful tale of sexual obsession that shouldn’t have been allowed to share the same binding as decent stories like Nina Allen’s “Bellony”. “Far Beneath Incomplete Constellations” is the grandiloquent tale of a university lecturer’s controlling, abusive sexual relationship with one of his female Japanese students. It’s a story that never uses one word when half a dozen will do, preferably Latinate and eldritch ones. Whenever the main character realises anything, he has “an epiphany”. There are absurdities such as “it had birthed anger in him” when something makes the protagonist angry.

The central motif, that of the protagonist riding his lover, who has transformed into a crimson (not red!) winged beast, as a metaphor for sex, reminded me of the animated sex scene in the movie “Anchorman”, when Ron Burgundy and his lover ride pink winged unicorns, and I found that reading the story was a lot less onerous when I imagined the protagonist’s dialogue read out in Burgundy’s voice. Later on my hunch was confirmed when I learned that lecturer’s office smelled of “rich mahogany”, which is of course, one of Burgundy’s least successful chat-up lines (“I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.”)

Besides being at times laughable, the protagonist’s insane notion that his Japanese lover is inhuman, a lust-making shell designed to entrance him, is not seriously questioned anywhere in the story. The Japanese student is herself made too timid, pliable and inarticulate to effectively counter this violent dehumanizing idea. The story ends with the man riding an asteroid accompanied by one last injudicious metaphor: he fishes a drowned bluebird from a pond full of semen.

Despite editorial oversights such as “Far Beneath Incomplete Constellations”, a lot of care has gone into putting “Blind Swimmer” together. There’s a thought-provoking foreword by Joel Lane, who discusses withdrawal and engagement as two equally necessary modes for any writer, even one who professes to reject “the mainstream” (whatever that is). “How can this loneliness be shared and learned from without falsifying it?” he asks, concisely summing up the problem that seems to haunt many of the writer-protagonists in this collection.

“Radical and counter-cultural writers in the UK are branded irrelevant” he writes, and “any writer who does not buy into the ‘affirmative culture’ of forced optimism and competitive individualism is isolated by the indifference of the ‘market’ (a prescriptive myth shared by commercial publishers and booksellers).” I take issue with this: I don’t believe that there is a dominant ‘affirmative culture’ operating in the literary mainstream, and I can think of few recent successful novels that have celebrated competitive individualism or any kind of simplistic optimism. There is a danger of small-press and “genre” writers creating an insular victim culture: uncritically reading one another’s books and believing themselves an oppressed minority. To compare the small press market to “shanty towns…crowded with literary refugees” buys into this myth.

Lane wisely warns writers not to “withdraw into a narcissistic inner world of perpetual wound-licking”, but I can’t help wondering whether the term “weird fiction” panders to that very same adolescent instinct (“we’re different and special and nobody understands us”). Writers might fool themselves that they’re not getting published because they’re just too “out there” for the mainstream publishers, but it’s hardly a recipe for constructive self-criticism. “Nobody likes my writing but that’s just because they can’t handle it!” Possibly, but the more likely explanation is that it’s not good enough. And one doesn’t have to explore the mainstream canon of literature very far to discover that it has always been packed to the rafters with outcasts and misfits who never saw themselves as part of a separate, parallel tradition of “weird” literature. Joel Lane mentions Jean Genet, and there are of course dozens more canonized Great Authors who did not write “horror”, “fantasy” or “speculative” fiction, but who expressed horrifying, fantastical and speculative ideas that could invigorate and widen the scope of so-called “genre” fiction.

Blind Swimmer – An Eibonvale Press Anthology edited by David Rix. Eibonvale Press 2010. ISBN 978-0956214751 (paperback), 978-0956214744 (hardback).

Douglas Thompson launches at FantasyCon

Eibonvale Press will be releasing two brand new works at FantasyCon, including the second novel by a frequent contributor to the pages of TQF and Dark Horizons, Douglas Thompson. The novel is Sylvow, and Douglas will be reading from it on the Saturday morning at 10am in the dealer’s room.

In the city of Sylvow, brother and sister Claudia and Leo Vestra made a childhood promise to each other: he would look after the plants and she would look after the animals. Unlike most promises, both of these were kept – each in their own way. Claudia is now a vet – looking after pampered pets or putting down strays and leading a mundane life in the city. Leo, on the other hand, disenchanted with modern urban life, has abruptly abandoned his wife and disappeared into the surrounding forest, his only contact with the outside world being a sequence of dramatic and prophetic letters –increasingly convinced that a semi-sentient natural world is preparing to rebel against its human irritants.

Nature is a strange thing – although we have done an amazing job of cataloguing and observing it, we still know very little about it. Nature always surprises – and always changes, especially under an external influence such as humanity’s devastating effect on the environment. This book follows its cast of characters through a spectacular clash between everyday life and life on the evolutionary scale – as society dissolves and is stripped away under the onslaught of surreal environmental disaster. Douglas Thompson has dug deep into the inevitable guilt that we all feel, as a culture/species, for the disastrous state of civilization and its effect on both ourselves and the world around us. Sylvow incorporates elements of literary surrealism, philosophy, horror, disaster novel and science fiction into a visionary and highly original work.

Douglas is also a contributor to Blind Swimmer, an anthology on the theme of creativity in the wilderness, with an introduction by Joel Lane:

Isolation is a subject that humans have a tricky and contradictory relationship with. On the one hand we fear loneliness, seeking to banish it with contact with others and suffering considerable negative effects from it sometimes. Fundamentally we are a gregarious species. But on the other hand, a contradicting force often sends us desperately seeking isolation. Maybe this is a symptom of the world we live in that creates the need to escape from it in order to actually achieve things. Or maybe it is a deeper dichotomy in our own psyches. Writers in particular feel this dichotomy, which must be why it is quite a prevalent one in literature. Lovecraft, for instance, wrote about little else. Blind Swimmer is an anthology of stories and novellas that seek to explore this isolation, especially in terms of creativity and in terms of how that isolation relates to the outside world.

The anthology is also a kind of "sampler" and snapshot of Eibonvale Press itself at this key moment in time, featuring all of its writers to date, past, present and near future, in a fascinating experiment in collaboration, with various contributors playing off each other and all giving their best towards a sum greater than its parts. Featuring: Joel Lane, Nina Allan, Gerard Houarner, Rhys Hughes, Brendan Connell, David Rix, Allen Ashley, Jet McDonald, Douglas Thompson, Terry Grimwood, Alexander Zelenyj, and Andrew Coulthard.

Reviews of both should be forthcoming here just as soon as I have time to read again… For more information see the Eibonvale blog and the Eibonvale website.

Unpleasant Tales, Brendan Connell

Unpleasant Tales collects twenty-two short stories from Brendan Connell, who contributed "The Putrimaniac" (included here) to Dark Horizons 54 last year. Anyone who enjoyed that story will find much more to their taste here. For those who didn't have the pleasure, titles like "A Dish of Spouse", "The Skin Collector", "Mesh of Veins" and "The Cruelties of Him" give a good indication of what to expect, although every so often there's something like "The Nasty Truth About Dentists" to lighten the mood. On the whole, these stories live up to the book's title extremely well. "For an artist, all experiences are exquisite", claims the protagonist of "The Tongue", and this collection pushes that idea to its limit. The artists here are experimental to the fullest horrific extent of the word, though I hesitate to give examples; best discover them yourself for the complete effect. The selfishness of the artistic impulse, its lack of regard both for others and for one's own best interests, is here shown at its very worst.

There's not a story in here that wouldn't have been accepted for Dark Horizons in an instant, and taken alone each is rather brilliant. Reviewing the collection as a whole, a formula reveals itself: a character, usually male, is introduced, and then we discover his obsession – music, odour, body piercings, food, plants, tattoos, and so on – and learn about it in some detail, and by the end that obsession has overwhelmed him, usually with deadly consequences. Some stories break away from the formula, but I would recommend taking this collection a story at a time, rather than reading it all at once, to avoid that sense of repetition setting in. It's very well written, full of interesting words, and evidently well-researched throughout, given the level of detail. However, in a very literary book, typos can unfortunately be quite harmful to the overall effect, and there are quite a few here – and as in some other Eibonvale books they grow more frequent as the book draws on. Bobble for bauble and course for coarse stand out, as does "He fed her on a strict diet of deserts". In the end, though, far better to have been able to read this book, typos and all, than not to have read it at all.

Unpleasant Tales, Brendan Connell, Eibonvale, hb/pb, 284pp.

Magic Mirror, Ed Pinsent

Eibonvale Press here takes a very successful first step into comics publishing. The artwork, most of it originally appearing in fanzine-type publications in the eighties and nineties, looks fantastic, Pinsent's bold black lines reproducing with perfect clarity – though if you flick through without reading you might imagine it formless nonsense, such is the variety of strange, apparently random imagery it presents. However, once you begin to read, the coherence of each individual story becomes clear. Useful notes from the author help clarify his intentions, but leave room for the reader's personal response. Among my favourites were the two-part tale of The Last Eskimo, who awakes from a ten-thousand year freeze to hunt down the wandering moon, and The Lion Sleeps Tonite, about a stationery thief confronted by his own criminality.

After a series of equally varied and interesting shorts – divided into humorous tales, fables, family tales, Astorial anecdotes, poems and dark tales  – the book takes a slight dip with the first three Windy Wilberforce stories. Predating many of the other strips, they are a little dull and over-long (not to mention that their tale of stupidity caused by "nigrification" is open to a very unsympathetic reading), but important parts of the collection in that they establish Windy as an essentially decent human being. With the next story things are back to the usual high quality – but Windy himself is at his worst, becoming a paper dictator and earning himself the wrath of the world's trees! After an odd pair of shorts, the last ninety pages are devoted to a hallucinatory, prophetic Wilberforce epic, The Saga of the Scroll, which is breathtaking, ambitious, experimental and not a little baffling, in the best possible way.

Well worth the attention of anyone interested in indie comics, or indeed anyone who has enjoyed other Eibonvale books, among which it sits very comfortably.

Magic Mirror, Ed Pinsent, Eibonvale Press, A4 tpb, 352pp

Ultrameta: a Fractal Novel, by Douglas Thompson

Alexander Stark is a university professor who goes missing; this book contains accounts of his life – or rather lives – from that point on. His – and sometimes her – stories take us all over the world and into the past, to ancient Greece and medieval Italy. Those he left behind try to piece things together from a trail of corpses. Where is he going? What is his purpose? Is he a serial killer or a serial suicide?

I should say up front that four of these stories were published in magazines I edited (two here in TQF, and two in Dark Horizons), so some bias in my review should be expected. But of course there was a reason I selected those stories for publication: I thought they were fantastic. So for whichever reason you choose, it’s no surprise that I loved the book too.

Let’s get my reservations out of the way first, since that leads directly to one of them: it’s perhaps because I read many of the stories in isolation that I saw the book’s overall linking structure as something of a flaw. In some places the linking material gives away too much about the stories which follow, but also the stories stood so well on their own that threading them along the skein of one man’s life lessened them slightly for me, losing a little of what made them unique by stressing their similarities. Production-wise, the book is afflicted by Eibonvale’s usual love of blank pages (fifty-four of them!) and enormous indents. There’s also an odd bit of spacing between each paragraph. Discreet is muddled with discrete throughout, punctuation is occasionally erratic and typos become slightly more frequent as the book goes on. On the other hand, each chapter announces itself with a bold, atmospheric illustration by publisher David Rix, and there are useful essays by Allen Ashley and Joy Hendry.

To new readers the book’s tiny flaws will be imperceptible, hidden by the glare of the originality and imagination on show here. Looking back at my email accepting “Telemura” for publication (in which spiders rearrange Margaret’s house while she sleeps), I said that it reminded me of Borges, or maybe a more dispassionate Lovecraft – if I’d read enough Ballard to be confident of my ground I’d probably have mentioned him too. Now I’ve read the rest of the book, it only reminds me of Douglas Thompson. It seems to me he’s a writer who doesn’t sit down to write a story unless he’s got an idea to justify it. As an example, consider “Anatomicasa”, in which a man slowly takes his house to pieces and rebuilds it in the strangest possible way, revealing its structure, becoming both its coroner and plastic surgeon. These stories are original in theme, in execution and in subject matter. Over the last few years I’ve read hundreds of short stories, and these have been among the very best and the most distinctive. The remarkable thing about this book is that despite the experimentation, the eccentricity, and the frequent changes in point of view, tense, location and time, it’s exceptionally readable, each carefully crafted sentence going down like hot chocolate laced with brandy.

In that sense Ultrameta reminded me of Moorcock’s A Cure for Cancer, another book I very much enjoyed without ever really understanding. But like the ten-year-old in “Butterflies”, “I enjoy reading books that I do not understand, and revelling in that mystery, that blissful confusion” (p. 273). That sums up my feelings so exactly that I wondered at first if I was being quoted! Not knowing can be frightening (being lost in a strange city), but it can also be wonderful (being whirled in the air by a parent). With Ultrameta there’s a bit of each: it’s both frightening and exhilarating. By turns cynical and idealistic, liberating and claustrophobic, this book is entirely entertaining and highly recommended.

Ultrameta: a Fractal Novel, by Douglas Thompson, Eibonvale Press, hb, 304pp.

The Smell of Telescopes, by Rhys Hughes

This is a new edition from Eibonvale Press from 2007 of a collection of short stories first published by the highly respected small press, Tartarus Books, in 2000. I don’t have the original version for comparison, but this one has a couple of oddities: like the other Eibonvale books so far, each paragraph begins with a gigantic indent, creating hundreds of unintentional ellipses, and full stops are followed by two spaces instead of one, which gets annoying over the course of a whole book. Also, the space between each story includes two to four blank pages: providing time to decompress, perhaps, but adding up to about sixty blank pages in total. On the other hand, this edition adds striking illustrated title pages to each story, and the author has said that this is his preferred version of the text.

Though each of the stories works alone, there are connections between them. Largely they fall into four categories.

One set deals with Captain Morgan’s retired pirates, scoundrels such as Spermaceti Whiskers, Thanatology Spleen, Muscovado Lashes, Lanolin Brows and Omophagia Ankles. These were the stories I had most trouble with – the first couple I found almost entirely impenetrable – I had to nail my eyes to the page to stop them running away. “Lanolin Brows”, though, was brilliant: a pirate makes himself a suit of armour from wood, and goes on to create an entire city from the stuff. “Omophagia Ankles” ties together many of the book’s threads for a very satisfying conclusion.
Four stories tell of two troubled lovers, Myfanwy and Owain, and their travails with pies, imps, trousers and souls: “The Blue Dwarf”, “The Orange Goat”, “The Yellow Imp” and “The Purple Pastor”. The first was almost painfully quirky, but the last was superb, leaving the hero in a most unusual position.

Five stories concern the strange town of Ladloh, its inhabitants and politics: “Ten Grim Bottles”, “The Purloined Liver”, “A Person Not in the Story”, “Burke and Rabbit” and “The Hush of Falling Houses”. These were my favourites in the volume, in particular “The Hush of Falling Houses”, in which Ladlow must face its final fate – again.

Twelve stories are more or less standalones, including “The Banker of Ingolstadt”, “The Squonk Laughed”, “Telegraph Ma’am”, “The Tell-Tale Nose”, “A Girl Like a Doric Column”, “Nothing More Common”, “Bridge Over Troubled Blood”, “The Haunted Womb”, “There Was a Ghoul Dwelt by a Mosque” and “The Sickness of Satan”. All of these were very good, and are the most accessible. My favourites from this group were “Depressurised Ghost Story” and “Mr Humphrey’s Clock’s Inheritance”, a story on the perils of licking furniture.

This was a very challenging book to read. Every line is so dense, so filled with allusions, in-jokes and puns that I halted and stuttered in my reading, reminding me of when I began to read novels in French for the first time. Every line needed to be decoded, sifted for meaning before I could understand it or move on to the next. But the more of it I read, the more I settled into it, the more I enjoyed it. I started to pick up on the internal connections, stopped worrying so much about catching every nuance, and stopped looking up the words I didn’t know in a dictionary. By the time I finished Le Comte de Monte Cristo I was reading French very well; by the end of this book I wouldn’t say I was fluent in Hughes, but I was making my way with more confidence, and looking forward to the next volume.

When you read a book of short stories, it’s easy to assume the stories appear in chronological order. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but even allowing for my steady acclimatization to Rhys Hughes’ writing, my impression was that as the book went on the puns became less laboured, the twists became more natural, and the stories were better. The first edition of this book dates back to 2000, the stories I imagine are even older: I’m very much looking forward to reading the author’s subsequent work, especially the forthcoming Twisthorn Bellow from Atomic Fez.

The Smell of Telescopes, Rhys Hughes, Eibonvale Press, hb, 464pp