Better the Devil

Better the Devil (2019)
Gloomy Seahorse Press

More than 100,000 words of fiction and featuring eighty-six stories. A volume of collected chapbooks that have previously been available only in limited editions or as ebooks, namely Romance with Capsicum, The Skeleton of Contention, Madonna Park, Plutonian Parodies, Young Tales of the Old Cosmos, To Err is Divine, The Devil You Don't, and The Dangerous Strangeness. Some of these chapbooks have been extremely rare. The earliest story here is my earliest surviving story, and the volume samples my career from 1989 to 2012.

Available from Amazon and other online bookstores.

Contents:

The End of the Road * Raindancing * Thinner Air * Passengers * The Catastrophe Trials * The Urban Freckle * The Journal * Oaths * The Dungeon * Romance with Capsicum * The Faust Business * Zumbooruk * The Third Blow * Trombonhomie * The Undeniable Grin * The Innumerable Chambers of the Heart * There's a Woman with a Cactus Instead of a Head * The Apology * Niddala * Miserable with Groceries, Cuddly with Stubble * Under the Tree * Primate Suspect * Sucking the World's Thumb * Big Game * Three Friends * The Big Lick * Madonna Park * Suttee and Sweep * The Gunfight * Poe Pie * The Lollipop God is Dead * The Sun Trap * On the Shoulders of Pipsqueaks * Buffoons of the Moon * The Pink Giant * The Curdling of the Milky Way * Death of An English Teacher * The Cakes of Gehenna * The Pelican of Venice * The Dirtiest Ararat * Cracking Nuts with Jan Hammer * The Precious Mundanity * An Ideal Vocation * Cutting Back * Twelve Candles * Midknight Express * The Cat * The Younger Man * One Better * Convergence * Sexing the Confection * The Falling Lover * Eyelashes in my Nepenthe * Gone with the Wind in the Willows * The Googol Seasons * Go West Young Ripper * The Wooden Salesman * Cosmic Bagatelle * The Spanish Cyclops * The Metaphorical Marriage * The Unsubtle Cages * Encore * The Culture Shock * The Strongest Monster * Description of a Liar * Stale Air * Musicians in the Cold * Better the Devil * Cats' Eyes * The Tools * The Iron Age * The Martian Monocles * The Spoon * Stand and Deliver * Moonchaser * The Burning Ears * Said the Spook * Vanity of Vanities * Suddenly * The Cottage in the Cottage * The Dark Horse * The Apple of my Sky * The Days of the Turbans * Invisible Letters * The Locksmith * Train of Thought

Note: The contents of the paperback edition are slightly different from those of the ebook edition. Full contents can be found on my Aardvark Caesar site. For example, the Fanny Fable tales have been replaced with the Young Tales of the Old Cosmos stories.

Arms Against a Sea

Arms Against a Sea (2019)
Raphus Press

Limited deluxe edition published in Brazil featuring fourteen stories. A perfect square in format (7.87 × 7.87''), 90 pages, with a exclusive handcrafted Japanese binding style.

Also a paperback (and ebook) edition featuring twenty stories. Dreamlike fables that range the distant tropical shores of the overheated imagination. Tales about falling stars, mythological giants, reincarnated cats, lost cities, jungles, sieges, ghosts, mountains. detached faces that set off on sea voyages, cavemen that are living retail outlets, the misunderstandings and misadventures of absurdist life.

Contents:

The Lynchpin * Silky Salathiel * Arms Against a Sea * Weepy Boo Hoo * Maximum Efficiency * Disdain of the Game * The Long Ward * Starfish Wish * The Divided Island * The Siege * And Follow Me * Her Face was Flushed * The Bookmark * On the Threshold * The Shepherd's Ascent * The World Premiere * Moth in a Daydream * Perspectives * All Your Belongings * The Explorer's Porters

Note: The paperback edition contains four stories not included in the original limited volume. These bonus stories are ‘Disdain of the Game’, ‘The Bookmark’, ‘Moth in a Daydream’ and ‘The Explorer’s Porters’.

Slap-on-the-Wrist Stories

Slap-on-the-Wrist Stories (2019)
Gloomy Seahorse Press

Numbers control the galaxies and atoms of the universe but they don't always control us. Freedom lovers seek to break out of the mathematical prisons. There are a certain number of us. Perhaps you are one of them. We go on journeys and have adventures.

But our adventures generate new numbers and we only learn this truth later. The stories in this book are guided by precise numerological constraints but paradoxically they find a greater freedom as a result.

And so do we.

Contents:

* Only Sixty-Nine Whims Away * Postcards from the Hedge * Trouble with Drabbles * Ten of Our Trombones are Missing

Mombasa Madrigal

Mombasa Madrigal (2019)
Gloomy Seahorse Press

Mombasa Madrigal...
...and other African escapades

"A collection of stories introduced by a novelette that is a fusion of memoir, travelogue and speculation. 'Mombasa Madrigal' charts a modern voyage to that city of crumbling equatorial grandeur. A thoughtful, pulsating, intuitive text, it is something new in the somewhat conventionalised universe of contemporary narratives.

The short stories that follow complement and amplify the impact. Outrigger canoes with crab claw sails ride the currents of the Indian Ocean into oblivion, the mountains of Kenya loom high over grounded ships miles from the sea, pirates dream impossibilities and scheme them into reality along the Swahili Coast. And always Mombasa, the gateway to East Africa, pulsing endlessly in the heat of the night."

Contents:

Mombasa Madrigal * In African Airspace * Nothing Will Happen * Noah the Second *Sailing to Port Manitou

Note: The story 'Noah the Second' is only available in the paperback edition, not in the ultra-limited handcrafted original edition.

The Nostalgia that Never Was

The Nostalgia that Never Was (2019)
Gloomy Seahorse Press

"Marco Polo is travelling again in the service of Kublai Khan but this time he wanders off the path and ends up in an unknown part of the world. In his solitude he becomes an emperor of dreams. The ghosts of prehistory visit him, and the phantoms of later ages and the future too. He even finds himself in the unexpected position of haunting himself. Only his very last spectral guest can know everything that is essential, and that last guest may well be you, the reader."

A tribute to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities but with ghosts instead of cities. 222 ghosts pay a visit to Marco Polo, who is now enthroned in a natural amphitheatre. Having travelled in the service of the Khan he is now a Khan himself, the Khan of the Canyons, and others can come to him for a change. And they do. From Pangu, Adam and Keyumars, three of the first men from three different traditions, to the very last man of all. The centuries slide past, some ghosts are substantial, others are flimsy, a few are nothing more than an idea or the starting point for a tangential routine.