He Felt a Ghost, So He Stole It

He Felt a Ghost, So He Stole It (2026)

Mission Creep Press

Prose poems, thought experiments, fictive meditations and crypto verse.

"A panda arrives at your door for tea at six in the morning. A burglar steals a ghost and has no idea what to do with it. A madman marries a cumulonimbus cloud with a dowry measured in millibars. Two astronauts drift apart in the void, exchanging insults scratched on a panel.

He Felt a Ghost, so He Stole It is Rhys Hughes at his most concentrated, a book of prose poetry that dissolves the boundaries between flash fiction and rhythmic lyrics, between the philosophical riddle and the shaggy-dog joke, between Borgesian perception and Kafkaesque bafflement.

Arranged in three linked sequences, these pieces treat images as infinitely compressible forms, logic as a plaything, and language as something to be enjoyed at speed. They are wry, strange, formally precise, and quietly unsettling. They ask what geometry looks like when the angles go wrong, what a week tastes like when someone tries to turn it into a book, and whether innocence is possible in a boundless void with nothing to stand on.

Perfect for readers of flash fiction, experimental poetry, absurdist literature, and anyone who has ever felt a ghost and wondered whether to keep it..."

Contents:

The Geometry of Maybe * Sorry About Reality * The Pangram's Progress

Imaginary Hotheads

Imaginary Hotheads (2026)
Black Scat Books

"Welsh writer Rhys Hughes performs his magic in this masterful work of experimental fiction.

Imaginary Hotheads is an intricately constructed fiction divided into three sections. Each section is a frame around a selection of smaller fictions.

These short 'flash fantastika' are mystically linked — often connected by mood, theme or style. Imaginary Hotheads exhibits the author’s signature absurdism, wordplay and whimsy, laced with hard-edged, speculative epiphanies."

Contents:

The Moving Finger * Hannah and her Cisterns * The Fortnight Fistfight

The Unfair Dinkum

The Unfair Dinkum (2026)

Incunabula Media

"Welcome to The Living Library, also known as the Flesh and Blood Lending Facility. Here people do not check out books, but actual writers. You check them out, take them home for a few weeks, and then bring them back. If the writer is dead, you check out a sack of his remains.

Sounds reasonable, the sort of place anyone would want to work. And our narrator is fairly happy, until one day his routine is disrupted by Joey Rue, an Australian writer who has the impertinence to check himself out of the library and precipitate an adventure which takes him, and our narrator, across vast tracts of perilous land in search of the ‘Unfair Dinkum’.

And what is that?

You need to read the book to find out, cobber."

With an Introduction by Brian Evenson.

Trumpet Strudel Mineshafts

Trumpet Strudel Mineshafts (2026)
Gibbon Moon Books

Eighteen one-act plays featuring castaways, cowboys, duellists, pandas, pilots, twiddlers, cyclists, phantoms, eccentric academics, angry bears, jazz musicians, mystic gorillas, philosophers, hippies, madmen, and many more strange characters. Written for people and puppets, for dreamers and schemers, and intended for the page as well as the stage.

“If I said he was a Welsh writer who writes as though he has gone to school with the best writing from all over the world, I wonder if my compliment would just sound provincial. Hughes’ style, with all that means, is among the most beautiful I’ve encountered in several years.” — SAMUEL R. DELANY

“It’s a crime that Rhys Hughes is not as widely known as Italo Calvino and other writers of that stature. Brilliantly written and conceived, Hughes’ fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumphantly parades across all bestseller lists.” — JEFF VANDERMEER

Contents:

The Universal Set * Dr Oxygen and Mr Hydrogen * The Modesty Men * The Wallah * The Dessert Isle * Like a Rhino Cowboy * Balconies * Pandemonium * The Plane Play * Twiddling * Uneasy Rider * Three Friends * The Pendulum * Pursued by a Bear * The Jazz Strumpet * The Mystic Gorilla * The End of the Road * The Grass