Oddity O'Clock

Oddity O'Clock (2026)
Incunabula Media

"In Oddity O’Clock, Rhys Hughes invites you into a cheerfully off‑kilter world where measuring instruments wander the landscape on tiny legs, solving mysteries, dodging authority figures, and generally making a glorious muddle of things. Oddity O’Clock and the Knick Knack Irregulars may be made of gears and glass, but their adventures sparkle with warmth, whimsy, and the kind of surreal logic only Hughes can conjure."

Oddity O'Clock is part of the 'Knick Knack Trilogy'. The books can be read in any order. The other volumes in the series are Trumpet Face and The Unfair Dinkum.

“Hughes is the Spike Jones of fantastika.” —Paul di Filippo

The Biscuit Thief

The Biscuit Thief (2026)

Telos Publishing

"Burt Reckoning is a perfectly normal chap. He works at a biscuit factory and is in love with his co-worker Susan Fledgling. But one day he decides to take her up The Bum, a local hilltop beauty spot. This sets in motion a chain of events which sees Susan frozen solid during a night of snow and ice and then projected into orbit around the Earth. Burt meets the occupants of a supposed lost lunar (loony) base, before heading into a past Earth in an alternate future reality and meeting magicians, the inquisition, an alchemist and a scientist! All the while protected by a mysterious ghost who needs to keep Burt alive.

The Biscuit Thief is Rhys Hughes at his most mischievous and surreal. The wordplay and cunning contrivances come thick and fast as we’re taken on a whistlestop tour of every literary genre available: from domestic comedy, through science fiction, fantasy, horror, western, and crime fiction; while taking in the very best that literary fiction can offer. An astonishing novel of wit and warmth mixed with the surreal absurdity of life, told as only Hughes can."

‘It is heartening to find a writer as eclectic, prolific and talented as Rhys Hughes.’ - MICHAEL MOORCOCK

Songs Gone Wrong

Songs Gone Wrong (2026)
Mission Creep Press

Songs Gone Wrong is Rhys Hughes's gleefully unhinged collection of comic verse, built from the wreckage of songs half-remembered, misheard, and gloriously misappropriated. Music Hall collides with Nietzsche. Chris de Burgh is damned to a very specific corner of the afterlife. Robert Frost's snowy woods get a talking snowman. Along the way there are philosophical nipples, seafaring skeletons, tropical islands of questionable geography, invading Vikings, and more gorillas than any collection has a right to contain.

Ranging from poems written in the 1990s to verse composed in the past few weeks, these pieces are less concerned with conventional wit than with absurdly offbeat delight, and nearly every one of them is written to be read aloud, at a festival, in a pub, or wherever the nearest willing (or unwilling) audience can be found.

Rhys Hughes is a Welsh writer known for work that sits between speculative fiction and literary experimentation, celebrated for its imaginative scope, wordplay and sense of the absurd. Songs Gone Wrong is his third book from Mission Creep Press, a poetry collection for anyone who has ever mangled a lyric and wondered if the mangled version was better

Streetlamp Astrology

Streetlamp Astrology (2026)

Hybrid Sequence Media

Poems and Prose Poems.

“Rhys Hughes’ latest poetry collection, Streetlamp Astrology, is a wonderful assemblage of Surrealist-influenced and daily vignettes, that evoke reality through a sharp yet often tender lens. Always surprising, Hughes’s poetry is tribute to both reality and poetry itself, as the ultimate telescope set on our bizarre and yet unique planet. A must read for lovers of the uncanny and the wonderful.” — Seb Doubinsky

“It has been a pleasure to venture into these word adventures, into these shadows, reflections and lobsters.” — John Hegley

“These poems are philosophy with its tongue lodged firmly in its cheek. Streetlamp Astrology predicts a time when obscurity and melancholia are no longer synonymous with cleverness and depth. ” — Maithreyi Hughes

“These carefully-crafted poems and short essays look deeply, steadily, and closely at human relationships, literature, geography, philosophy, mythology, and the natural world. Unpredictable in content and form and intriguingly off-kilter, Hughes’ writing pulls us from the night sky to Skopje to Sri Lanka to the ocean floor and more. Keep your own eyes wide, trust Hughes as your guide, and enjoy the trip." — Jessie Janeshek

"These are poems that can turn streetlamps into stars or fuse the moon and a marriage. For all their casual charm, there’s some serious alchemy going on." — Matthew Francis

"Collectively, poets have always routinely dealt with the moon to the point of overkill. It's a sign of Rhys Hughes's confidence that, in his new collection, Streetlamp Astrology, after a few deftly concise shorter poems, he gives us 'Sensible Ode to an Absurd Moon', a longer poem that knows it's taking on an eternal staple, yet runs all manner of fresh routines that grant lustre to the moon as is due, but also make it seem a hapless character watching strange things unspool from the sidelines. It's a delightful tour-de-force delivered with winning lightness. Laundrettes, flies, Belgrade, rabbit's shadows, Boy Kings follow, proving he can start with almost anything and end up at a wonderful somwhere else. Delight is a very underrated quality in contemporary poetry. Hughes has it in spades. Yet he can have a barney with Neruda or sustain a serious gaze that doesn't hide from lyric grace: 'The city twinkles / waves of heated air wash the stones / and secret bones propel their owners around the corners / into encounters with the radiance'. Go on, take a tuk tuk to the heart of this book." — Matthew Caley

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

Trivialities

Trivialities (2025)
Gibbon Moon Books 

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was a Russian absurdist writer, a dissident and satirist who was imprisoned by the regime during the Second World War and died of starvation in a prison cell in Leningrad. His works were rescued from oblivion by friends and clandestinely preserved for several decades before the cultural climate in the Soviet Union loosened sufficiently to permit piecemeal publication. He is now renowned for a sequence of very brief stories, typically violent, acerbic, nightmarish yet comical snapshots of an oppressive reality in which truth and dream are seamlessly blended.

Trivialities is a tribute to Kharms. Here are eighty flash fictions that attempt to express admiration for the modes, themes and ironies of Kharms' microfictions. The nightmare endures as people are thrown out of windows, crushed by trams, flown into the sides of mountains, launched from catapults, bisected by guillotines, sealed alive in coffins. And often but not always they are resurrected in otrder to be destroyed by some other method. Meanwhile, Daniil Kharms himself waits for the sentence of starvation to be carried out in full, doing his best in secret to delay the process.

Trumpet Face

Trumpet Face (2025)

Incunabula Press

A comedic fantasy novel full of strange characters and stranger incidents.

"The explorer who can turn his head into a trumpet if he tries really hard has crashed his balloon again, an accident that leads to him becoming the guest of a very strange household. He is introduced to the members of the tribe, including a living suit of armour, levitating skull, sentient reflection, and the woman or women in a state of quantum superposition he is fated to fall in love with.

In a world ruled by the flux of wordplay and ideas-association rather than ordinary cause and effect, he must adapt quickly to the demands of lateral logic or perish. He must learn to blow impossible fanfares with his own face to secure his future."

With an Introduction by Michael Moorcock.

Tangents

Tangents (2025)

Raphus Press

The culmination of the Pandora's Bluff story cycle, which took 33 years in total to complete. Tangents is a mosaic work consisting of exactly one hundred linked flash fictions. The last of these fictions is a prequel to the first story in the cycle.

"In the brief narratives of this new work, Hughes's obsessions, humour, unique perceptions, and subversions of language come to the forefront. Tangents is yet another essential contribution from an author who is as significant as he is unconventional.

This book has a perfect square format (7.87 × 7.87 in.), 90 pages, with an exclusive, painfully handcrafted Japanese binding style. As usual, this new chapbook edition will be very scarce: only 30 copies, plus some (very few) private copies."

That Other Egypt

That Other Egypt (2025)

Eibonvale Press

There is more than one Egypt.

There is the Egypt of reality and dreams, a realm of impossible nostalgia, a sandblown land cut by the mightiest of rivers, ancient and enigmatic, the days swirling with the dust of millennia, the nights thick with the accumulated echoes of countless generations, alluring, exotic, often arcane, a focus of desire for generations of archaeologists.

But parallel Egypts exist too, more sinister and even more mysterious, where pyramids are inverted and every object that can be mummified will be. Some of these alternative Egypts might be found inside our heads, others will transform those heads into geometrical travesties of themselves.

Egypt is a multiplicity, an infinite layering of secrets.

Contents:

Mummyfixation * Nile by Mouth * Why Mummy is a Pharaoh * Ponzihotep * The Lighthouse Sisters * Toot and Come In * Cloud Hunter * The Taming of the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shrew * The Universal Set * A Tomb with a View

Robots in Love

Robots in Love (2025)

Eibonvale Press

A retelling of the Ancient Greek story of Daphnis and Chloe but with robots and androids instead of shepherds and goatherds, and set inside an asteroid rather than on an island.

It is an astro-pastoral romance featuring a male robot and a female android who get some quantum entanglement going despite all the obstacles and distractions put in their way, namely star pirates and vacuum gods, attempted abductions, futuristic mischief merchants, moon apes, jealous rivals, twists of fate, superconductive dented rumples, and the pure hostility of the deep space environment.

For the gravitational power of passion is supreme and these logical lovers are a pair of clanking bleepers made for each other!

Signs of the Times

Signs of the Times (2025)

Gibbon Moon Books

Poems inspired by signs. These are the signs of the times. "Signs of the Times" is a phrase that can be turned into a selection of anagrams such as "Oftentimes Sighs", "Softish Meetings", "Gnome Fetishists" and "Fishnets Egotism", all of which might be considered as alternative titles for this slim collection of verse. But in the meantime (the mean time is never as nice as the good times) let us refer to it simply as Signs of the Times.

"If you are looking for a light, entertaining read that you can open anywhere for a few good laughs and more, welcome aboard.” — BRUCE BOSTON, Bram Stoker Award Winner, author of Gallimaufry.

"A wonderfully stylish writer. I would call him an indubitable modern sentence master.“ — SAMUEL R. DELANY, author of Dhalgren.

"Rhys Hughes puts a big red rubber nose on language." — MAITHREYI KARNOOR, author of Sylvia.

The Eleventh Commandment

The Eleventh Commandment (2025)

Recital Publishing

"Rhys Hughes’ unique observational, aphoristic humour abounds in this collection of artfully crafted, extremely short stories. A perennial master of invention, Hughes explores our perceptions of humanity, mining truths beneath the clutter of culture with incisive wordplay and trademark wit.

Hughes has arrayed eighty-eight narrative gems into three groups, The Zodiacal Light, Beyond Necessity, and The Ostraca of Inclusion—clever new takes on mythology, history, and science. A thirteenth star sign, minotaurs and gorgons, a dog ventriloquist, gears and cogs, a clock-wrestling octopus… all are semantic Möbius strips where fantasy and philosophy are seamlessly melded as only Hughes can do; both thought provoking and entertaining."

Contents:

1. The Zodiacal Light (Aries * Taurus * Gemini * Cancer * Leo * Virgo * Libra * Scorpio * Ophiuchus * Sagittarius * Capricorn * Aquarius * Pisces)

2. Beyond Necessity (Kafka’s Birthday * One Mighty Bound * Kissing With Noses * Teachers * In the Corner * Fever * Occam’s Beard * Shadow Foot * Baldness * Listening to Leonora * The Contrast * The Leg Puppies * When I Discovered Laziness * Frankenstein Films * The Giant Woman * Exaggeration * In the Den with Daniel * Big Enough * The Skull * A Man on Stilts * How Cold is It? * Anatole France * The Birds * Postmodern Picnic * The Leaves * Stretching My Legs * Do They Believe? * The Mirror * The Underwater Trapeze * The Eleventh Commandment * The Façade * The Ventriloquist * The Gorgon * The Fireman * Infinity Gears * Walking the Wrong Plank * The Sea and the Ruins * Inside the Minotaur * The Prison * Head in Hands * The Windmill * Alexander Kluge * Washing Our Hands * How to Wake Up * The Umbrella * Song of the Sirens * The Slipper Exchange * The Palace * Pressed Flowers * The Octopus and the Clock * My Swiss Neighbour * The Palace Coup * Whirlwind Romance * The Witch * A Deep Breath * The Tired Bed * The Illuminations)

3. The Ostraca of Inclusion (Beyond the Edge * The Book Burning * Unwanted in Paradise * A Room With a View * White Cliffs * Map of Conquest * Just A Second * The Eclipse Flower * Monsieur Choux * Tumble Keys * Nostalgia City * Freight of Years * The Lamp * The Wardrobe of Love * The Lost Coffee * The Möbius Minutes * The Mirrors * The Overdue Book)

Romantic Onion Antics

Romantic Onion Antics (2025)

Gibbon Moon Books

Poems about onions and flying saucers. phantoms, revenge, accidents, monsters, tribulations, trilobites, and who knows what else? Poems that will linger on your breath and in your mind...

"A wonderfully stylish writer. I would call him an indubitable modern sentence master. A delight to discover." — SAMUEL R. DELANY

"Rhys Hughes puts a big red rubber nose on language." — MAITHREYI KARNOOR

"If you are looking for dense, lyrical poetry you’ve come to the wrong place. For the most part shunning adjective and adverbs, Hughes writes in a clean direct voice with sensible line breaks. If you are looking for a light, entertaining read that you can open anywhere for a few good laughs and more, welcome aboard." — BRUCE BOSTON

The Devil's Halo

The Devil's Halo (2025)

Elsewhen Press

In death, as in life, paperwork is hell. The paperwork for the recently deceased Monty Zubris needs to be examined and deliberated upon. So, meanwhile, the Devil has consigned him to the Waiting Room of the Afterlife. It is ordered alphabetically, so he is compelled to make his way to his designated zone, which is, of course, near the very end of the chamber. On this voyage of enormous length, he meets various dead individuals, many of whom wish to tell him their remarkable stories...

“For many years, I have regarded each new book from Rhys Hughes as continuing proof that the universe is a marvellous, exciting and creative place. His work brightens my days, lightens my burdens, and convinces me that I am in the presence of a font of exuberant inventiveness. The Devil’s Halo is no exception, and might very well be in the Hughes Top Five. All the myriad tales of Hell from Dante onward have never charted any territory as gaily bizarre and humanly affecting as this book unveils. As Monty Zubris traverses the ten-million-mile length of Hell’s Waiting Room, the reader is treated to posthumous wonders akin to those in Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld books. If Anatole France, Voltaire, James Branch Cabell and C.S. Lewis had been born in the year 2000, and come of age amidst our twenty-first-century chaos, they might have collaborated to produce an existential odyssey half as wild and unruly as this one. Somewhere in Hell’s Waiting Room, Robert Sheckley and William Tenn are reading this book and splitting their sides with rueful laughter.” —PAUL DI FILIPPO

Dabbler in Drabbles Omnibus

Dabbler in Drabbles Omnibus (2025)

Gibbon Moon Books

DABBLER IN DRABBLES is done and dusted. There are 1000 drabbles here (with the meta-inserts 1008 in total) and they are mostly self-contained microfictions, but there are mini-epics too, cycles and sequences of tales that often overlap with each other.

A huge cast of characters populate these drabbles, many of them frequent visitors to the text as it evolves through the individual stories.

Be prepared to meet Three-Armed Jake, Leo the Walking Skeleton, Travis the Stick Man, Curious Bertie, Bunny Grunter, Cranny Faddock, The Discourager, Bookmarkus Aurelius, Silverfake, the painter Elbigelli (with the illegible signature), Charlotte Creeps, Malta Witty, Fibba Flobba, Explorer Jones, Blob Hope, Spooky, Frightful and Boo, Editor Jenkins, Truman Quixote, Gothario, The Boast Gusters, Jellyfish Morton and many many more, not to mention Polyphemus, the cyclops who is telling the tales, and Chiron, the centaur who is listening to them.

Dabbler in Drabbles #4

Dabbler in Drabbles #4 (2024)

Gibbon Moon Books

The fourth and final volume of the Dabbler in Drabbles project. Together, all four volumes contain exactly 1000 drabbles.

There is a frame of sorts, but it is contained within the main text. The cyclops Polyphemus is telling the drabbles to the centaur Chiron. Some of the drabbles are told from the viewpoint of Chiron, but it is only Chiron's viewpoint as imagined by Polyphemus, and Polyphemus knows this and allows his imaginary Chiron to know it too, which means that the real Chiron also gets to know it (because he is listening on our behalf). But it gets a lot more complicated than that.

Available in paperback and ebook editions.

Second Hand Hands

Second Hand Hands (2024)

Gibbon Moon Books

Fifty new stories. Strange, offbeat, imaginative, inventive, concise, playful fictions featuring ghosts, werewolves, giants, pirates, mutants, spirits, witches, elephants, sentient mirrors and a parade of other odd characters.

These tales delight in language as well as concepts, form as well as content, comedy, tragedy, horror, crime and paradox.

"A Welsh writer who writes as though he has gone to school with the best writing from all over the world." — SAMUEL R. DELANY

"For many years, I have regarded each new book from Rhys Hughes as continuing proof that the universe is a marvellous, exciting and creative place." — PAUL DI FILIPPO

Contents:

My Body Parts * The Stairway Zoo * Duke Electron * Shoe Stones * Roman à Clef * Pirates of the Carob Bean * The Impossible Backpack * The Ornithopter Pilot * Who is the Giant? * Wolfbat * The Plucky Old House at Fisticuffs * Hired Gun Hiram * Three Bens in a Moat * A Sorry Tale * A Werewolf Story * Consent: a Bedtime Story * In the Lost Box * The Chairs * The Self-Haunting * The Turning * Roman Holiday * The Rasp of the Dead Breath * Second Hand Hands * The Spoils * The Sheet * The Actor * Bluebeard * The Anniversary * My Breath * Are You Ready? * The Distribution of Fear * The Other Meaning * War Memorials * Through Our Teeth * The Leaves * The Witch * Girlfriend Archaeology * Candles * Skylights * The Façade * Elephant Letters * The Despatch * Dracula's Dilemma * Granny's School Journey * Hand in Marriage * The Birds * The Passage * So Far Untitled * The Editor * Memoirs of a Mirror