The ultimate digestion of insecurity in a very strange hotel
A hard-hitting fairground fever-dream
The new king of the maggots and bloody piano keys
A foul-mouthed talking mockingbird in American suburbia
A bizarre crime caper at what may just be the end of the world
And a chilling supernatural brush with a very badly made clay owl
John Travis’s writing blurs between genres, rooted in many but coming with his own unique style. His stories are weird, subtle, grotesque, emotional, intelligent, human and surreal, existing in an area somewhere between horror and outsider art. Reading them, one gets the feeling that they are connected to both British horror writing and to more experimental and unusual threads as you explore the quiet backwaters of life in the UK and elsewhere, blended with wild psychological mayhem and terrifying supernatural happenings.
This volume collects 16 stories, several never before published. Each is distinctive and individual, and together they form a spectacular example of British Slipstream writing.
Contents
The Guy Who Nailed Himself to the Blank Page
We, the Remedials
The Monkey, Not the Organ Grinder
Everything
The Flit
Tequila Mockingbird
The Cure
Rated X
Networking
Cuticles
King of the Maggots
Reflections from a Broken Lamp
Less Ahead Than Behind
Links Ain’t What They Used To Be
The Tobacconist’s Concession
In Bleed
Gaseous Clay
The hardcover is jacketed with printed boards.
Called ‘a writer of considerable energy’ in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Travis is the author of three books – a short story collection, Mostly Monochrome Stories, and two weird crime novels, The Terror and the Tortoiseshell and The Designated Coconut, the former attracting the attention of several Hollywood film companies. His many short stories and novellas have been published in anthologies and journals such as Nemonymous. British Invasion and in both volumes of The Humdrumming Books of Horror Stories, his story from the second volume, ‘The Tobacconist’s Concession’ appearing on the 2009 shortlist for a British Fantasy Award. He’s also had his work praised by TED Klein and David Renwick, and had an invisible poem read out on Radio 1 by John Hegley. Having given up his long-held ambition to become a full-time writer, he now writes what he can, when he can, when the other rubbish in his head gives him the opportunity. If by some miracle he ever did make any money from his stories about talking animals and various haunted objects and people, he’d like to move to the country or the coast, possibly Scarborough.
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