The Spoons That Are My Ears!

As promised last week, here's my sales pitch for my new novel Twisthorn Bellow... It exists at last! It can be obtained directly from the publisher; just click on the following link to the Atomic Fez website. Or it can be ordered from Amazon and other online bookstores.

What can I say about this book? I wrote it last year in a white hot frenzy! It features monsters, lots of them! It's a metafictional satire! It's a fantasy pulp tribute! It's funny and inventive! It simultaneously attempts to spoof and evolve the subgenre of the fantastical adventure tale! There are vigorous nods to Hellboy, Philip José Farmer, Norman Spinrad, Michael Moorcock and Oliver Postgate within its pages! Mike Mignola himself praised it excessively! It's connected to all my other work!

In fact my novelette 'The Singularity Spectres' from Journeys Beyond Advice is especially connected, being a sort of prequel that describes the first meeting between Professor Shylock Cherlomsky and Mark Anthony Zimara and their descent into the centre of the Earth where they uncover a fiendish plot by the government of France to make French the official language of Hell.

Cherlomsky was named after a mispronunciation of "Sherlock Holmes" uttered by a character in Felipe Alfau's Locos: a Comedy of Gestures... Mark Anthony Zimara was named after an obscure inventor of that name (1460-1523) who attempted to build a self-blowing windmill, in other words a perpetual motion machine... Kingdom Noisette is a tall hatted nod to the great engineer Brunel... République Nutt is Brunel's perfect French counterpart...


The above photograph shows the private party thrown for the monsters who appear in Twisthorn Bellow. Not every monster turned up, and not all are capable of being photographed, but here we see the golem himself, Ptula Graark (wielding the golem's kpinga), Ruby dubDub and Tiktac Spittlegit. What's a collective noun for monsters? A clutch? A grunnngh? Answers on a claw, please.