The Spoons That Are My Ears!

Prologue Books in the USA are bringing back into print some of my early out-of-print books. Two have just been released for the Kindle. Written in 1996 and published two years later, Rawhead and Bloody Bones, a novella about two ghost comedians and their tour of Europe, is available on Amazon here and probably elsewhere too.

Also written in 1996 and published two years later, Elusive Plato is perhaps my most transgressive and darkest work, so much so that I'm a bit reluctant to plug it on my blog, where there are so many nice and gentle people watching, but hey... it's just literature, right? You wouldn't avoid George Bataille, Samuel Delany or Pauline Reage on the street just because they had written twisted works of depraved perversion, would you? Oh, you would! Oops!

I don't write "transgressive" fiction any more. I find books that involve intense sexual perversion very disturbing; but important because they are disturbing and thus help to illuminate (or less helpfully: to propogate) the darker aspects of the human condition. Personally, whenever I read a bondage scene in a book or see one in a film, the main urge it awakens in me is to jump in, bash the man and free the woman, like some sort of unwanted Don Quixote...

Each to their own, of course; but what I find baffling is how off-kilter sexual weirdness has become 'mainstream', so that in my local library on Valentine's Day a temporary special section was set up devoted to amorous fiction; and most of the books on display weren't normal love stories but BDSM kinky stuff. How and when did the marginal become the centre? I find that troubling.

I used to think that I could make a valid contribution via my fiction to an understanding of the dark drives of the human condition; but I no longer think that. The only thing I think I can make a true contribution to is the examination of the idea that logic isn't necessarily connected with empirical reality... Anyway, Elusive Plato is available from Amazon here and probably elsewhere too...