Rhys Hughes

I always planned to write exactly 1000 short stories and no more, and that they should form a very loosely connected grand story cycle...

But yes, I will work on novels and plays and other things. Non-fiction mostly, in fact, but already I have started writing short plays and in fact my first collection of one-act plays has just been published.... :-) See here:

https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Strangeness-Fifteen-One-Act-Plays/dp/B0874966BY/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+dangerous+strangeness+rhys&qid=1587648465&sr=8-1​
 
My first book of short plays has been published and is now available. I am more excited about this volume than I am about most of my short-story collections! Cover artwork by Selwyn Rodda. Fifteen one-act plays in the absurdist tradition including one longish monologue. Also songs and dances! One of the plays was written in collaboration with the Mauritian author Vatsala Radhakeesoon.

None of my plays have ever been performed and only one ('Yesferatu') has even been published before (in Brazil), so maybe writing plays at my age is the super folly/crisis of a middle-aged man :-) But by heck, I enjoyed the process of writing them! They were written for the page as well as the stage, but I do hope that one day some of them will be acted (with puppets or people) or turned into animated films.

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When the first is performed I will consider myself a playwright but not before then. Nonetheless I am delighted with this volume and the way it has turned out. I only began writing plays in the year 2018. Wish I had started sooner! 😊
 
My new book has just been published and it's a collection of poetry. I rarely write poetry. This is only my second volume of poems.

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CARRYING WOMEN ACROSS RIVERS is a paperback and also an ebook. Don't go expecting anything striking like Cavafy or profound like Pessoa or haunting like Housman (probably my three favourite serious poets).

No indeed. Expect mainly light hearted daftness in this collection (with some lyricism that crept in to the most recent poems). With a deep bow to the soul of Richard Brautigan in whose shadow I bask.

Available from AMAZON as usual.

Let the daftness and music begin 🎵🎶😀
 

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The ebook edition of my story collection LINK ARMS WITH TOADS is now available for free from Amazon for the next four days.
Click on "Buy Now" to get it for free (not on "Read for Free") :-)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Link-Arms-Toads-Rhys-Hughes-ebook/dp/B0053GKINA/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Link%20arms%20with%20toads&qid=1592811766&s=digital-text&sr=1-1&fbclid=IwAR0muOoJbqk5pUw48vAK360_BODy88l762agpEkbi1R8YzKAepZC3hW7o6A
 
I have recently had an epic poem published. It is available as a paperback and an ebook. Can be obtained from Amazon, etc. My response to the pandemic was to get more into poetry than I had been before. I never would have imagined that I would ever write an epic poem, but here it is....

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Whether or not I will ever write another epic poem remains to be seen.... It took me 53 years to get round to writing this one! :-)

https://www.amazon.com/Meandering-Knight-Epic-Poem-ebook/dp/B08BXCSVWT/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1600360483&sr=8-1
 
My story about a man who accidentally wanders into the guillotine section of a large department store has just gone online courtesy of Diabolical Plots. This is one of my rare horror fictions in which horror has priority over all the other elements. Happy Halloween 👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻👻


:-)
 
My poem 'Thankenstein' about a monster made from the body parts of polite people is now online at Borderless Journal. It's a sort of tribute to Ogden Nash...

Plus two other poems of mine, one about pumpkins, the other about playing the air guitar :-)


Hope you enjoy!
 
My epic poem THE MEANDERING KNIGHT is free on kindle for the next four days. Click on "buy now" for £0 rather than "read for free".

Amazon UK
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08BXCSVWT

Amazon US
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BXCSVWT

Amazon India
https://www.amazon.in/dp/B08BXCSVWT​
 
THANK YOU for the head's up!!! I also did NOT know there was an omnibus Hughes volume, with the best thing I've ever seen on the cover, "volume 1."
 
When I lived in Spain in 2007 I started writing stories about a character called Arturo Risas, the self-styled Duque de Costillas y Cosquillas. I was working on a farm in the Sierra de Guadarrama at the time and winter was drawing on. It was bitterly cold in the wooden cabin where I lived; and I huddled over a tiny heater while penning the tales, taking frequent breaks to do a typical comedy shiver: hugging my own arms and rubbing them with a vocal, "Brrrrr!!!"

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I wasn't planning to do much with these little tales. They were just a divertissement to pass the dull evenings. But somehow they became the opening chapters of a novel called The Pilgrim's Regress. I added more chapters: the thing became intricate and extremely metafictional. I knew I had a monster of unsaleable humour on my hands. But then, midway through 2008, I ran out of steam and abandoned the project. That's not an uncommon habit with me.

But I always console myself with the knowledge that I'm able to return to any half-finished work at any time and take up again exactly where I left off. I always planned to return to The Pilgrim's Regress after only a brief pause, but as that "brief pause" grew longer and longer, I began to fear that all the little complexities of the numerous subplots, the intricacies of the connections between events, ideas and conceits would be lost to my memory. I knew I had piles of notes in boxes, but my notes are often just mnemonics that quickly become baffling if not acted on rapidly.

So it was with some trepidation that I launched myself back into the novel in the summer of 2011. And to my relief, it all came back; or rather, much of it came back, and what didn't was easily replaced with new (and perhaps better) things. It was good that I never abandoned poor Don Cosquillas permanently. And yet it has taken a further ten years for this novel to finally be published.

And here it is at last... The adventures of a knight as he roams with his trusty sidekick Sancho Panda over Spain and across Africa and all the way to India and the back of beyond on a bicycle. Cover art by the magnificent Selwyn Rodda.

Available on Amazon as a paperback or ebook. :-)
 
Last year I was asked to edit a collection of the verse, prose poetry and meditations of unjustly forgotten 1930s writer Victoria Plumjob. She was friends with Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Chump Rumple, Edith Shriek and Roger Dammit Upstairs, and she was one of the leading lights of the Furious Ducks, an obscure avant-garde collective.

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This book has now been published. It is the first volume of her work for 80 years. It includes an afterword by noted critic Jaggery Feeley and thanks to the help of historical researcher Nina Vangerow photographs of Victoria have been unearthed and they are published here for the first time. The book is available in both paperback and ebook editions from all Amazon outlets.
 
rhysaurus said:
Two years ago I began writing a story that turned out to be the first chapter of a novel, a weird Western that became very weird indeed. I had the title The Honeymoon Gorillas in my head for years before finding a use for it. Gorillas play only an indirect part in the book but it is an important one nonetheless. They are always-present but never seen.

I have wanted to write a weird Western for a long time. This urge was considerably amplified by the weird Westerns of two great writers that I enjoyed immensely, The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan and The Place of Dead Roads by William Burroughs. Both have been an inspiration on my own novel to some extent.

The Honeymoon Gorillas has now been published by Bizarro Pulp Press. It's available from Amazon and other online bookstores. This novel was one of the most fun projects I have ever worked on. In fact I will go further and say that it was the most fun I've had working on a book.

This very morning I received my author's copies, so I decided to take some thematically appropriate photos that might help to promote the novel. This is one of them.

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Click to expand...

I know this is an old post but this is one hell of an enticing cover.
 
I am extremely delighted to announce the publication of my new book, Weirdly Out West.

It's a Western, yes, and furthermore it's a Weird Western, and I am very pleased with the way it has turned out. It's a collection of stories and poems and includes a play and an article too.

Published by Black Scat Books...

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I am going to run a book promotion for this book as follows: if you purchase the book and take a photograph of yourself holding it, I will put your name into a hat and when there are 25 names in that hat I will dip in my hand and pull one out. The winning name will receive a free copy of my next book, My Rabbit's Shadow Looks Like a Hand, when it is published.

In fact I think I might do this with all my subsequent books... Anyway, this new book is now available on Amazon and elsewhere. I had enormous fun writing it and I hope you will have fun reading it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735764612​

Adios amigos!
 
The ebook edition of the volume I edited last year is free on Amazon for the next four days. Follow the link and click on "buy now" for free (rather than clicking on "read for free").

Victoria Plumjob was a writer very active in the 1930s. Her poetry and flash fictions were much admired by Cocteau, Jean Genet, Colette, Buster Crabbe, Salvador Dali and Edith Shriek, among many others, but most of her work was lost in a house fire.

This slim book collects the surviving material together for the first time and includes very rare photographs of the author in her prime. And it's all free! 😊
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vampires-Fairy.../dp/B08W5BNFVB
 
Four of my ebooks are now going to be free for five days. These are the first two:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B083QMJHK5?fbclid=IwAR0zPHk2z87if7R49Qzs4-Zdzp9VovyIyxgIkDkVOiYZXf2ZvzSriWfPekc

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B086JDQM38

Click on 'Buy Now' for free, rather than 'Read for Free'.

The ebooks are free on all Amazon outlets :-)
 
Here are two more of my four ebooks that are free for the next few days.

This is the third one and it's a biggie, the first OMNIBUS of my work. It includes no less than five books. Click on 'Buy Now' for free, rather than 'Read for Free'. The ebook is free on all Amazon outlets 🙂https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08HY16ZZ2

This is the fourth one, RHYSOP'S FABLES. Click on 'Buy Now' for free, rather than 'Read for Free'. The ebook is free on all Amazon outlets 🙂
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00IXH894Q
 
I am going to attempt to attach a PDF of my book CREPUSCULARKS AND PHANTOMIMES here. Let's see if it works!

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“Wryly dark and creepily funny, the stories in Crepuscularks and Phantomimes simultaneously scratch the horror itch and strike your funny bone, What might happen if Firbank’s head was grafted onto Lovecraft’s body and then released into the wild.” – Brian Evenson.

“Crepuscularks and Phantomimes, Gothic, Ghostly and Lovecraftian tales in the ironic mode is a perfect showcase for the author’s adroit wordplay, for an imagination as whimsical as it is grotesque. His voice is refreshingly original, darkly witty, dazzling and delightful. My highest recommendation.” – Jeffrey Thomas.

“These tales defy anticipation, schoolbook rules, humdrum parsing, genre conventions. They stutter, they sing, they ingest and indigest. They gimp and they gag, they traject orthogonally, they do the seven year itch. They show us butts inside butts, ruts atop ruts, and guts within guts. They kick and they frack. They love craft, they craft love. They rapture and enrapture, if sometimes only fractionally. They case shadows and shadow casts. They separate and conjoin, and when they stop dancing, the jig still isn’t up. Enter this collection at your peril and try not to fret if you emerge as someone you don’t yet recognise. All will be well, and if it isn’t, oh well, you’ve had a hell of a slide.” – Michael Bishop.
 

Attachments

“And now I find out that the final Rhysian story — in this seemingly important book that is new to this author’s evolving canon — is about the very locked down battle between life and death that I have already described in my previous entry above!!

THE FANGS OF THE UNDERWORLD

A horror vision to end all horror visions. On the very road to Blake’s heaven or hell, or, rather, here, to the actual gut of a cave system, imprisoned in a stalag of tites and mites, locked down with glowing slime that perhaps becomes the very sweat of his fever at the end! The gods and goddesses to whom he does not deign to pray to or or even blame – because they do not exist, CANNOT exist? – deities who’ve never had “immunity to the diseases we carry, that they have already been wiped out by our viruses.” Wiped out, ab initio. The only hope is to become their priest? A priest without a deity to proffer can only substantiate priesthood by becoming that deity’s own leap of faith? A new nesting of monsters? Or a new logic.”
- Des Lewis
 
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