Rhys Hughes

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Now that I know how to attach PDFs to my messages here, I am going to take the liberty of attaching another. I have grouped eight of my "get a" poems together into one document and turned the document into a chapbook, a proper old-fashioned chapbook that I will distribute for free in many other places too.

People can print it out themselves, on both sides of one sheet of paper and then fold the sheet like a concertina to make eight separate panels (this will require only two folds, if you see what I mean)...

Here is the chapbook

 

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The ebook edition of my collection of ekphrastic poems CORYBANTIC FULGOURS is now available to be downloaded for free for the next five days. Click on 'buy for £0' rather than on 'read for free'. Available on all Amazon outlets. This offer is to celebrate the fact that the book is now exactly one year old

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corybantic-Fulgours-Ekphrastic-Ditties-Doodles-ebook/dp/B08HKF6Q7T?fbclid=IwAR3M2_l8JChJ0T2omJ7P7y7zp41YmhU3vIJk3wLcKAFAXB5heNipc6GiBYo​

 

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I have collected many (or most) of my 'Lovecraftian' tales into one volume. These stories are not parodies or pastiches but darkly ironic fantasies that connect with the Cthulhu Mythos at a tangent. Open-minded devotees of Lovecraft may find amusement in the offbeat ideas, paradoxical plots, whimsical language and strange originality of these tales. Lovecraft purists and horror fans with a visceral dislike of comedy might be repelled and outraged. Or they might not be. I am quite unable to anticipate the reactions of individual readers, let alone readers in groups or sets. There may well be no reaction to my book at all.

I regard Lovecraft as an important writer for several reasons, but these reasons tend not to be the same as those offered by his devotees to justify his high standing in the world of weird fiction. He strikes me as a wholly emotional writer (rather than the cool philosophical rationalist he is often portrayed as) and the currents that froth and flow beneath his work are surely powered by an organic frustration instead of a scientific fatalism. I may be wrong about this, and I surely have no intention of viewing his stories through a Freudian lens, but it seems to me that his palpable yearning for a better life drove his creativity and his visions do not originate in a deliberate turning of his back on the petty concerns of humanity.

Does any of that make sense? Whether it does ot not, my book features twelve stories written over the past 25 years, from the deliberately silly humour of 'Bridge Over Troubled Blood' (only barely a Lovecraftian story and thus highly vulnerable to derision from any Lovecraftians who read it) to 'On the Other Hand' which I wrote late last year. In between there are stories I really am very proud of, such as 'A Languid Elagabalus of the Tombs' (about the dire consequences of semantics), 'Sigma Octantis' (about an attempted manipulation of astronomical forces), 'How Gangrene was my Sally' (concerned with the overlap of layers of different narratives) and 'The Sauce of the Guile' (in which I believe I finally truly fused the comic with the horrible in an effective manner).

This volume doesn't contain all my 'Lovecraftian' stories. Missing are 'Get Recipe for Mina' and 'The Whisperer in Darkness Bangs his Head on an Unseen Projection' among several others, but I believe it is a comprehensive enough showcase of my short prose fiction in this particular milieu.

The book is available from Amazon and other online bookstories in both paperback and ebook versions.

https://www.amazon.com/Cthulhu-Wants-You-Rhys-Hughes/dp/B09DFKFVN5/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1630752237&sr=1-9​

 

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Happy New Year to all !

Having recently completed my novella Clumsy Carnacki, the Ghost Loser, a set of adventures featuring the incompetent son of the famous occult detective, I thought I would link to the first self-contained part of the novella, which has been published online here:

The Ghastly Club Foot​

I would also like to draw your attention to my experimental poem about the end of the world called 'Snowball Earth'. This type of poem employs an OuLiPo constraint called a 'snowball'. Each line is one letter longer than the previous line. It works best when using a monospaced font. It was previously published in the Mount Abraxas anthology A Vigil of Black Stars but without a monospaced font. Here it is with the original formatting:

Snowball Earth​

Have a most excellent and productive 2022!

 

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My first book of 2022 is a slim collection of five OuLiPo ghost stories that I wrote in the 1990s. One of them was published in the journal Ghosts and Scholars but I can't remember if any of the others were published. But I do know that they are being published all together for the first time now.

OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Pontentielle) is a perennial workshop of experimental fiction that was founded by Raymond Queneau and Francois le Lionnais in 1960. Its members attempt to create original fictions using mathematical and logical constraints that are arbitrary but rigorously applied.

Some OuLiPo constraints are complicated, some are simple. For these ghost stories a simple constraint has been chosen. Five of M.R. James’ stories (the more obscure ones) have been taken and sequels written for them. Each sequel is exactly the same length as the original and has an identical structure, which means it has the same number of paragraphs, the same number of sentences in each paragraph, the same number of words in every sentence, and all the punctuation marks are in exactly the same places.

The book is available on all Amazon outlets in both paperback and ebook editions.

https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Ghost-Stories-Jamesian-Fictions/dp/B09QNWZPFY/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1642832960&sr=1-1​

 

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"'The World Beyond the Stairwell' may well be the finest tribute (with love) to Hodgson ever written." — John Clute

First published twenty years ago as part of a limited edition hardback collection, my novella THE WORLD BEYOND THE STAIRWELL is now available as a standalone paperback and ebook. It is simultaneously a tribute to Hodgson and Borges, with a bit of Lovercraft thrown in for good/bad measure

"Enter the weird and original world of Rhys Hughes, an eerie nightmare place of monsters, demons, devils and other strange horrors. If you haven’t read anything by this author previously, then get ready for a truly terrific helter-skelter ride of the imagination." — Jeff VanderMeer

Available from Amazon here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1739797124​

 

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An article I wrote about ghosts and ghost stories has appeared at Borderless Journal. In this article I make the case that ghost stories are not only stories about ghosts written by living authors, but stories about living people written by ghosts

THREE GHOSTS IN A BOAT​

Thanks!

 

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My book of occult detective stories featuring the non-canonical incompetent son of Thomas Carnacki is published today. As a promotional offer, the ebook edition is free to download for five days starting now. The book is also available as a paperback from all Amazon outlets and elsewhere

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Loser-Misadventures-Clumsy-Carnacki-ebook/dp/B09SWYNTFM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Hope you enjoy!

 

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The ebook edition of my new book THREE NOVELLAS is now free for three days. Available from all Amazon outlets. Three novellas long out of print including 'the full text of 'The Darktree Whee;' which appeared in part in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy published not long ago by Vintage

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09V4JNQC5?fbclid=IwAR1kd1VGnknOG6kV7pV-1CjnJYx-xwd8S6tcP2ZEVw-eMZs8Lq4Xak1xibI​

Hope you enjoy!

 

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Now that I know this site allows me to attach PDF documents to my posts, I have decided to occasionally post a story or some other work that can be downloaded at the reader's convenience.

This is a story from 2020 called 'An Old-Fashioned Journey from North to South' which consists of a voyage from one end of Africa to the other. The prose text is studded with poems that comment on various ports of call throughout the length of the continent.

Combining poetry with prose is something I am very interested in. It's an old-fashioned technique that (hopefully) matches the old-fashioned feeling of the story itself

 

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The ebook edition of my collection of linked stories THE SEVEN DEADLY SINBADS is a free download from any Amazon outlet for the next five days

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HZ7RNMX?fbclid=IwAR2k2G1WhKxJLWRWWhILovB1Jj8IdJFhQoCnSypm8-QT3wGwNko_gYxxk8k​

If you decide to download it, I hope you enjoy it

 

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Not sure if anyone here is interested in lighthearted poetry but a book I have just edited -- WUXING LYRICAL -- is officially published today. The paperback edition can be obtained for a very reasonable price indeed. And to celebrate the occasion, the ebook edition is FREE for the next five days on all Amazon outlets.

My regards to all the contributors who have worked to make this volume even better than I was hoping it might be! It is uplifting, sweet, charming, sometimes profound

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZPY61NW?fbclid=IwAR17NAoBg_VGx4LtFQ1Vksr2b3eRLik76KQ7APKW-YnBNj8ED0HbOW9EURA

 

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The ebook edition of my new book ROBOT POEMS is a free download for the next five days.

A collection of long and short poems about robots, androids, and assorted cybernetic beings that includes the mini-epic 'The Mime of the Android Stammerer'. This is the link to the American Amazon but you can find the ebook on any Amazon outlet:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B4KRRCC9​

 

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Seems that my big book of tribute stories to authors I admire is about to be published by Centipede Press.

THE SENILE PAGODAS is a collection of stories of various lengths, from a few pages to novelettes. Twenty-two authors are tributetized (is there a real word for that?) but only two are alive in the world today, Michael Bishop and Michael Moorcock. Others include Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Dunsany, Poe, Bulgakov, Sladek, Akutagawa, Lem, Meyrink, Barthelme, and lots more.

The title THE SENILE PAGODAS comes from a "H. Bustos Domecq" crime story that Borges wrote in collaboration with Bioy Casares and it is an imaginary book in that story. I always knew I would use it one day as the title for one of my real books.

These stories are my genuine attempts to say "thank you" to those writers. They aren't parodies or pastiches but try to utilize some of the themes or methods that I found so enthralling in the work of the authors I have chosen.

 

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Back in 2012, I put together a collection of short stories that were tributes to authors I admire. Then I sent it to Centipede Press and it was accepted fairly quickly.

Now, ten years later, the book has finally been published. My delight is no small thing. Anyone who knows how magnificent the books of Centipede Press are will understand why.

THE SENILE PAGODAS​

Good things come to those who wait, but even more fantastic things come to those who wait longer.

Six balls bowled at wickets in cricket is an over. And so is the wait

P.S. On a quite separate note, I was recently asked to compile a list of my favourite books in any category of my choice. I did so and my list has just gone online. This list has nothing to do with Centipede Press but I would like to see them republish every one of these books...

BEST UNDERRATED OFFBEAT HUMOROUS FANTASY BOOKS​

My list is there to be agreed or disagreed with, as you choose.

 

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A slim collection of my (mostly new) flash fiction has just been published. Has a dozen illustrations too, by the artist David Bowman. The conceit is that each microfiction or nanofiction is a tiny arrow shot from the bow of a mythical archer.

Low price for both paperback and ebook versions. Is this a chapbook or a real book? I'm not sure. It's 83 pages, so you decide about that. The book is available from every Amazon outlet. Here is the link to Amazon US:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLGDR9VQ​

There's not much more to say. I enjoy writing flash fiction, probably more than I enjoy writing full-length short stories. I sometimes think that if I am ever remembered for anything as a writer (but how can any of us know who will be remembered?) then my flash fiction might end up defining me. I am pleased that Samuel Delany, Ian Watson and A.A Attanasio, three writers I enormously admire, have all praised my flash fiction. That in itself justifies the endeavour.

 

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My latest slim collection of flash fiction is a free download from any Amazon outlet for the next five days... This is a link to Amazon US:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLLXRLNH

And one of my poetry collections is also a free download from any Amazon outlet for the next five days...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089B56GHZ

But that's not my main reason for posting today. The main reason is as follows:

A box arrived for me
today from the USA
and though
boxes often
get in the way
and make a mess
I must confess
I was pleased to see
this one
because
I took one look
and saw that
it held my book
from Centipede Press
Oh yes!

 

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I have recently joined Paul Di Filippo and Darrell Schweitzer as one of Wildside Press' few contemporary Megapack authors.

These Megapacks often work as retrospective collections. Most of the Megapack list is filled with writers from the first half of the 20th Century. There are some great names on that list, including Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Lester del Rey, Max Brand, Clark Ashton Smith, Maurice Leblanc, Fletcher Pratt, Zane Grey, Johnston McCulley, Edgar Wallace, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. Hoffmann Price, etc.

My own collection is a comprehensive sampler of what I do and what I have done for the past thirty years. It's the ebook I'll be citing as the best intro to my fiction.

 

[rhysaurus]

FREE BOOK.

LOVECRAFT'S CHIN, a slim volume of poems about the man himself, his chin and his pantheon, has just been published and the ebook edition will be a free download for five days (from July 3rd to July 7th). But the paperback will be a permafree PDF download too. This will be my last self-published project before I leave India one week from now.

I think it's funny and I hope you will too, though if you are a fanatic for Lovecraft you might not. That's the risk we take when we do things like this. It's unfortunate, but some devotees of the Weird take things far too seriously, and then they get angry, and their anger becomes bitterness, and really the whole thing becomes even weirder than the Weird fiction they believe they are defending. My own view is that Weird fiction (or fiction of any sort) doesn't need to be defended. It can defend itself perfectly well.

Anyway, the book is there to be read for free and I will say only one more thing about it. Lovecraft often disparaged people, entire races of people in fact, so any disaparagement or mockery that comes his way is entirely his own fault. He has no one to blame but himself. As for the argument that he was "of his time", that's fine: I am also "of my time", so if his foibles can be justified that way, so can mine. Let us at least try to be logical and consistent.

 

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I am raising the price of my ebooks (most of which are currently at 99 cents) by one dollar. This is because at the moment royalties are very small even when sales are quite good. To mark the occasion I am making nine of these ebooks free for three days, my largest mass freebie giveaway ever. This is a one-off and won't happen again. The ebooks in question are:

COMFY RASCALS (flash fictions)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B76SJ9KW

THE POSTMODERN MARINER (fantasy)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B19Y7PG8

THE WORLD BEYOND THE STAIRWELL (dark fantasy)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09S63ZJJC

CREPUSCULARKS AND PHANTOMIMES (horror and weird)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086JDQM38

CTHULHU WANTS YOU (horror comedy)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DB3R1S1

VAMPIRES WITH FAIRY WINGS (fictional biography)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W5BNFVB

CARRYING WOMEN ACROSS RIVERS (poetry)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089B56GHZ

THE DANGEROUS STRANGENESS (one-act plays)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08765HTTQ

THE NOSTALGIA THAT NEVER WAS (flash fictions)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MM25RBB

These links are to Amazon US but look on your own Amazon, where they are also free