The Star of Gnosia

I am elated to announce that The Star of Gnosia, my second offering on Snuggly Books, is now officially released and available for order.

The Star of Gnosia collects five hallucinatory narratives steeped in secrecy and transgression, complex rites and protocols, the delirium of the sleepless wanderer and the obsessions of the savant.

Ceremonial initiations, forgotten sacraments, inexplicable machines, and God-intoxicated exiles are brought together by duplicitous stratagems and infernal revelations in which the gates of the senses are ravaged by fires both sacerdotal and profane.

Contents:

The Imperishable Sacraments 

The Apostatical Ascetic 

A Perilous Ordeal

The Hour of the Minotaur

The Star of Gnosia 

The final story in the book, "The Star of Gnosia", is a fairly long novella that has not been published elsewhere. 

The book is available directly from Snuggly Books, as well as from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, et al. 

Drowing in Beauty

I am honored, soaked in ether, distilled, and ceremonially set aflame to announce the availability of Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology, published by Snuggly Books, edited by Daniel Corrick and Justin Isis, and including a story by myself.

From the publisher: 

From the ashes of countless decayed Modernities comes Neo-Decadence, a profaned cathedral whose broken stained glass windows still glitter irregularly in the harsh light of a Symbolist sun. Behind this marvellously vandalised edifice, a motley band of revellers picnic in the graveyard of the Real, leaving behind all manner of rotting delicacies and toxic baubles in their wake. During the last eighty years, world culture has seen an explosion of popular aesthetics, art-forms and the movements associated with them: clothing, trends in fashion, tattoos, recreational drugs, musical sub-cultures, cosmetics, photography—all of which can be the subject of obsessions, damnations and salvations. Devices and formats, initially vulgar, are worshipped, only to be forgotten by all but the few initiates who, through their maniacal fixations, manage to uncover their hidden allure. These twelve stories and their preceding manifestos, then, arise from a shift in aesthetic consciousness: synaesthesia, ecstasy in extremes, the Divine and Infernal alike seen through a neurasthenic lens of supreme focus.

Daniel Corrick - Introduction

Brendan Connell - First Manifesto of Neo-Decadence

Justin Isis - Second Manifesto of Neo-Decadence

Brendan Connell - Molten Rage

Justin Isis - The Quest for Nail Art

Damian Murphy - A Mansion of Sapphire

Yarrow Paisley - Arnold of Our Time

Ursula Pflug - Fires Halfway

Colby Smith - Somni Draconis

Colin Insole - The Meddlers

DP Watt - Jack

Avalon Brantley - Great Seizers' Ghosts

Daniel Corrick - Chameleon is to Peacock as Salamander is to Phoenix

Quentin S. Crisp - Amen 

James Champagne - XYSchaton

Paperback, 256 pages

USA: $16.95

The book is available directly from the publisher, as well as Amazon, Book Depository, and several other distributors. 

The Living Heart of the Panopticon

I am extremely happy and excited to be able to unveil the multiple components of A Spy in the Panopticon, which has just been released by Mount Abraxas Press. Click on the images for larger resolution. 

(Photos by Dan Ghetu)

Artwork by Bethany White, Naked Star, Mikhail Vrubel, and Victor Hugo. For purchase information, contact exoccidente@gmail.com or andy@coldtonnage.com. The book should also be available at Ziesing Books in the US within a couple of weeks. 

A Spy in the Panopticon

Art and Calligraphy by Bethany White

I am honored and very excited to announce A Spy in the Panopticon, a boxed set of my latest work which will be released by Mount Abraxas Press in February, 2018. 

A woman peers through a hidden eyepiece into a bedroom of lavish design in ‘A Spy in the Panopticon’, the title novella. What she observes in the exquisite chamber is progressively unraveled over the course of an intricately woven narrative, the many threads of which converge upon a series of increasingly enigmatic motifs: lenses, mirrors, cameras, and prisms; illicit transmissions and invisible signals; unspeakable passwords and etheric emanations; and the infiltration of an inexplicable ministry replete with intrigues, counter-plots, and duplicitous technologies.

A crucial document is laboriously authenticated beneath the ravages of the wild hunt in ‘The Notary’. ‘Paraffin’ follows the descent of a housemaid into the impossible depths of her employer’s past. Two siblings, in ‘That Holy and Formless Fire’, engage in precarious activities involving a transistor radio and a book of poetry. In ‘Imperium’, an infirmity suffered by the wife of a magistrate reveals an ingenious and well-concealed stratagem.

BOOK I
A Spy in the Panopticon

i. The Spyhole
ii. The Mirror
iii. The Camera
iv. The Prism
v. Signal/Transmission
vi. Blackout
vii. The Spy in the Panopticon

BOOK II
The Notary

BOOK III
That Holy and Formless Fire
Imperium

BOOK IV
Paraffin

Purchase information coming soon.