The Young Dictator

Literature & Fiction

Hughes, Rhys.

Humor & Satire

Pillar International Publishing Ltd.

"Every so often, the old Id grows weary of the Gothic style and declares a return to Classicism. He doesn't take it so far as to pull down Nightmare Abbey and erect a villa in its place. He settles for wrapping togas around the gargoyles. It's an attitude thing apparently. At such times, what he doesn't know about the glory that was Greece, or the grandeur that was Rome, isn't worth carving on an olive-stone. First he starts up the wine-presses in his cellar. Then he excavates the original amphitheatre in his extensive grounds, piles cushions on the tiered seats and throws a decadent party. <P" think Engelbrecht was expecting to compete in some sort of gladiatorial contest when he received his invitation. I remember the last Imperial Bash at the Abbey. Tommy Prenderghast got confused and assumed he was attending the Highland Games. He took one of those big Roman catapults, onagers I believe they're called, and launched the Id's prize Doric Column into the extinct volcano moved there especially for the occasion. It was no Etna, that conical mass, but this novel method of tossing the caber wasn't appreciated when the pillar plugged the crater. Magnanimity was as scarce as magma in the grounds that day, and we were all asked to leave. The Id had clearly forgiven that insult, for now he sent us a fleet of chariots with rubber practice scythes attached to the wheels, and they clattered the entire membership of the Surrealist Sporting Club down rutted lanes. The awful bulk of the Abbey loomed ahead, but the dreadful effect was softened by the sweet strains of a lyre plucked from one of the turrets. Presently our host came down to greet us with blistered fingers. He had a garland of ivy onhis head and sunglasses fashioned from two halves of an enormous grape. I looked out for slave-girls but there were none to be had. All the other ancient details were in order, so there was no room for complaint. Baths of milk fed by miniature aqueducts, lions in sandals and poisoned eunuchs. He led us into the Arena and Engelbrecht drew out a sharpened salad-fork from under his robe, turning it so that the starlight reflected into my eyes. He realised he was going to be disappointed at about the same time I did. There was a musical play going on right at the centre, some dreary rubbish entitled The Sound Of Mastic, and we had to sit and watch it. Hardly the orgy of violence hoped for by the plucky dwarf. But he put his modest trident to good use when the refreshments were passed around, for when I dipped my thumb into a dish of Pisum Indicum he took this inverted digit as a signal to stab three poor peas at once." And so begins Rhys Hughes' wonderful novel, Engelbrecht, Again

Engelbrecht Again!

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Dead Letter Press

Twisthorn Bellow: He's dynamite -- and he has a short fuse! It may come as no surprise that France wants to take over the world again. But this time they plan to go much further and gain control of the spiritual dimensions too, making French the official language of the afterlife! Twisthorn Bellow is a freshly baked golem who has fallen into a vat of nitroglycerin, turning him into a living stick of dynamite. As well as battling against monsters and rock musicians, he's the only thing that can preserve and protect the glorious British Empire and prevent the French-ification of the entire cosmos. But considering the French have all the best ideas and tunes, he doesn't stand a souffl#65533; in Hell's chance!

Twisthorn Bellow

Atomix Fez Pub

The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction

Meteor House

Imagine a fictional world in which all your beloved (or despised) dead writers get one last swan song from beyond the grave. Do they find themselves in "heaven", "hell", or something far more strange? And will they ever get around to answering some of literature's greatest mysteries for us, such as: *Why did Rimbaud stop writing poetry? *What type of Heaven awaits C.S. Lewis? *Is Hell other people as Sartre theorized? *Will Joyce ever return to Dublin? *Was Jack Kerouac actually a Buddhist, Catholic, or both? *Just how much was Zelda Fitzgerald plagiarized by her husband? *Do all Brontë sisters go to Heaven? *What type of Hell could ever surpass Beckett's angst for life? *Why did David Foster Wallace commit suicide? *Did Kawabata accidentally leave the gas tap on? *What would Hunter S. Thompson's politic opinion of our present be? *Why did Oscar Zeta Acosta disappear in the Sea of Cortes? *And just what kind of music does Boris Vian play in the hereafter? As well as check-ins with: Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Brautigan, Charles Bukowski, Gregory Corso, Sylvia Plath, Donald Barthelme, & Jorge Luis Borges. [Additional writers contributing to the anthology: &#381;ana Brankovi&#263;, Ian Drew Forsyth, & Marcella Shepherd.]

Afterlives of the Writers

HOOK, ANDREW

McCormick, Michael

Woomer, Amanda R.

Belardes, Nicholas

DeSantis, M.T.

Press, 5th Wall

Encomienda, Alex R.

Mersault, Treyvon

Salis, George

Literary

Independently published

A book of poetry by cult author Rhys Hughes with more than seventy poems selected from the past twenty years of his writing career and divided into four approximate categories: absurdism, mystical, science fiction and lovey-dovey, followed by an afterword.

The Gloomy Seahorse

Poetry

lulu.com

Tired of being given good advice in fables and parables by wise men, sages and gurus? Why not try Rhysop's Fables instead, a set of 207 unhelpful and irresponsible fables? There are no messages here telling you how best to live your life. That kind of thing is entirely up to you! The philosophy of Rhysop's Fables is that there are no answers to life because life is not a question. . . Join a cast of crows, clouds, aardvarks, snails, robots, foxes, dinosaurs, ghosts, pickle jars and many other beings and things in the great quest to fail to unravel the mysteries of existence! You won't regret it; and even if you do, you won't regret your regret!

Rhysop's Fables

For more than two decades, Welsh writer Rhys Hughes has been entertaining and befuddling readers with his distinctive mix of terror, humor, fantasy, and absurdity. Although influenced by such writers as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, his work is utterly unique in its melding of weirdness and comic grotesquerie. In this substantial collection of new and reprinted stories, Hughes displays the literary skills that have brought him a wide and devoted readership. In "The Old House Under the Snow," we find two explorers burrowing under the snow to find a house whose bizarre features mesmerize them; in "What I Fear Most," the narrator's account of his inmost terrors takes a strange turn; in "The Hydrothermal Reich," Hitler and his cohorts are shown to have an unusual plan for world domination. In a story reminiscent of Kafka, "Happiness Leasehold" tells of a wealthy man who is unnerved to discover that his prosperity is entirely the result of another's actions-and now his time is up. Somewhat more orthodox, "Sigma Octantis" is a powerful tale in the Lovecraftian idiom, telling of cosmic horrors in an obscure Welsh community. Many of these stories have been published in leading magazines and anthologies over the past decade; but several are unpublished and reveal their wonders and mysteries for the first time. With this book, Rhys Hughes stakes a claim to being one of the most original writers in contemporary weird fiction. Rhys Hughes is the author of seven novels, dozens of short story collections, and hundreds of tales, essays, poems, and artwork. He has also compiled two volumes of the anthology series The Ironic Fantastic.

Bone Idle in the Charnel House: A Collection of Weird Stories

Genre Fiction

Hippocampus Press

A revised edition of a collection of stories totalling 100,000 words of fiction that span the entirety of the career of cult author Rhys Hughes. Ghosts, vampires, mythological beings, eccentrics, mad inventors, demons and other strange beings can be found cavorting here, sometimes seriously, sometimes comically, with original and unique results.To quote the great A.A. Attanasio: "Better the Devil compiles eight chapbooks of short stories that offer dazzling disintegrations of the reality principle. These are rites of passage to the greater world beyond common sense. Their levity raises the bar on profundity and sets a comic standard for the tragic limits of our human experience. Like parables, these antic tales reveal by hiding. And like the Uncertainty Principle, they guard the secret of being from intellectual bondage. They're fun! Like Beckett on nitrous oxide. Like Kafka with a brighter sense of humor."

Better the Devil

Short Stories & Anthologies

Three Novellas: The Darktree Wheel The Impossible Inferno The Swine Taster

Fantasy

Gibbon Moon Books

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