Treatises on Dust

“From the small bones of the middle ear can be fashioned a key.”

This summer has seen the release of the debut collection of strange fiction from one Timothy J. Jarvis, an enigmatic individual with a passing resemblance (but merely a passing) to yours truly.

It’s a collection of linked tales, that could all be loosely described as ghost stories, though they are haunted, not by ghosts, but by an obscure volume of French decadent poetry, a seventeenth-century murder ballad, a bone antenna, and by places where “the membrane is thin”.

Treatises on Dust is available from Swan River Press – the link to order is here.

And you can hear a few of the short tales from the collection here.

The Wanderer Resurrected

In early 2011, my friend Fiona G. Ment and I came across a mouldering and crumpled document in the apartment of the cult weird fiction writer Simon Peterkin, who’d disappeared under bizarre circumstances in late 2010. This document, a typescript running to over 200 pages, was entitled on the first, The Wanderer: A True Narrative.

Reading the tale it recounted, thinking it at first perhaps an abandoned novel of Peterkin’s, then wondering if it wasn’t something more eldritch, I felt it should see the light of day, though more as a curiosity than anything else. I didn’t think it would last. Samuel Johnson may have misjudged Tristram Shandy, but in general, ‘Nothing odd will do long,’ is a sound principle. And The Wanderer is odd indeed.

Antic Fiction

I’m fairly ambivalent about genre designations. Part of me is suspicious, both of the taxonomical impulse that lies behind their creation and of their use as marketing labels. I think the best writing will always be hybrid, difficult to categorize, and display an irreverence towards established tropes. But on the other hand, in my main job as an academic and university lecturer, I think genre is an important tool for understanding and teaching how literature works, and why it takes the forms it does. I’ve also always liked those scenes in contemporary music that define their own, abstruse, sometimes ridiculous genres as a way of expressing their difference from other forms, and as a kind of game. Further, I reckon that thinking in terms of genre can help when attempting to transgress certain ways of writing.

Some Reviews of ‘The Wanderer’

Here are a selection of the reviews that have appeared online for The Wanderer. I’m extremely grateful to everyone who’s written something about it for their insightful comments and critiques.

Uncertainties IV

Over the last year or so, I’ve been working on putting together the fourth in Swan River Press’s series of contemporary supernatural and strange tale anthologies, Uncertainties (you can find more details and order the volume here). It’s the first time I’ve edited a fiction anthology and it’s been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in writing. It’s been great seeing the thing take shape—as it started to come together, it began to take on a life of its own. Brian Showers at Swan River was incredibly helpful throughout the process, sharing his wealth of experience. He pretty much gave me free rein, his only brief being that I bring in some writers who hadn’t featured in the series before, and who might be new to the press. It has long been my feeling that innovative writing can enhance the uncanniness of a supernatural tale, so I solicited contributions from writers who I thought would be playful and experimental with their tales. And as cohesion was really important to me from the outset, I also asked writers whose work I thought would share points of similarity. As the pieces came in, I saw this had worked better than I’d dared hope and that there were lots of potent synchronicities between the stories. But there was also a lot of variety, so I starting thinking about how certain juxtapositions might work and also how to ensure an overall flow. The tales are all experimental in some way, but run the gamut from melancholia, to outright horror, to comedy. I wanted to balance and shift between tones in a hopefully satisfying way. It took me back to the days of making mixtapes for friends, and thinking about flow, moving between moods, and setting up a kind of loose overall narrative from disparate parts.

‘Judderman’ by D.A. Northwood

It was an astrological conjunction that led me to the work of D.A. Northwood, that of Sagittarius and the Pleiades. I was walking up from Highbury Corner to meet with friends in the Archer pub on Seven Sisters Road, when I realized I was a little early and decided to kill some time browsing the wares at the much lamented Fantasy Centre bookshop on Holloway Road.

I’d been in there about ten minutes, running my eye along the shelves, when a title leapt out at me, ‘What Never Was’, a phrase which chimed with a refrain then going round my head, a line from a nursery rhyme I’d heard some children chanting outside my flat at dusk the previous day: ‘This is the thing that never was.’ I didn’t recognize the author’s name.

Some Thoughts on the Storyteller’s Imagination

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, largely because I’ve been busy with teaching. The teaching is time-consuming, and does takes me away from my own writing, but, in addition to the satisfaction of seeing students develop and explore different ideas in their work, I also get, from the discussions we have in lectures and workshops, a lot to take into my own poetics. One of the things we’ve been attempting to formulate recently is how the storyteller’s imagination works in the increasingly fragmented, fractured world we live in.

An Interview

Justin Steele interviews me for the Arkham Digest, here: a weblog wherein I witter Wanderer-wise and Weird.

‘The Wanderer’ – Some Resonant Songs

There are a handful of songs on The Wanderer soundtrack posted yesterday, songs particularly apt and potent, but, in the main, I find vocals (and strong rhythms and melodies), too distracting for reading, writing, and editing. But much of the music I was listening to in other moments, while working on the book, did have a real impact on its tenor (or would have had, were the book my fiction and not something else, something more uncanny). The following is a short playlist of songs that particularly resonated.

Here’s the tracklist:

Scott Walker : Farmer In The City
Årabrot : The Wheel Is Turning Full Circle
Tiny Vipers : Development
Ghosting Season : Time Without Question
Buzzard Lope : Fag Ash Crow
Swans : You Fucking People Make Me Sick
Marissa Nadler : Dying Breed
The Body : Ruiner
Chelsea Wolfe : Ancestors, The Ancients
Botanist : Rhyncholaelia Glauca
Birds Of Passage : Belle de Jour
Pere Ubu : 414 Seconds
Boduf Songs : Last Glimmer On a Hill At Dusk

Some Thoughts on the Incantatory Power of Drone

Most of the pieces on the eldritch soundtrack to The Wanderer posted yesterday could be described as drone works. Modern drone is a musical tradition developed from the radically minimal compositions of ’60s innovators La Monte Young, Phill Niblock, Eliane Radigue, Terry Riley, Charlemagne Palestine, Tony Conrad, and others. It has taken influence from a range of sources: the clanking and metallic whines of David Lynch’s and Alan Splet’s Eraserhead sound design; later industrial and noise artists, such as Coil and Nurse With Wound; the classical minimalism of New Yorkers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and of their Eastern European sacred music counterparts, Arvo Pärt and Henryk Górecki; the darker, less propulsive fringes of dance; the more lumbering styles of metal; and world folk and religious music.

This music has an incantatory power. Drone, repetitive and glacially solemn, yet emotive, with ghost melodic and harmonic progressions, is a kind of alchemy; it mingles, in its crucible, the ritualistic and the affective. The effect of this is transmutative: drones fire the imagination, summon into being that which does not exist.

‘The Wanderer’ – An Eldritch Soundtrack

This playlist is a selection of eerie tracks, by some of the very best contemporary drone, ambient, & noise artists (and a few other apt pieces) – an antic soundtrack to The Wanderer.

…chewing on his own teeth…

…chewing on his own teeth like a horse with the colic the man sat in the Starbucks swigging the swill they serve in there which they falsely give the name coffee scribbling in his notebook a rambling tract a pseudo-liturgy with no conceivable end and beginning chewing on his own teeth…

Launch of ‘The Wanderer’ & Some Thoughts on Walking and Storytelling

The evening of Thursday 4th October saw the launch of The Wanderer, in a very apt space – a cellar beneath an occult bookshop in the heart of London’s Bloomsbury. There was topery and merriment, and I stumbled my way through some brief thanks and a short reading from the foreword of the book (on the principle that foreword is forearmed, or some such). Then we went to the pub for more quaffing. Though my thanks were brief – I wanted to avoid that thing of listing everyone I’ve ever met, which is so endemic to Oscar speeches and the like (indeed most Oscar speeches seem attempts to resurrect the medieval idea of a chain of being – attempts to connect everything from inert matter through to God, who, it would seem, according to the denizens of Hollywood, is such an avid movie goer, that, in order to ensure good acting in the films he watches, spends much of His time divinely inspiring thespians) – there really are a lot of people without whose support, encouragement, and editorial advice the book could never have been written. They know who they are, and I’m very grateful to them. And I’m really grateful to everyone who came to the launch, and made it such a fine event.

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Tomorrow, Saturday 6th October, I’m participating in this event, discussing walking, and its relationship to memory and storytelling. I’ll be on a panel alongside Maud Casey, who’s most recent novel, The Man Who Walked Away, is a sublime meditation on loss and the nascency of psychiatry, told through the story of a 19th century Frenchman, Albert, who is a dromomaniac, a fugueur, compelled by his illness to walk all over Europe, but unable to retain any memories of his journeys, only able to recall the brief moments of stillness his condition allows him. I’ve, therefore, been thinking a lot about walking and fiction in general, and walking in The Wanderer in particular.

An exploration of certain aspects of walking in fiction was a large part of what I wanted to do with the book; indeed the PhD thesis out of which it was developed has the decadently pompous subtitle, ‘Peregrinations in Eldritch Regions’. I wanted to engage with a particular British tradition of walking in fantastic fiction, a tradition exemplified by the meanderings of the protagonists of Arthur Machen’s stories, a tradition in which a transformative and terrifying sublime vista could be waiting round every corner. I wanted to twist the tropes of recent psychogeographical writing, to distort in weird ways; rather than writing tramping feet that wear down through the strata of London’s cultural, historical, and esoteric palimpsest – something that, though it can be revelatory, is always Gothic, and sometimes ‘heritage’, the routes walked into the city sigils to invoke the past – I wanted to write feet that stray from the path of the ordinary and everyday, and into eldritch regions (actually, less stray, than have that path wander from beneath them)… Darkness doesn’t lie beneath or beyond, rather it’s insinuated into rational spaces and distorts them. I hoped the book’s terrors would not just cross the boundaries that delimit them, but deform and erase those boundaries. I wanted to depict real places, known to many readers, as being rife with horror, so that, drawn into the perturbing regions described by the novel, they might find it difficult to mark them off from the spaces through which they move every day.

Or this would have been what I’d have wanted to do, were The Wanderer a work of fiction by me, which, of course, it isn’t…

Loft Conversions

Looking out the window, charred cloud in a hazy sky, houses topped with scaffolding wrapped in plastic. Some incubating brood. Gnawing on saucisson sec wrapped in a gingham napkin like a good petty bourgeois. It ain’t half muggy.