Gloom and Glow by Tobias Reckermann, the latest book in the Eibonvale Press chapbook line, is now available to order in hardcover and paperback. This is a mini-collection of four horror stories, but with a fantastically wild, moody and surreal tone to them.
The Irony in ironclad machines works wonders when an egomaniac liar is telling the tale. Why, you haven’t visited Nachtland, yet? The land of the dead lies right round the next corner, but don’t forget the drum set when you go! Masks are the real faces – faces are inanimate masks.
This is an atmospheric, moody and surreal mini-collection of four stories from the stranger end of psychological horror fiction. With these obscurities and strange encounters, lunacy is just another word for love.
* A retelling of an old Norwegian fairy tale with a very different ending to the original.
* A strange apocalypse, and the even stranger existence that comes after.
* After meeting the One, nothing can ever be the same again.
* A classmate’s secret identity, and two children doing what they must to remake the world into the Paradise it used to be.
Beware Us Flowers of the Devil was originally released as a free gift accompanying preorders for his full-length book Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator, meaning that only a small number of copies were ever produced and it was never directly for sale. It felt as though the book deserved a bit more – so we have braught out a new version with a different cover in a limited edition run of 100 copies.
I have also prepared a bundle deal if you want to buy Devil and Annihilator together. The two are still a kind of pair, after all!
Oh and just to add … this and other Eibonvale titles should sidestep the recent problems with postage to the US as they are manufactured within the country. So if you are in the USA, you can still get free postage.
Look what just arrived! I have to say, I am quite pleased with these ones. They have a pleasantly lively feel to them and they’ve ‘settled in’ well as actual books. Every time I see them in the flesh, some gears change in my mind as what I always saw as a flat, on-screen artwork becomes a solid 3d object.
And here is the other in the current double bill of books by Rhys Hughes. This time, a collection of ten linked short stories and novelettes themed around Egypt, modern and ancient. However, that is just a part of what is going on, because …
There is more than one Egypt. There is the Egypt of reality and dreams, a realm of impossible nostalgia, a sandblown land cut by the mightiest of rivers, ancient and enigmatic, the days swirling with the dust of millennia, the nights thick with the accumulated echoes of countless generations, alluring, exotic, often arcane, a focus of desire for generations of archaeologists. But parallel Egypts exist too, more sinister and even more mysterious, where pyramids are inverted and every object that can be mummified will be. Some of these alternative Egypts might be found inside our heads, others will transform those heads into geometrical travesties of themselves. Egypt is a multiplicity, an infinite layering of secrets.
Both these books (this one plus Robots in Love) are currently at the printers being set up and will be available for order in just a day or so now. Watch this space for more details!
We have a double bill of new Eibonvale books coming very soon now – both by Rhys Hughes. Both of these are finished and ready, and they will be off to the printers as soon as a few last details are sorted.
The first of these is the whimsical sci-fi novella Robots in Love, a reimagining of something very classical. The ancient tale of Daphnis and Chloe is transferred to asteroid L35B05 and acted out by a cast of robots, androids, space pirates, vacuum gods, mischief merchants and moon apes, the plot involving escape pods, comets, nebulae and titanium rods, all twisted together in a warp drive powered by literary absurdism.
Given the light-hearted and sci-fi nature of the writing, this was a chance to relax and have a bit of fun with the design as well, which makes use of digital glitching techniques and other messings around. I am my own worst enemy though, ending up with hundreds of layers, masks everywhere, and multiple colour adjustments on top of each other, all getting into arguments and generally fighting it out.
The second cover will be revealed in a day or two – and you can tell me if you spot the trick!
The paperback version of Alexander Zelenyj’s collection Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator is now available to order. This time, the paperback has been released by another press – Manta Press in the USA. It feels a good idea for books to be shared around sometimes – it helps authors encounter new readers, for one. In this case, the paperback is largely independent of Eibonvale, with a different cover, but hopefully the two presses together can give both of them a boost. So hi to any Manta Press folks finding Eibonvale – and Eibonvale regulars, pop on over and have a look around!
US customers can order the book directly from the press website. Customers from elsewhere can find it in various online bookshops, including:
I have just now, one day before the new GPSR regulation enters into force, been informed that my distributor will be able to continue deliveries to the EU after tomorrow. And that nothing will really change, for Eibonvale Press at least. Given the confusion and chaos surrounding this topic, I hope that is true!
I only found out about the EU’s latest sledgehammer regulation a few days ago and, like many, got into a panic thinking that the EU ‘market’ was finally closing off – that the bureaucracy would finally make selling anything to EU countries beyond possible. I had only a few days to try and find out information and the overall impression was that nobody at all really understood what was going to happen – including, one suspects, the people who created the damn thing in the first place!
It’s hard to say for sure but the feeling is that the regulations themselves are not so ill-intentioned – the problem is that EU regulators treat everyone, including small presses and struggling artists, as though they are international pharmaceutical companies or some such. This is not the first time they have done this. They show a deep obliviousness or carelessness about small-scale enterprise, creativity, doing things on a personal level, or just being interested in stuff. Do they assume that someone like me, who runs a tiny indie press that has never really made much profit in 20 years, can just find hundreds or thousands of extra £, or open offices in other countries, or has multiple departments and teams who can somehow get to grips with the confusion and complexity? I don’t know – it’s hard to avoid descending into rant territory after this exact same problem with bad regulations has arisen multiple times, and each time you end up thinking to yourself “Is this finally the one that ends it?”
As may have been the case with previous events, I hope the chaos will fade a little, things will settle down, they’ll revise the law as needed and clarify the stuff that urgently needs clarifying. I feel Eibonvale got lucky here, and I’m not sure how other presses will handle it in a worst case scenario. But for now, I will continue sending deliveries to the EU countries as usual.
The Christmas Rush
I also just wanted to let people know that we are deep in the pre-Christmas rush at the moment, which means orders are taking considerably longer than usual for the distributor to process. So if you have not received an order yet, I want to reassure you that they are going through the system. All outstanding orders have been sent through to them, as of now. But as always, if you want to check anything up, feel free to drop me an email and I’ll look into it.
It feels a little cruel to reveal the cover of a book that is already unavailable – but I finished work on this one and uploaded it to the printers just half an hour ago! If you placed a pre-order for Alexander Zelenyj’s large collection Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator, then you will receive this slim hardcover chapbook alongside it – Beware Us Flowers of the Devil. This book contains an additional four stories (we originally said two but got carried away) and it will not be available for sale … ever.
With a colour-scheme that was designed to be both gentle and toxic, and based on a deceptively classic artwork by Warwick Goble, this was again quite a different kind of cover to work on. Lots of colour blending and abstract shapes.
Of course, you can still get Alex’s full collection here. I did receive one report of someone having trouble placing a pre-order through PayPal. We are still not quite sure why, but of course, if anyone has encountered any problems or were prevented from ordering, please do reach out to me and I’ll sort it!
And with this, I can finally put the design work for this particular project to bed. With Colby Smith’s wonderful collection and this increasingly large-scale project happing at roughly the same time, it has been quite a workload and there is still much to do. But in terms of art, I can now turn my attention fully to the next projects, which will be the chapbook Gloom and Glow by Tobias Reckermann and Yesterfang by DF Lewis.
And a very very vague teaser … there might, MIGHT be a new Eibonvale imprint starting up sometime soon. And I don’t mean the still in-preperation photobooks.
I now have in my hands the first copy of Zelenyj’s collection Beware Us Flowers of the Annihilator, which will be officially launching in just one day now. I’m very happy with how this one has come out – a big, dramatic and very rich collection of stories. The book will be launching at the Weird Windsor event at Windsor Ontario. Anyone able to get there should definitely pay a call – there will be numerous authors, visual artists and musicians involved and admission is free. Being on the other side of the world, I won’t be able to be there myself, alas, but I’ll be with you in spirit!
This also means you have just one day left to take advantage of our pre-order special. Order the book by and including the 16th November and you will receive an exclusive free hardcover chapbook, Beware Us Flowers of the Devil, containing three extra stories. These chapbooks will only ever be available through this offer and orders will be shipped out as soon as the design of that book is complete, which should be fairly soon now. Click here for more info and to place an order: http://www.eibonvalepress.co.uk/books/books_Annihilator.htm
This is also one of the first times I have ever directly used paintings by a living artist on an Eibonvale cover, with two beautiful and moody works by Canadian artist Carl Lavoie. These became centrepieces in a paper-and-metal collage and I love the way they look. Maybe this is something I will come back to.
A few early reviews, which I will present in more detail later:
Colby Smith’s unusual, diverse and experimental collection The Universe as Performance Art is the latest release from Eibonvale Press, available now in hardcover and paperback. Here is the text from the book cover:
The Universe as Performance Art, Colby Smith’s first short fiction collection, is a disquieting, panoramic gallery exhibition obsessed with art’s arranged marriage with Nature and the consequences of art itself. Here are stories of an epidemic of fossils repurposed as psychotropic drugs, the Marquis de Sade’s first orgasm, queer love nourished—and destroyed—through making and documenting graffiti, and others. The title story is at once a staged, Fluxus-esque creation myth and a structurally daring prose poem. The Universe as Performance Art is an indispensable contribution to the Neo-Decadent international art movement canon and a formidable short fiction debut by any standard.
“Colby Smith’s extreme and poetic vision—immense, psychedelic flowers!—is a cosmos driven by the lithified dead, the cannibalistic heavens, the revelry after the destruction of creation. These stories read like nerve ganglia lit by Ursa Minor, writ by hands tending to abnormal forms in a fatal garden.”
—Paul Cunningham, author of Fall Garment and The House of the Tree of Sores
Seeing existence itself as a kind of performance art – whether in an absolute sense or on a human level, with no division between basic existence and creative processes – is a clue to the range of processes going on in this book. Ranging from neo-decadent and experimental literature, to slipstream and hints of genre, to science and palaeontology and beyond, it’s an exceptionally diverse recipe of stories and an excitingly original literary voice.
In terms of designing the cover, this very directly followed the scrappy collage style that I keep coming back to. To generalise, there have been several different styles that keep reappearing in Eibonvale covers. There was the early days when I was trying to use Photoshop to create semi-realistic but surreal dioramas, then came the “Museum Showcase” style where everything is framed up for display, and then there’s the “Scrappy City Wall Covered in Stickers and Posters” style. I think it was Rosanne Rabinowitz’s Resonance and Revolt where that first started emerging – the eruditely revolutionary style of her writing suggesting urban anger very easily. But the nice thing about these sticker walls is that I can maintain full control over just who lives in this city. And if that urban angst includes old Iranian art, outdated dinosaur reconstructions and drawings of microsnails from my own childhood, then so be it. Such a city may exist. And in the case of Colby Smith, such a city HAS to exist.
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