Rule Dementia!

Quentin S. Crisp

Back in print after a long hiatus, Quentin S. Crisp’s third collection of fiction, Rule Dementia!, sees the author start to experiment with the form and content of the macabre tale. ‘The Haunted Bicycle’ is his first attempt to use Japanese I-novel techniques with supernatural subject matter and tales such as ‘The Waiting’ and ‘Unimaginable Joys’ are a fusion of cosmic vision and the fey, shoe-gazing miserablism of Generation X.

Throughout, the collection forms a symbolic, whimsical bestiary of the modern soul as brimming with unexpected, irreducible and oddly specific imagery as a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Informed by a surreal, apocalyptic paranoia, yet rooted in child-like imagination and sheltered in the lee of unschooled mysticism, these early tales together make up a playful scrapbook of despair and hope at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

About the Author
Quentin S. Crisp was born in 1972, in North Devon, U.K. Leaving A-level college without grades, he spent five years working with Wolf and Water Arts Company as an actor and stage manager before going on to study Japanese at Durham University, graduating in the year 2000. His first collection of fiction, The Nightmare Exhibition, was published in 2001, by BJM Press, while he was teaching English in Taiwan. He returned to Japan later that year to research Japanese literature on a scholarship at Kyoto University, studying in particular the works of Higuchi Ichiyo. He returned to Britain in 2003, and his second collection, Morbid Tales, was published by Tartarus Press in 2004. Since then he has had work released through a number of publishers, including the novella Shrike (PS Publishing), which was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award in 2009. His work has been translated into German and Spanish and he was a speaking guest at the 15th International Book Fair in Mexico City. He currently resides in a damp flat in the London Borough of Bexley, and works as a freelance writer and editor. His first collection of poetry, September, was published by Snuggly Books in May, 2016.

Paperback, 358 pages. Release date: October 3, 2016
ISBN 13: 978-1-943813-18-6
Price: US$ 22.00

LIMITED EDITION of 60 copies, of which 55 will be made available to the public
Hardcover, 358 pages
Release date: October 3, 2016
Price: US$ 37.50