NOVELS
click covers/titles for more information, blurbs & extracts
MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER (2023)
Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London purveyor of pulp fiction, Man-Eating Typewriter is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century. Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a ‘fantabulosa crime’ in 276 days that will revolt the world. A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Paris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter - but, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever intended.
KIMBERLY'S CAPITAL PUNISHMENT (2012)
Having moved to London with her athletic boyfriend, the sweet-but-stuttering Stevie, she soon tires of him and decides to destroy the relationship from within by being as cruel as is humanly possible. When this tactic leads to Stevie's violent death by his own hand, Kimberly embarks on a determined, but no less disastrous, venture in 'unadulterated altruism'. Kimberly's soul hangs in the balance - will she ultimately spend eternity in the great TopShop in the Sky? Will she be reincarnated as a pampered greyhound or a deadly bacterium? Or will she be cast into the abyss, tormented endlessly by her past demons and her malevolent pet hamster Lucifer? This is the story of Kimberly's redemption, or possibly her damnation: it's up to you. There are six different endings on offer.
TEN STOREY LOVE SONG (2009)
Spanning one torrential paragraph, Ten Storey Love Song follows Bobby the Artist's rise to stardom and decline into horrific drug psychosis, Johnnie's attempts to stop thieving and start pleasing Ellen in bed, and Alan Blunt, a forty-year-old container driver who spends a worrying amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school. Bobby - the so-called 'love-child of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat', holed up in a Middlesbrough tower block - works on his canvases under the influence of pills-on-toast, dirt-cheap cider and dream pop. When Bent Lewis, an art dealer from London appears, Bobby and friends are sent on a breakneck adventure of self-discovery, hedonism and violence, their frayed lives and assorted addictions - sex, money, fame, pick-’n’-mix and, above all, love - bleeding together in one glorious, ferocious slab of technicolour concrete prose.
APPLES (2007)
As a distraction from sleazy male admirers, spiteful classmates and her mother's cancer, Eve's eyes are opened to a multicolour life of one-night stands, drug-fuelled discos and cheap booze. She barely has time to notice the reclusive, obsessive-compulsive Adam. Adam, however, notices Eve. Narrated alternately by Adam and Eve alongside a cast of delinquents, foetuses and butterflies, Apples is an exploration of the sickly-sweet turmoil of growing up and the hazards of getting 'fucked as quick as you can'.