Human Flesh is unleashed

At last the date has arrived and the second Chômu Press publication is unleashed. We are very proud to present, I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like by Justin Isis.












Here is what others have to say of the collection:

If you ever wanted to experience some life-bending obsession but thus far are still waiting for one to come along, reading I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like will serve as the next best thing. In his disarmingly masterful first collection of stories, Justin Isis reports on what it is like to be young, Japanese (quite incidentally in our global culture), and hopelessly a slave to awful and bizarre attractions—eccentric enchantments that any fugitive from the conventional world would take agonizing pride in confessing to a sheaf of private papers. Indeed, these are stories in the best tradition of the confessional genre. Even when they are not narrated in the first person, the focus is still that of a Poesque psyche utterly fixated with an imprudent intensity upon someone or something of an unparalleled nature. One problem in writing for the uninitiated about Isis’ stories is how to praise them in terms appropriate to their character. But while there are so many ways in which one might go wrong, each would be likely to bring up some aspect of their fascination. So for present purposes, let us simply generalize them as admirably captivating narratives with the following “black box” label: To be read by those who themselves would be overtaken by the extraordinary liaisons and manias that either save or doom—it can be hard to tell—the characters in these works.

- Thomas Ligotti

Justin Isis’ stories read like future videos, in their shape-shifting, voyeuristic Eurasian themes, dominated throughout by the obsessive retrieval of visual detail pulled right from the edge of one space-time dissolving into another. “He wondered about how present he was” the narrator of the title story questions, and it’s the author’s ability to live parallel to what he is seeing that gives the collection an elusive, fetishistic concentration, as though Isis is trying to step into a film as a real-time participant. I love these stories for their fractionally off-world message that is always vitally, sexily modern.

- Jeremy Reed

To learn more about Isis in his own words, please read the interviews here and here.

There are also reviews starting to appear online. The first ones can be seen here, at Blog Critics, from Jessica Schneider and here, at the Theaker’s Quarterly blog.

Warning: I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like is not horror fiction.

Competition

To celebrate the launch of our second book, Chômu Press would like to announce a competition to win a ‘Super Limited Edition’ of I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like. What is the hidden meaning of the cover of I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like? If you think you know or have some interesting ideas of your own, please send your interpretation (tweet-size) to the Chômu Press Twitter feed, using @chomupress. (Please feel free to express the meaning in the form of a caption.) So that we can send you a private message to obtain your contact details if you win, please also make sure to ‘follow’ the Chômu Press Twitter account. To indicate that your tweet is a competition entry, please accompany your interpretation with the hashtag #fleshcover. Alternatively, those who don’t have a Twitter account may send us their entries (again, tweet-size – 140 characters or fewer) via the normal Chômu address: info at chomupress dot com. We may tweet the entries of those who enter via e-mail. Because of text-size considerations, if we do so we will omit the name of the entrant. Therefore, in e-mail entries please specify if you would rather not have your entry tweeted. Multiple entries are allowed.

The closing date for this competition is the 14th of February. The interpretation judged to be the most interesting by Chômu Press and the author will receive a unique and special ‘Super Limited Edition’ copy of I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, signed and decorated by the author.

Finally, please subscribe to our mailing list to keep updated on future releases, behind the scenes insights, news and exclusive rarities (and the competition results).