Three months have passed since our last release, Jeanette, but there are three more books to come from Chômu in 2011, and today the first of them, The Orphan Palace, by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., (also featuring fabulous cover art from Peter Diamond) is finally released. Hitch a ride to madness by picking up a copy here.

Already we detect a stir of anticipation and excitement surrounding this title, as evidenced in quotes from Matt Cardin, Simon Strantzas and others:

“Joe Pulver is like the answer to some arcane riddle: What do you get when you cross one of Plato’s Muse-maddened poets with a Lovecraftian lunatic, and then give their offspring to be raised by Raymond Chandler and a band of Beats? His work caters to a literary hunger you didn’t even know you had, and does it darkly and deliciously.”

- Matt Cardin

“The Orphan Palace kicks you in the face and doesn’t stop. Pulver’s prose sees the world through a cracked lense of 60’s hedonism and 70’s grit, with a side order of unshakable terror. A serial killer novel that explores the dark side of America via Kerouac in a shell of cosmic horror. What he does is electrifying. I’ve never seen anything like it. My hair is still standing on end.”

- Simon Strantzas

In honour of the road trip nature of the novel, here is a ‘Route 66′ synopsis in exactly 66 words:

“Cardigan heads east through the night-bleak cities of America. His destination? Zimms County Home for Orphaned Children, the palace of dementia where Dr. Archer, ‘Lord of Chaos’, evilly presides – a trap baited with memories. Fires blaze in the rear-view mirror. On the roadside, ghosts, bounty hunters, mermen, Ghoul Hotels. Will D’if, the talking rat, help Cardigan escape this maze, or do all roads lead to madness?”

In The Orphan Palace, Chômu Press are proud to present another prime slice of majestic literary dementia, and another change of literary gear. Watch the book trailer here, and pick up a copy of the book here.

Prize Draw for uniquely inscribed copy of The Orphan Palace

We would also like to announce a prize draw for a signed and uniquely inscribed copy of The Orphan Palace, with a customised bookmark. You may know the drill by now, but here it is again: To be entered for this draw, please sign up to our mailing list (using the ‘Free updates’ widget on our home page) and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘The Animal’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, naturally there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘The Animal’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 2nd of November.

Joe Pulver’s message to prize draw entrants:

The CP “contest ed” will contain –
postcard(s) [with a note] from Carcosa East
signed & dated
an unpublished poem/tExt;;;; or 2 . . .
a “few” special annotationS sprinkled here & there . . .
a drawing of a rat [this is good for a laugh
as P’ull-yverre can’t draw! !!]
an illo of a bEastie [see above]
a TOP bookmark [one of only 25 made]
a selections from the TOP SOUNDTRACK CD
[& maybe some stickers/rubber stampings/
. . . .and only CTHULHU knows what the hell else? ??]

Good luck!

Everyone on the mailing list will also soon receive an exclusive mini-interview with the author.

Other winners, previously unannounced are Steve Duffy and Marc Lyth (sometimes known as Weber). The former won not only an inscribed copy of Nemonymous Night, but the entire ten-volume set of the acclaimed Nemonymous journal, pictured here:

The latter won a copy of Link Arms with Toads! personalised with a poem about himself by the author, Rhys Hughes:

Also included with the prize were a copy of the anthology Cthulhu Unbound and other goodies detailed on Rhys Hughes’ blog.

Here is the poem:

Caught in a weber spun by himself
Marc waits patiently for the secret
spider of his mind to come
and suck out his juice
with all the stealth of an eight-legged elf.

“Fangs for that!” he’ll say. “Most kind of
you, dear spider. Have a nice day!”
or words to that effect.

He lives alone with his books and his cat
and a balding head
which he has never yet read
because he prefers hair-raising tales.
He dismantled radiators in his youth
and we find that’s proof (if any were needed)
that he deserves to be eaten
by the secret spider of his mind.

The cat’s name is Balrog:
that’s another reason.

A jujitsu black belt, Marc should be able
to handle himself in any situation
but the secret spider of his mind is an expert too
and knows all his moves.
Before closing its jaws on his quivering flesh
it will dance for him
an eightfold Can Can,
the sort of thing we can all do without.
But that’s Lyth, I guess.

As mentioned in a previous update, Jérôme-Luc Paulin and Steve Poupard won inscribed copies of Dying to Read and The Great Lover, respectively.

Our next book to be released will be The Orphan Palace, by Jospeh S. Pulver, Sr., of whom Matt Cardin speaks thus: “Joe Pulver is like the answer to some arcane riddle: What do you get when you cross one of Plato’s Muse-maddened poets with a Lovecraftian lunatic, and then give their offspring to be raised by Raymond Chandler and a band of Beats? His work caters to a literary hunger you didn’t even know you had, and does it darkly and deliciously.”

We hope you will enjoy what remains of the summer until that release, and use your time wisely in catching up with the Chômu catalogue. Please also look forward to our November and December releases, Here Comes the Nice, from the legendary Jeremy Reed and The Secret Life of the Panda, a wonderful collection from Nick Jackson.

Finally, the exclusive Brendan Connell interview was sent out to all our subscribers (check your spam if you missed it); remember to subscribe to our e-list for future interviews (John Elliott and Joe Simpson Walker coming soon), to receive updates and to be eligible for future prize draws and competitions.

July is here. Could this be the feel-good hit of the summer? Jeanette, by Joe Simpson Walker, is officially released today.

Here is the soundbite:

“Joe Simpson Walker is to kinky boots what William S. Burroughs was to junk.”

We feel confident in saying that you have not read anything like Jeanette before. It is a transgressive novel set in the early sixties, “a time when fetishism, bondage, masochism, transvestism and homosexuality are still condemned as perversions.” Transgressive fiction encompasses works such as Justine, Venus in Furs, The Story of O, Lolita, The Naked Lunch, Last Exit to Brooklyn, the theatre of Joe Orton, and the pseudonymous or uncredited writings of the erotic underground. Jeanette adds something entirely new to this lineage. The longest novel that Chômu has so far published, it nonetheless rattles by at a fair lick. Like a motorbike rider roaring past and snatching the handbag of your preconceptions, Jeanette is a novel that comes out of nowhere and means to cause trouble. Take a ride on the wild side by grabbing your copy here.

Prize Draw for uniquely inscribed copy of Jeanette

We would also like to announce a prize draw for a signed and uniquely inscribed copy of Jeanette, with a customised bookmark. You may know the drill by now, but here it is again: To be entered for this draw, please sign up to our mailing list and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘kinky boots’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, naturally there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘kinky boots’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 3rd of August.

Everyone on the mailing list will also soon receive exclusive mini-interviews with our authors, including Brendan Connell, John Elliott and Joe Simpson Walker.

We are proud of each of our releases and are gratified to know that our titles are now enlivening bookshelves and enriching readers’ lives around the world. Therefore, first of all, please allow us to introduce a small selection of links here relating to those titles and/or their authors:

Reggie Oliver was featured in Suvudu’s Take Five series, telling us five fascinating things about The Dracula Papers. Signed copies of The Dracula Papers, Book I: The Scholar’s Tale are available from the Aldeburgh Bookshop.

Chômu authors Michael Cisco and Brendan Connell were interviewed together by Jeff VanderMeer for the Amazon blog Omnivoracious.

Gestalt Mash features a characteristically lively interview with Justin Isis, author of I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like, and the review blog of stalwart Theaker’s Quarterly features a review of Revenants by Daniel Mills.

Musings on the cover of The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales, by Mark Samuels, are to be found at Grim Reviews, and Quentin S. Crisp talks about “Remember You’re a One-Ball!” and other things, at Matt Cardin’s Teeming Brain.

In other news, we now have winners for the Dying to Read and The Great Lover prize draws, and can announce that inscribed copies of the books will be sent to Jérôme-Luc Paulin and Steve Poupard respectively. The winner of the prize draw for Link Arms with Toads! by Rhys Hughes will be announced soon. Please look out for prize draws with our future releases.

Speaking of which, those following developments on the site will have noticed that after Nemonymous Night, we have also scheduled releases for two very different (to each other and to just about anything else we’ve encountered) novels, Jeanette, by Joe Simpson Walker (July release), and The Orphan Palace, by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (October release). The former is in the transgressive tradition of Pauline Réage, with a gritty British sixties setting. This will also be the longest work we have so far published. The latter comes from one of the rising stars of the weird, for whom, we believe, the stars are now right; a novel of madness, written in poetry, or perhaps a novel of poetry, written in madness.

Those awaiting news of the Dadaoism anthology should also rest assured that gears are invisibly turning, and we are working hard on making this something special. However, it should be noted that, due to the high number of submissions, it is taking us some time to sift out the very best. We are excited, however, to have already found a considerable quantity of gold in our prospecting. We will release more information on the contents, scheduling and so on for the anthology when it is available. At present, we are still carefully sifting.

Other things to look forward to include mini-interviews with our authors. Interviews with Brendan Connell and John Elliott have already been conducted, and will be sent out in the near future to everyone on our e-mail list. Please note, you must subscribe in order to receive the interviews and other planned exclusive content. Please also subscribe or keep watching this site for news on further releases and developments.

Thank you.

“Because I have experimented with so many different genres, styles and moods, not one of my individual books to date really provides a full overview of what I actually do. Link Arms With Toads! is different because it’s a fully representative sampler of my entire body of work and has been designed as a showcase of the new genre I recklessly tried to invent when I was younger. This book is certainly the best entry point to my body of fiction and if you don’t like Toads! you can be confident you won’t like my other books, so it’s also the financially wisest choice for any new reader.”

So says Rhys Hughes, the author of the collection in question, Link Arms with Toads!, which we gleefully release to the world today, a showcase of the genre that Hughes is calling ‘romanti-cynical’. In this collection you will find elements, indeed, of ghost story, gothic tale, science fiction, and much more, but all of these elements combined and transformed into a protean world of philosophical polymorphous perversity. Evolving through the exponential mutations of paradox, the ‘romanti-cynicism’ of Rhys Hughes swells the biodiversity of literature’s multiverse with innumerable species of medicinal eccentricity.

Some people have already obtained copies, and reviews of the books may be read here, here, and possibly elsewhere. We hope the reader will take this chance to make an acquantaince with the work of Rhys Hughes, by ordering a copy here. We hope also there will be many more chances for reacquaintance in the future. May we suggest further samplers such as Mink Farm Explodes, or perhaps, Pink Karmic Woad?

From the reviews:

…Hughes is the perfect chronicler of … absurdity, not simply because of his gift for whimsy, but because that gift is accompanied by a feeling for the symbolic value of the strange.

- The Stars at Noonday

Reading Rhys Hughes is a leisurely process: one feel’s that reading with too much speed the goodies may slip away unnoticed. He challenges our wit, our ability to imagine, our intellect and our table of entertainment. He is a complete pleasure.

- Grady Harp

Prize Draw for unique commemorative copy of Link Arms with Toads!

Regular visitors to the website will by now be familiar with the pattern of the prize draws, but please allow us to repeat it here. We would like to announce a prize draw for a signed and uniquely inscribed commemorative copy of Link Arms with Toads!. To be entered for this draw, please sign up to our mailing list and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘Toads!’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, naturally there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘Toads!’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 1st of June.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, the language has proved to be too strange and alien to yield up its secrets in the form of a literal translation of what it says. We shall, then, save that mystery for another day. However, there is a winner to the competition – the one who came nearest in spirit the secret hidden in the alien writing. The winner is Brendan Moody. The specially signed copy of the book will be winging its way to him soon. In the meantime, with Brendan’s kind permission, we reproduce his winning entry in full below:

What It Means

I had intended to enter the competition in a timely manner, but a recent personal tragedy, so mundane that beneath equally mundane grief lay a certain resentment that my life should take such a prosaic path, had necessitated a delay. The deadline was drawing near as I sat at my newly-cluttered kitchen table with a pad of notepaper, a pencil, and my well-read but immaculate copy of the red book. The light from the breast-shaped fixture overhead seemed dimmer than usual, and when I looked up I could see that one of the two bulbs within had burnt out at some time in the past week. The sickly yellow glow was, however, strong enough to work by, and I was too exhausted to clatter through cabinets looking for a replacement.

I wasn’t expecting the code-breaking to require much time. It looked likely to be a simple substitution cipher, akin to the cryptograms that fill the pages of mass-market puzzle magazines, and I was reasonably adept at such things. Identifying and extrapolating from the simple logic that guided them had always been a source of deep satisfaction for me. (My wife had often jokingly linked this hobby to my work as an accountant, suggesting that my life was defined by numbers, their order and lack of ambiguity. I had always resented this joke, but had never told her so, and now that resentment was a source of festering, pedestrian guilt.)

But when I took my first close look at the symbols on the cover of the red book, I realized that this puzzle would be more difficult than I had realized. The problem was that the symbols of this new alphabet were so small and so similar, and the gaps between them so minute, that it was difficult to tell where one ended and the next began. Did the message begin with two words of three letters, or one word of six? Were those two symbols identical, or was one at a slightly skewed angle, and therefore unique? I tried copying them onto my notepad in larger print, but halfway through the first line I tossed my pencil down in despair. Suddenly my failure to crack the code became symbolic of other, more serious recent failures, and there seemed no alternative but to slink out to the couch, where I had been sleeping for the past week, and hope that this time I would be able to rest through the night.

It was not to be. I woke in the early morning, with an aching head and a mouth full of saliva. I stumbled to my feet, rubbing brittle sleep-dust from my eyes, and headed for the kitchen, to take a plastic water bottle out of the refrigerator and chug from it until I felt my stomach expanding. But on the way there I happened to glance at the kitchen table, and in the faint light coming through the window from a flickering streetlight outside, I recognized my copy of the red book.

Suddenly, more than water, or sleep, or any other nepenthe, I wanted to know what message lay beneath that bright cover, which seemed almost to mock me, to be laughing at my matted hair, my dirt-encrusted black suit, the crumbs caught in my beard and mustache. I snapped on the kitchen light — even its half-illumination was an assault on my tired eyes — and sat down once more. At first I was as unable to make headway as I had been before, and my frustration grew, reaching its usual peak in a strange sensation, almost like physical arousal, that pierced my genitals, pleasant and yet at the same time unbearable. Just as I thought I would have to retreat for the second time, I blinked, and when my eyes opened again I could see everything.

It was small wonder that my earlier attempt had failed, for what was revealed to me was nothing that could ever be communicated through the incremental, rational processes of frequency analysis and persistent guesswork. This message was of another order altogether, brought to me in what were clearly words of a sort, yet which defied translation into English, or any other human tongue. It was beautiful, promising discovery and clarity, and yet there was something faintly mechanical about it; I felt, without knowing precisely why, that it was appropriate that the cover of the red book should show this message emerging from an old-fashioned typewriter: grace and industry combined. The symbolism was so perfect that I laughed aloud. Perhaps that laughter that prevented me from hearing approaching footsteps. But I think not.

When the door that led from the kitchen to the front porch swung open, I was leaning forward, about to reread the message, if “reread” is an appropriate term for the return to something so fundamental, so circular, that once discovered it is inescapable. I was too excited by my discovery to feel any surprise as I looked over at the shadowy doorway. Even when I recognized the figure emerging from it, I felt only that this, too, must be contained within the message on the cover of the red book. If I looked down at it, all would surely be explained. But I found myself unable to turn away from the creature that had been my wife.

All the signs of the petty tragedy that had destroyed her were gone, and at first she seemed rather ordinary. It was only when she opened her mouth and began to speak that I saw the change, how the hinge of her jaw had been ingeniously altered so that it opened wide, like the mouth of a dummy or puppet. A terrifying thing, I suppose, in the abstract, yet the words she spoke distracted me from any fear. It was a language of buzzes and clicks, like the sound of ancient machinery, and somehow I knew that it was the oral equivalent of the spindly symbols on the cover of the red book.

I could hardly tell where one word ended and the next began, but I knew what she was telling me, this thing that might be wife or might only have borrowed her form. With each buzz, each click, each step toward me across the grey tiles of the floor, she drove further home the message that I had, by some quirk of mind and hour, opened a door that few would ever perceive. There would be no turning back; “turning back” was not a concept that had any meaning on the other side of the threshold across which she was about to lead me. Her wide, wide mouth would cover mine, to make the necessary adjustments, and that would be that. As I prepared myself for what I knew would be a cold, sharp, tantalizing kiss, I managed to turn my head and take one last look in the direction of the red book. I was not at all surprised to find that, its purpose fulfilled, it had disappeared.

Brendan Moody (who couldn’t translate the code and decided to find another way to amuse himself).

And now for something completely different! In keeping with the Chômu mission to bring you works that are of the highest quality and (maybe not just) a little unusual, we are very pleased to present a murder mystery that is also something of a literary conundrum. Dying to Read, by John Elliott, is a crime thriller as comic as it is gritty. Its evocation of its chosen milieu (“Heathrow perimeterville”) is masterly, the dialogue and characters are up-to-the-minute, and the text delights in the small, real and very odd details of so-called ordinary life. But beneath the surface it takes as much from the European tradition of existentialism as the Wodehouse and Ealing Studios tradition of British comedy. Get on the case, by ordering a copy here.

To quote the ever quotable Rhy Hughes:

It’s always a particular pleasure to chance upon a cunning, erudite, stylish, inventive, unique but relatively obscure writer who, perhaps because of dissatisfaction with their own obscurity, makes a sudden wild attempt to break into the limelight, to write something more commercial, but who actually fails to ’sell out’ because they simply have too much integrity and talent. The result is often a curious hybrid between the popular and the avant garde, the low and the highbrow, with each component doing its best to sabotage its opposite. John Elliott’s brilliant novel falls squarely into this category, but the self-sabotage becomes symbiosis. Dying to Read is a marvellous slide along the high tension wires of a vast imagination with nothing but a frayed belt to keep you above the intertextual chasm.

Prize Draw for uniquely inscribed copy of Dying to Read

We would also like to announce a prize draw for a signed and uniquely inscribed copy of Dying to Read. To be entered for this draw, please sign up to our mailing list and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘Dying to Read’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, naturally there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘Dying to Read’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 12th of May.

The prize copy is signed and inscribed, and comes with six photographs of the American Northeast, where the novel is set, as well as unpublished poems and lyrics from the author.

Additionally, we can now announce the winner of the Polycrates prize draw as Claus Laufenburg, who will soon be receiving the inscribed and exotically modified copy of The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children, by Brendan Connell.

Today we are proud to announce the release of a book that we know has been much anticipated – the sixth novel from International Horror Guild Award winner Michael Cisco, The Great Lover. A many-spired citadel of a novel, The Great Lover has its foundations in an underground of untamed vision, but its architecture is that of poetic rigour. This is a work to make the divisions between genre and literary fiction seem what they are—the preoccupations of a previous century. Discover this new frontier of fiction, for yourself, here.

In his Foreword to the novel, Rhys Hughes poses the question, what can you say about a perfect work of art? Let us quote what some have said about it below:

The latest phantasmagorical offering from Cisco (The Narrator) is a fusion of dark fantasy, literary fiction, and existential horror that revolves around the eponymous character of the sewerman, an undead tramp in search of capital-L Love who can enter into women’s dreams. As he pines for a blind woman named Vera, he also helps a disgraced academic turned prophet to establish a “ptochocratic” cult that wants to create its own reality underground and battle a soul-sucking plague of white noise. The surreal narrative is something like a 400-page T.S. Eliot poem: otherworldly, lyrical, deeply philosophical, and supersaturated with extraordinary imagery and ideas (like the Prosthetic Libido, a golem-like device constructed to house a scientist’s unwanted desire). Fans of stylish and thematically sophisticated weird fiction should seek out this mad testament to Cisco’s visionary genius.

- Publishers Weekly

It seemed as if The Tyrant was the biggest monster Cisco could make, but The Great Lover is now his new masterpiece. Brilliant, light-years beyond … still marauding. He should receive plaudits for conceiving the Prosthetic Libido alone. Cisco has an identity as much as any writer I’ve read

- Thomas Ligotti

Prize Draw for uniquely inscribed copy of The Great Lover

We would also like to announce a prize draw for a signed and uniquely inscribed copy of The Great Lover. To be entered for this draw, please sign up to our mailing list and send an e-mail with the subject heading ‘Great Lover’ to info at chomupress dot com. If you are already on our mailing list, naturally there is no need to sign up again – simply send an e-mail with the ‘Great Lover’ subject heading to the address mentioned. Only one entry allowed per person. Deadline for draw, the 28th of April.