Rhys Hughes

One of the few books I have ever bought purely on the strength of the cover (a glorious Charles Rennie Mackintosh tribute), this turned out to be an engaging short novel, wherein a university professor in a coastal town sets his students an assignment where they have to write an essay about the professor's free time. Some of these essays are fabulations; a few may not be. And who is teaching who?

Whilst reading this book, I was reminded of the early days of the British science fiction show more magazine Interzone, which for a time regularly featured stories by the Serbian writer Zoran Zivkovic. This story has a similar, slightly other-worldly quality that suggests we are not in our own reality but one at an angle to our own. I shall be looking for more from Rhys Hughes. show less

Hughes’s snarky poems pillorying H. P. and his followers are aptly subtitled. Some of his pretty ditties are so monstrously bad that the response is the groan invoked by a pun while some are right on laugh out loud skewers into the racist verbiage that mars much of Lovecraft’s work. Indeed, facing the title page of this print on demand publication the author has placed this dedication:

“This collection is dedicated to every reader who loves Weird fiction but doesn’t take it too show more seriously. It is also dedicated to everyone who opposes fascism of any variety.”

And it’s not only Lovecraft’s social and political opinions that are mocked in verse. The cover illustration is but one instance of Hughes’s humor. There are several snide takes in verse on Lovecraft’s chin at the bottom of the long face he inherited from his English ancestors. show less

“Better the Devil” compiles seven chapbooks of short stories that offer dazzling disintegrations of the reality principle. These are rites of passage to the greater world beyond common sense. Their levity raises the bar on profundity and sets a comic standard for the tragic limits of our human experience. Like parables, these antic tales reveal by hiding. And like the Uncertainty Principle, they guard the secret of being from intellectual bondage. They’re fun! Like Beckett on nitrous show more oxide. Like Kafka with a brighter sense of humor. show less

"I heard the tramp of feet, five feet in total, which meant only a single visitor, for three feet always belong to Chives; I gave him the extra leg when I invented him, for the sake of stability and speed. And also because he's a monster."

That's probably enough to tell you whether you'll enjoy this charmingly bizarre tale of the theft of the sky and its replacement with a stone ceiling. Renowned Absurdity Investigator (where's one of them when you need one?) Sampietro Mischief aims to find show more out who did it and why with the assistance (or not) of his butler (and monster) Chives.

Full of throwaway one-line ingenious ideas like Mischief's fear about "the extinction of electricity, which I had wrongly believed to be an animal", the story invites you to revel in its absurdity. Never mind worries about vitamin D deficiency when the sun has disappeared, how will you work out which 3 o'clock is which when there are two in every day and they're both dark? And more importantly, why isn't Chives appearing with the brandy when he's called?

I enjoyed this foray into the perfectly logical illogicality of the world of Mischief (and especially Chives - who doesn't love a monster sidekick?) and I'm pleased to see that a second in the series, [b:The Polo Match|12865480|The Polo Match (Sampietro Mischief #2)|Rhys Hughes|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1318496847s/12865480.jpg|18017605], is available for the next time I need a dose of cheerful madness! show less