Rule Dementia!

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.