[HORROR][PUNK] REED, Tony

The Black Book. Chapter 1: Dark Fantasies

London: Creation Press, 1989. First U.K. Edition. First Printing. Octavo. 21cm. Publisher's glossy illustrated card wraps. 96pp.; [4] ads to rear. Very Light wear to edges and extremities, strong and tight; internally clean and fresh. A fine copy.

One of the more standout and distinctive of the little fiction magazines that London's ever-writhing maggot tin of counterculture, underground, and avant-garde publishing was spraying out over the literary landscape with the gleeful abandon of a County Cork farmer who loves his slurry. A fervid little collection of Barkerised pocket horrors with contributions from Tony Reed, Jacqui Deevoy, Alex Murray and a number of others. Creation Press, later to become Creation Books, was (perhaps is, although rumor suggests otherwise) one of those odd but very typical slow motion, very London, collisions between the music and literary underground when it was born as an offshoot of Alan McGee's Creation Records. Creation Press was erratically helmed by an itinerant bookdealer, writer, goth musician, and double agent of chaos named Julian Hallett; aka James Havoc, James Williamson, Julian Halibut, Ferdy, the Head of The Church of Raism, and a number of other pseudonyms, nom-de-plumes, and identities of convenience. Havoc's moral compass was so manifestly faulty it's a miracle he managed to find Camden, and although he is still apparently producing workit is under something of a cloud of anger and recrimination from various writers and artists claiming absence of payments, plagiarisation, and a number of other issues to do with rights and publisher responsibilities. The underground, ad hoc, and improvised publishing output of London in the late 80's and early 90's; spliced in Giger-esque fashion with the music industry and swarming with people like Kathy Acker, Boyd Rice, Coil, David Tibet, and indeed James Havoc, was a seemingly unstoppable busted water main of confrontational punk, grand guignol excess, and boundary-burning creativity that fought hard before sinking beneath the quicksand of the internet and being gradually supplanted by a guy called Erik who drinks IPA's flavored with sourdough and work denim and who secretly thinks tradwives sound kind of cool.

Price: $75.00

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