Ever Upward

EXCELSIOR: Rhys Hughes

Extract from my review of THE LUNAR TICKLE Thornton Excelsior stories HERE:

1. In Thornton Wilder’s stage play ‘The Skin of Our Teeth’, the entire action happens in a fictitious New Jersey town with the name “Excelsior”. Longfellow who wrote a real poem entitled ‘Excelsior’ is directly featured in Thornton Wilder’s play but with a fictitious poem! ‘Excelsior’ means ‘ever upward’.
2. Reply
4. nullimmortalis
   October 2, 2014 at 10:43 am Edit
   I love Thornton Excelsior stories – and the way they chase each other towards some extra braincore beyond anything else in literature. Yet, thinking aloud, I wonder if it is counter-productive for publishers to publish so many Rhys Hughes books so frequently as they do – but that in itself, of course, is no mean achievement of which this author can be proud. Other than perhaps ‘Rhysop’s Fables’ (that recently I had to abandon real-time reviewing, at least temporarily), all his books are special unique classics, but I am still waiting for THE legacy Rhys Hughes book that will take years for him to write, and months if not years for me to read. At least one thousand pages of deep and textured and reader-brainshape-altering text – blending, say, ‘Engelbrecht Again!’ and ‘A Rape of Knots’ with dashes of Thornton Excelsior… All said, with due humility and tentativeness. A lunatic tickle from me to him.
5. 
   Hatstands on Zanzibar
   “Have you ever beamed at somebody you recognise in the street and then remembered, too late, you aren’t supposed to like that person?”
   This is a completely and utterly mad but strangely sane, too, dealing with the alchemy of unintentional smiles…making the reader do handstands to help get his brain back into position.

Jenny Khan - by Rhys Hughes

An extract from my review HERE.

“‘When I go to Parliament,’ said Jenny, ‘I’ll abolish clouds. And I’ll live on cakes and peanuts! And when I’m full, I’ll jump up and down until I’m sick and start eating again!‘”

The older I get, the odder. But never as creatively and constructively and dyslogically odd as Rhys Hughes or, at least, Rhys Hughes’ work. This is genuinely one of his greater pieces (and quite different from, if the same as, most of the other works I’ve read of his); good job! It takes up about 30 pages of this Journal. Worth every page. It starts off with Jenny as a wonderful new take on Jane Turpin (by Evadne Price), a young girl version of Richmal Crompton’s ‘Just William’, but better. And it evolves into a major satiric, Lewis-Carrollian ironic-fantasy: absurdist, hootingly funny, with at least half serious undercurrents about Parliament and voting, and power, and monarchy, and the Middle Class, and Machiavelli: with so many wonderful new Rhys-Hughesian conceits: eg: Alky / Alchemist, Jingo /Bingo, buying years for the amount of their numerical ‘name’: with all manner of larger-than-life characters and references like the one to the Guy who tried to blow up Parliament: and Whovian statue-blinks, Whovian mayhem in Westminster, slime things underground etc. Even a version of Facebook for Dictators. And much much more. The prose is plain and short-paragraphed (not usually to my taste), but the ideas scintillate. And it’s thought-provoking, too, if you have any thoughts to be provoked. It even has childish conceits, to go with the more clever ones, like not finding any kangaroos in a kangaroo court. And the ending is not bathetic. It’s almost touching.

Sangria in the Sangraal

I shall go out on a limb: I have read much Rhys Hughes fiction since the early 1990s and, despite most of it, if not all, being brilliant stuff, I genuinely believe the SANGRIA IN THE SANGRAAL book to be the best organically thought-provoking and mind-expanding whole. Fabulous with brazen wit and sparkle: also implicitly gentle and meditative and self-traducing. Making clouds shine even if the world’s sun is hidden.

My real-time review here: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/sangria-in-the-sangraal/

Tears of the Mutant Jesters - Rhys Hughes

Books, in Rhys Hughes’s absurdist horror story, can be fastidious things. They can make noises in the middle of the night, they can howl and cry out in pain, they can wail and wince, they can groan and eject weird vomit, they can sob and shiver and even shift position and mess up even the most careful bibliophile’s regimented collection of books. The book in question, an anthology of one hundred surreal and fantastical horror stories, can even suffer from appendicitis! (Nearby volumes have other ailments: Athlete’s footnotes, allergic reactions to bookmarks, and my favorite, particularly relevant to anthologies: the loss of consciousness.) Such is the absurdist mode in this comic and disturbing tale, rich with anthropomorphic literary devices. The story seems to want to perhaps challenge the idea that there is no place for comedy, surrealism or satire in the weird tale of terror. It is very much welcomed here.

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Rhys Hughes’ “Tears of the Mutant Jesters” is a pleasant diversion from the more serious material involving a book with appendicitis (a vestigial echo of the time when books ate grass). A short tale, it brims with clever wordplay and wry humour.

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It’s not all darkness, there is humour, of a sort, in Rhys Hughes’ Tears Of The Mutant Jesters a typically Hughesean bizarre tale which bends, warps and twists the English language into a remarkable story about sick books.

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Next up is a humorous tale by Rhys Hughes, where an avid book collector has to deal witrh a book that is suffering from appendicitis, yes Mr Hughes loves a pun, and story is filled with puns. It is a lightweight tale that after three very heavy and serious tales brought a nice bit of light relief to the collection

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One of the contemporary horror writers whose name O'Driscoll drops is Rhys Hughes, and Hughes just happens to have his own story in The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies. It's a short one, six pages, called "Tears of the Mutant Jesters", and while laziness played a role, I did choose two very short stories to follow up O'Driscoll's long-ish (not very, though) story because I wondered how the premise inherent to the whole anthology could be gotten across, while still leaving room for anything else, in a six or seven page story. Plus, one of those stories was called "Tears of the Mutant Jesters", and I'm not made of stone. Well, in Hughes's case, it doesn't matter, because "Tears of the Mutant Jesters" plays more like an advertisement for surreal horror than anything else, and a pretty low brand of surrealism, at that. "Tears of the Mutant Jesters" is the title of a horror anthology beloved by Thornton Excelsior. It is a collection of surreal horror, "a somewhat sidelined subgenre." The six pages of the story mainly consist of the book needing readjustment on the shelf, the book weeping, Excelsior's attempt to help the book, his various conversations, which are basically each exactly the same, with his housekeepers -- none of whom he hired which is pretty surreal when you think about it -- named Dawn, Midday and Dusk. So you'll have lines like "Dusk was sweeping the land", which is a pun, but also she really is sweeping the land -- sweeping up mountains. Anyway, I guess I missed the thing where everybody likes puns again, but I still don't. Hughes features them prominently, and makes me very much against the idea of partaking in his brand of surreal horror.

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There is a tightrope between intelligent wordplay and groan-inducing puns, and this story strides along it with confidence, with a couple of minor slips. A short and amusing piece, it plays with deep existential themes but doesn't properly explore them. Shades of both Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde. Fun.

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In “Tears of the Mutant Jester”, the books themselves become sick, vomiting indigestible words and having to be relieved of their unnecessary appendices. Rhys Hughes’ brightly punning narrative transforms the darker subtext of horror like a breath of fresh air. Where other authors see an opportunity for expressing angst, Hughes seizes the chance to make us laugh at this literary conceit – books have feelings too!
Thornton Excelsior, Rhys Hughes’, character understands the power of books and the words they contain as much as any of this collection’s authors. We spend so much time in the company of printed words that we know their power: their ability to create or destroy, to provoke wars and reduce men to quivering wrecks, to inspire love and devotion and to raise our eyes to beauty. Books are the driving force of many of the characters’ lives.


 Any further reviews after 20 Jan 12 will appear in the comments below.

My own views: http://horroranthology.wordpress.com/editors-story-by-story-commentary/

Further Thornton Excelsior stories have appeared since the HA of HA here: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/real-time-review-of-tqf-39/

Castle Cesare

An extract from my real-time review of 'Link Arms With Toads!' by Rhys Hughes (Chomu Press 2011) here.

Castle Cesare

“From the balconies of our highest turrets the entire firmament was accessible to our curiosity…”

But do we ever reach the last balcony? Not according to this story, as the hero protagonist – in a 2oth century East European literature flavour of a mediaeval fable – becomes a cross between the ‘Russian Doll’ hero (my expression not the story’s) from ’333 and a Third’, plus Robinson Crusoe, Lemuel Gulliver, Doctor Who and a solar-systemic Phileas Fogg and ‘you’ or ‘me’ by fictionatronic empathy with an orrery degree in endless imagination…… Indeed, I can’t imagine how big Rhys’ imagination must be to create this insular-picaresque fiction (seriously), but it seems central to some fabrication ‘magic fiction’ that I shall christen here, officially for the first time, ‘fictionatronics’. A fabrication that only Rhys can bring off. Ever chasing the noumenon but thankfully never reaching it because, if reached, it would become less than its unreachable essence. (27 Jun 11)

The Chivalry of Fame

The Chivalry of Fame

posted Thursday, 13 May 2010




This year, I was challenged by another writer to a Duel of Fame. You may find details of it by a careful or lucky search of a world that does not really exist: the Internet.

To cut a long story short, it has transpired that whoever of us becomes most famous in 50 years’ time wins the Duel. There are some Rules of Engagement including the formal yardstick by which to measure Fame. Another particularly interesting Rule is: “In the event of neither participant becoming famous, the Duel is deemed Null Immortalis.”

One certainty: in 50 years any fame, sadly, for me is Posthumous.

Or, better, Retrocausal?

Or, even better, Nemonymous. Forever.





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1. freckles left...
Friday, 14 May 2010 6:30 am
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