INFLUX PRESS – serie

The year 2036; in a broken down and dysfunctional post-Federal America, Ex-Marine Frank Dubois journeys from LA to Detroit on a mission to find redemption from his past actions in the 20 year Syrian war.In present day Hollywood, a British film director hustles to get his movie made in a cut throat and sycophantic business. Somehow, these two worlds collide.Bindlestiff begins with a simple image of a man mending the hole in his shoe with some glue and a cut off piece of rubber. And from there explodes into a broiling satire on race, identity, family, friendship, war, peace, sex, drugs but precious little rock and roll.Part screenplay, part novel, Bindlestiff is about the power of storytelling and how we use narratives to make sense of the world."If it's broke, fix it."

Isabelle is alone in Strasbourg. The day after her partner leaves to travel abroad, she receives news of her father's suicide, his body found hanging in a park back home in Crystal Palace. Isabelle misses her flight back to London and a new university job, opting to stay in her partner's empty flat over the winter.Obsessed with the many strange coincidences in Strasbourg's turbulent history, Isabelle seeks to slowly dissolve into the past, succumbing to visions and dreams as she develops her meticulous research about the city. Stalked by the unnerving spirit of the Erl-King she fears something else has died along with her father; the spectres of Europe communicating a hidden truth beneath the melancholy.How Pale the Winter Has Made Us rummages through the crumbling ruins of a life, building cartographies of place and death under a darkening sky.

A lonely woman invites danger between tedious dates; a station guard plays a bloody game of heads-or-tails; an office cleaner sneaks into a forbidden room hiding grim secrets.Compelling and provocative, Annabel Banks's debut short fiction collection draws deeply upon the human need to be in control - no matter how devastating the cost.

In this dark and toothsome collection, Anna Vaught enters a strange world of apocryphal feasts and disturbing banquets. Famished explores the perils of selfish sensuality and trifle while child rearing, phantom sweetshop owners, the revolting use of sherbet in occult rituals, homicide by seaside rock, and the perversion of Thai Tapas. Once, that is, you've been bled dry from fluted cups by pretty incorporeals and learned about consuming pride in the hungriest of stately homes. Famished: seventeen stories to whet your appetite and ruin your dinner.

Between Beirut And The Moon is the exuberant and hilarious debut from the hugely talented young Lebanese author, Naji Bakhti.A young boy comes of age within the confines of post-civil-war Beirut, with conflict, and comedy lurking round every corner.Adam dreams of becoming an astronaut but who has ever heard of an Arab on the moon? He battles with his father, a book-hoarding journalist with a penchant for writing eulogies, his closest friend, Basil, a Druze who is said to worship goats and believe in reincarnation, and a host of other misfits and miscreants in a city attempting recover from years of political and military violence.Adam's youth oscillates from laugh out loud escapades, to near death encounters, as he struggles to understand the turbulent and elusive city he calls home.

Vincent wakes up in an apartment in New York City with no recollection of having arrived there. Back in the UK, his girlfriend, Emily, has been murdered. Guided by mysterious phone calls which lead him to a series of clues, he soon suspects he has travelled to New York to find Emily's killer.Meanwhile, an explicit video Emily made is going viral. When she shared it with Davison in a private forum, she never expected him to upload it. But she's only ever spoken to him online, and he might not be who he says he is. Framed by footnotes and annotations written by Ike A. Mafar and author Steve Hollyman, Esc&Ctrl is a metafictional murder mystery examining the loss of identity in the virtual world of the Internet; a self-begetting novel for the 21st Century.

Carl, reeling from the death of his brother, is drowning in visions. Followed by shadow men through the crumbling outer regions of the city. Unable to trust those closest to him. Doubting his own reality.As a wave of brutal, ritualistic gangland killings sweeps through the underworld, Carl's involvement with a life he thought he had left behind catches up with him, with terrifying results.In the Shadow of the Phosphorous Dawn is the raw, brilliant debut novel from Rob True, operating at the bleeding edge of crime and psychedelic horror.

Man Hating Psycho is the caustic new collection of stories from visionary writer Iphgenia Baal. Interrogating the disconnect between our public identities and real-life selves, Baal exposes the inherent duplicity of online communication.Text messages relaying deep personal crisis are nothing more than an annoyance, WhatsApp takedowns of wide-eyed left-wingers unfold at breakneck speed, friendships that seem set in stone disintegrate at the first hint of sex, the language of love degraded as life becomes more and more transactional.With black and disquieting humour, thirteen playful texts disparage the highly-profitable superstitions that are the scaffolding of our current social order.Man Hating Psycho lays bare the trappings of modern life, whilst putting the short story form through a literary mincer.

In the Pines is author Paul Scraton's story of an unnamed narrator's lifelong relationship with the forest and the mysteries it contains, told through fragmented stories that capture the blurred details and sharp focus of memory.Accompanied by eerie images created using a 170-year-old technique of collodion wet plate photography by Eymelt Sehmer, In the Pines is a powerfully evocative collaboration between image and text

Rob is a Crescent kid. Born and raised in the sheltered circle of grey semis, built to house the employees of The City Works and their families. Under the eye of the reclusive Mr Olhouser, the residents of The Crescent go about their work, their lessons and their law, accompanied by the never-ending sound of The Works machinery deep under the ground.When Lee Wrexler moves into The Crescent, he brings with him something dangerous from the outside. Not just a reputation for trouble, but an outside perspective that will show Rob that the home he always thought he had a measure of is a stranger and far more unsettling place than he could have imagined…Malcolm Devlin’s Engines Beneath Us is a powerful and unsettling novella of how the individual spirit is crushed by the pressure to conform, from a contemporary master of weird fiction.

Birmingham, early 1990s. Triangle are a cult act on the post-punk scene, led by brilliant and troubled vocalist Karl - a man haunted by past violence and present danger, torn between fame and oblivion, men and women, music and silence.Triangle's bass player, David, is struggling to make sense of Karl's reality as the band start to make waves in the music scene and Karl starts to come apart in a blur of sex and drinking.First published in 2000, Joel Lane's debut novel From Blue to Black is a story of passion, blood and alcohol, broken strings and broken lives - a piercing voyage through our musical and political past that cuts to the bone.

In midwinter, an aspiring politician finds himself suddenly deprived of human contact.Newcomers to a town are strangely reminiscent of people lost in a recent flood.Demonstrators on a peace march see the faces of sleeping children in the snow.A failed musician meets his own ancestors getting off a midnight train.The Terrible Changes is a journey through the shadow-realm between reality and dream, between clarity and madness, between the living and the dead. In Joel Lane's fiction, the weird is a symbolic language expressing the chilling beauty, sadness and mystery of real life, combining the supernatural with themes of human loss, passion, solitude and despair, in the tradition of Robert Aickman, John Ramsey Campbell, and M. John Harrison.From ‘The Brand’ (1983) to ‘Alouette’ (2008), these stories span a quarter-century of writing: urban horror tales, elegiac ghost stories, erotic reveries and psychological fugues. Long unavailable, The Terrible Changes is now back in print for a new audience, adding to Joel Lane’s legacy as a true master of the weird.

Paul, ex-tube driver and drinking partner of legendary Union leader Bob Crowe turns up at Essex University in the early 1980s haunted by the death of his colleague on the tracks.Thrown into the radical mix of Student Union life and the academic intoxication of post-modern theory taught by the likes of Ernesto Laclau, Jaques Derrida and a very young Slavoj Zizek, Paul befriends the novel’s unnamed narrator.What follows is a riotous attempt to put the 20th Century to bed, as seen through the eyes of the foot soldiers of British history. From Miners strikes to IRA collection buckets, ANC demonstrations and some very dodgy handling of Soviet money, Our Struggle climaxes with a devastating denouement in modern day Kurdistan.Holloway’s epic tale asks the big questions, does what we think, what we say and what we do ever match up or are we destined to fall short of the ideals we think we cherish?

For more than a decade, writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell has been preoccupied by the strange connections between place and culture: curious about the graves of writers, determined to find the locations of iconic films, intrigued by the landscapes that inspired novels.From classic films to obscure British television, the poems of playwrights to the psychogeography of Weird Fiction, Local Haunts brings together a collection of essays, photographs, travelogues, and journalism that explores the connections between art and the landscapes that inspire it. With particular focus on several key figures that emphasised place in their work - including W.G. Sebald, Alan Garner, Agnes Varda, M.R. James, and Marguerite Duras - Scovell explores culture that is haunted by locales, rural and urban.Taken from a range of print and digital publications, including work published by Sight & Sound, Literary Hub, Caught By The River, and Little White Lies, as well as Scovell's Celluloid Wicker Man site that brought many ideas surrounding Folk Horror and the Urban Wyrd to prominence in the early 2010s, Local Haunts brings together a decade of work treading the ghostways and the corpse roads of film, literature, and art.

Set in a near-future fraught with ecological collapse, Christine Lai's mesmerising and prismatic debut novel Landscapes is a brilliant exploration of memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.In the English countryside-decimated by heat and drought-Penelope archives what remains of an estate's once notable collection. As she catalogues the library's contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and its scheduled demolition marks the pressing deadline for completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending return of Aidan's brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before. As Julian's visit looms, Penelope finds herself unable to suppress the past, clinging to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning.Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the country-house novel for our age of catastrophe, announcing the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.

Liguria, Italy. In a mountain village sits an old farmhouse that stores the memories of those who have lived there and suffers the tales of the visitors who come and go. The house weaves its magic on all who encounter it.New owners move in and over time become entangled with a parade of oddball characters. From pagan ritual to the antics of modern village life, the clash between outsiders and locals, Commedia Mortale seeks to understand what is authentic in both: the tall tales of ageing Second World War Partisans, the dreams of a chef to travel to parts unknown supported by a Greek chorus of drunks, a talking parrot, and asylum-seeking footballers with their own dreams, and miraculously a visit to the village by Anthony Bourdain himself. Parsed through the eyes of a film maker, the ultimate outsider, Commedia Mortale summons dreams of kinship and nightmares of enmity. Ranging across philosophy, food, history, love, loss and landscape, Holloway conjures up a unique portrait of a place, the fables of its past and the dilemma of how to live now.

A world on the brink of collapse. Dense woods, mountains, a standing stone, a barrow, and a very old house. But if you’ve only ever known concrete and glass, how do you live in a place like this? Recruited by a mysterious organisation, Nash thinks things are finally going his way. But when a job goes badly wrong, he is taken to an isolated location to await a decision on his fate.Paradise is a crumbling cottage deep in a forest; Nash is free to leave the house but must not leave the woods. It is winter, and this wild and remote place is unknowable and terrifying. He attempts to map his surroundings to find a way out, but they resist him, the land seemingly shifting and changing. Moreover, he begins to suspect that his employers’ intentions may be much darker than anticipated.Forming an unlikely friendship, Nash finally begins to understand the consoling power of the place that has become his home. Brigid is sure of herself and at home in the natural world, while he is urban, lost. But she longs for his world, and he longs for hers.Now the wheel of the year is turning. As winter gives way to spring Nash’s fate has been decided, and they are coming to deliver their verdict…Paradise is the brilliant new novel from Ben Tufnell, an uncategorizable Kafkaesque eco-thriller combining elements of noir, folk horror and nature writing, addressing the most urgent of contemporary issues.

Berlin: long-celebrated as a city of artists and outcasts, but also a city of teachers and construction workers. A place of tourists and refugees, and the memories of those exiled and expelled. A city named after marshland; if you dig a hole, you'll soon hit sand.The stories of Berlin are the stories BUILT ON SAND. A wooden town, laid waste by the Thirty Years War that became the metropolis by the Spree that spread out and swallowed villages whole. The city of Rosa Luxemburg and Joseph Roth, of student movements and punks on both sides of the Wall. A place still bearing the scars of National Socialism and the divided city that emerged from the wreckage of war. BUILT ON SAND centres on the personal geographies of place, and how memory and history live on in the individual and collective imagination. This novel offers a portrait of a city three decades on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the legacy of that history in a city that was once divided but remains fractured and fragmented.