Welsh writer Rhys Hughes performs his magic in this masterful work of experimental fiction. Imaginary Hotheads is an intricately constructed fiction divided into three sections (“The Moving Finger.” “Hannah and her Cisterns,” and “The Fortnight Fistfight”). Each section is a frame around a selection of smaller fictions. These short “flash fantastika” are mystically linked — often connected by mood, theme or style.

Imaginary Hotheads exhibits the author’s signature absurdism, wordplay and whimsy, laced with hard-edged, speculative epiphanies.

IMAGINARY HOTHEADS
Rhys Hughes
Trade paperback, $12.95, 102 pp.
ISBN 979-8993244488

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CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR RHYS HUGHES

“If I said he was a Welsh writer who writes as though he has gone to school with the best writing from all over the world, I wonder if my compliment would just sound provincial. Hughes’ style, with all that means, is among the most beautiful I’ve encountered in several years.”— SAMUEL DELANY

“Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet’s literature. As well as being drunk on language and wild imagery, he is also sober on the essentials of thought. He has something of Mervyn Peake’s glorious invention, something of John Cowper Powys’s contemplative, almost disdainful existentialism, a sensuality, a relish, an addiction to the delicious. He’s as tricky as his own characters, he toys with convention, he makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible and the comic hints at subtle pain. Few living fictioneers approach this chef’s sardonic confections, certainly not in English.” — MICHAEL MOORCOCK

“A dazzling disintegration of the reality principle. A rite of passage to the greater world beyond common sense. Raises the bar on profundity and sets a comic standard for the tragic limits of our human experience. Like Beckett on nitrous oxide. Like Kafka with a brighter sense of humour.” — A.A. ATTANASIO

“It’s a crime that Rhys Hughes is not as widely known as Italo Calvino and other writers of that stature. Brilliantly written and conceived, Hughes’ fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumphantly parades across all bestseller lists.” — JEFF VANDERMEER

“Hughes’ similarity to Spike Milligan runs deeper than the occasional shared lurch of phrase, for he writes as though he’d been bloodied in the same wars Milligan fought for eight decades: the same up yours melancholia about the malice of the absurd – about the absurdness of the world defined not only as an inherent lack of species-friendly grammar in the convulsion of the real, but also a sense that anyone who acts as though he believes what he is told by our Masters will almost necessarily inflict pain on others.” — JOHN CLUTE

“What do I like about Rhys Hughes’s work? Fun. Hughes sees and precipitates in words the latent humour in almost anything. Ranging from what our culture considers pleasing and smilingly ridiculous to horrors that have to be laughed at if they are faceable at all, Hughes is a laughing observer, both inside and outside. With Hughes you get humour that is white, various shades of grey, black – and I don’t know why humour cannot be characterized by other colours. I am also enormously impressed by Hughes’s stylistic brilliance. The richness of language, the occasional Cambrianisms, the inexhaustible array of puns, weird metaphors that form the point of a story. And I envy him his netted imagination. As a man who sees connections where others do not, he offers enough ideas, if parcelled out, to fill a catalogue of fantasy for a generation of writers.” — E.F. BLEILER

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Also Available from Black Scat:

Rhys Hughes saddles up and blasts his way across the vast plains — kickin’ up trouble in this hog-wild collection of Western Weirdness. Using various forms (short stories a play, lonesome poems — even a garsh-dang essay!), he roasts the genre and serves up some hearty, avant-garde grub — fresh as a dew-dappled Texas rose.

Dive in for some “Blazing tales of cowpoke lit!”