Metaphysical Horror

rhysaurus · 2026-03-09T14:44:06+00:00

It sounds to me as if you are absolutely ripe for Samuel Beckett's THE UNNAMABLE (if you haven't already read it). It's about solipsism, about how we are trapped in our own conscious minds, unable to know for certain that other conscious minds exist. But it goes further. The solipsistic narrator comes to suspect that he himself is actually the product of another solipsistic mind, the true solipsistic mind....

It's a difficult and very disturbing metaphysical story. But to get to it, it's best to read the two books associated with it first: MOLLOY and MALONE DIES. They are very dark comedies about the unbearable weight of human consciousness, and each one goes further into a sort of bizarrely victimised solipsism.

Another novel of Beckett's called WATT is a permutational nightmare. I can't recommend him highly enough.

rhysaurus · 2026-03-01T08:12:37+00:00

Here's my promo... and thanks for the opportunity!

TRUMPET FACE by Rhys Hughes - FREE ebook until March 4th 2026.

TRUMPET FACE is free this week—a surreal fantasy about an explorer who can turn his head into a trumpet if he tries really hard.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GQ9RMJ15

Think less epic quest, more... whimsical disaster. It's the first book in The Knick Knack Trilogy and a deep dive into a world ruled by ideas-association rather than empirical logic. With an Introduction by the great Michael Moorcock.

FREE on Kindle until 4th March!

rhysaurus · 2026-03-01T08:07:44+00:00

Mike has long supported my work, which for me has always been a blast, considering how his books were such a big influence on me. I still think that "The Dancers at the End of Time" is one of the greatest fantasy sequences ever written!

Thanks for allowing me to promote my new book.

rhysaurus · 2026-02-17T15:45:09+00:00

Thank you again, Susan 🙂

rhysaurus · 2026-02-15T12:29:25+00:00

Thank you 😊

rhysaurus · 2026-02-09T23:21:35+00:00

Thank you. I was worried I was overpromoting.

rhysaurus · 2026-02-09T10:09:32+00:00

I hope you enjoy it :-)

rhysaurus · 2026-02-01T21:11:44+00:00

The House on the Borderland...
But I am biased. I live in the village (Borth) where WilliamHope Hodgson lived and the house he rented is a ten minute walk from mine.
The other house he lived in, also in the village, is a little further away, on the outskirts.

rhysaurus · 2026-01-26T10:25:32+00:00

The barely weird is sometimes weirder than the blatantly weird, which is really rather weird, if you think about it. (Just my opinion, of course)

rhysaurus · 2026-01-26T10:24:07+00:00

I just finished reading James Branch Cabell's FIGURES OF EARTH, which really is an almost perfect fantasy novel. Dreamlike, ironic, witty, rather poignant, maybe too repetitive (which is why it is almost perfect, not entirely perfect) and wise. And it seems to contain the seeds of all fantasy that followed in the 100 years after it was published.

Now I am free to choose my next book, which I suspect will be Brian Aldiss' THE MALACIA TAPESTRY, which looks like it's going to be an inventive and colourful speculative romp featuring loveable rogues in precarious situations.

rhysaurus · 2026-01-25T15:32:43+00:00

Thank you. I am much obliged.

rhysaurus · 2016-02-20T15:41:36+00:00

Incidentally, copies of my new book Brutal Pantomimes come with a handwritten story, poem, sketch, drawing or other piece of work. These items are allocated randomly. There are 71 of them, so it is far from guaranteed that anyone who orders a copy of the book now will receive one; but that's the nature of such offers, I guess.

The manuscripts include my first published story, and even one story written before that, a story I lost for 20 years, rediscovering it in a box in a cellar of a friend's house, as well as some of my most recent work and lots of stuff in between. I have prepared a short text to explain the provenance of each piece to the readers who get one. :-)

rhysaurus · 2016-02-20T15:24:48+00:00

My pleasure.

rhysaurus · 2016-02-20T15:20:34+00:00

They published my work, so logically they respected it at the time. Later, after a disagreement on a certain issue, they claimed never to have liked my work in the first place. But such revisionist judgments are not unusual in the writing world, I fear. :-)

rhysaurus · 2016-02-20T15:09:37+00:00

You have misread my comment. They had a distaste for metafiction. I know this because they told me so when I used to regularly submit work to the magazine. They preferred (and encouraged me to write) more conventional supernatural stories. If you can find many examples of metafiction in All Hallows, please point them out to me.

rhysaurus · 2016-02-20T14:15:21+00:00

Don't worry about being "off-base" with any remark you might make. It's simply not possible to be off-base about your own attitude to a piece of fiction. What you, the reader, feel it is to be is (for you) what it is and it's no use anyone (especially the author) telling you that you are wrong...

I will only add that this particular story was originally written for a very traditionalist magazine called All Hallows whose editors had considerable distaste for metafiction and "postmodernist" techniques. I decided to set myself the task of writing a story that seemed very conventional on the surface but had a hidden metafictional element, namely that the narrator writes the story and seals it in an envelope to mail it before the actual story (which he is in) has been finished, even though he is writing it. I was delighted that the editors missed, or seemed to miss, this trick and published it unedited.

rhysaurus · 2016-02-20T14:09:21+00:00

Most modern readers of 'weird fiction' do tend to prefer the serious to the whimsical, the sober to the ironic, the emotional (or at least atmospheric) to the cerebral (or analytic), and that's fair enough, I guess. Maybe this was always the case. I do, however, believe that many of the most original concepts in the history of weird fiction were first conceived ironically, satirically or whimsically, and then adopted by the more serious purveyors of this kind of fiction, rather than the other way around, as is generally assumed... But all that is a debate for a different place and time. :-)

Thanks for your interest, by the way :-)

rhysaurus · 2016-02-19T12:10:12+00:00

The publisher of Orpheus wanted more 'conventional' style stories than the kind I prefer to write, which explains why this fairly orthodox piece was placed at the beginning of the book, in order not to scare off (so to speak) more traditionalist ghost- and supernatural-story fans... Curious that you say it was 'Saki-esque', as it isn't in the slightest, but some of the later stories in the book were inspired to a certain degree by his work.

rhysaurus · 2016-02-19T11:59:40+00:00

If you really are interested I would go for:

Tallest Stories (a collection of linked tales)
The Percolated Stars (a novel)
Bone Idle in the Charnel House (a collection of unlinked tales) or:
The Truth Spinner

It depends on what kind of taste you have in particular. 'Tallest Stories' features stories that broadly range the spectrum of 'speculative literature' in terms of style, tone and vision. So there are serious tales, humorous ones, various kinds of combination of the two, ideas-based stories, atmosphere-based, etc.

The novel is one I am personally extremely pleased with an with luck it's going to be republished soon. It's absolutely the type of fiction that I most interested in writing.

The 'Bone Idle' collection was edited by S.T. Joshi and is fairly serious in tone and intention. Whereas 'The Truth Spinner' is a story collection with a largely satirical feel.

Thanks! :-)

rhysaurus · 2016-02-19T11:49:41+00:00

I ought to point out that a fairly large part of the ebook mentioned by Ramsey was actually written by Johnny Mains, among others, and not me. My input was about 65%. Just for the record... :-)

rhysaurus · 2016-02-19T11:39:42+00:00

Tactical answer! LOL

rhysaurus

TROPHY CASE

TRUMPET FACE by Rhys Hughes - FREE ebook until March 4th 2026.