TONY BLACK
Edinburgh’s Gus Dury is back ... and so are his troubles. After swearing off the drink and reviving his flagging writing career on a webzine, Dury stumbles across a missing person’s case that he can't say no to. He thinks the job’s a slam-dunk—one missing employee, one decent-sized paycheck—but, when he’s woken by police and told the man he’d just found has been tortured to death, Dury realises he's already over his head. Warring drug gangs, corrupt cops and the siren’s call of drink all want to see Dury wrecked.
BARRY GRAHAM
“Before explores memories, both self-created and real, of a woman the narrator knew for a short time, who later died unexpectedly. He seeks to find her in visions, lost words, lonely spaces. While giving the reader a keyhole view of life’s underbelly, Graham manages to imbue the scene with a poignancy that is slowly hypnotic and lingers long after closing the book... Though there are certainly Tarantino-or even Wenders-like moments in the book, Graham has a visual style and writerly voice that are all his own: timely, urban, and powerful.”— Booklist
Francoise was “improbably lovely,” the type of character you see in movies. Of course, her life was a life, not a movie. But as the narrator, Barry (a writer who may or may not be the author), stunned by the news of her death, tells “her” story, he cannot find the reality of his friend in the dark, romantic film that flickers in his mind. As he searches for Francoise in a nightmare cityscape of desperate sex and casual violence, he finds only reflections of his own loss.
In haunting, cinematic prose, Before examines the impermanence of human connection and probes the arcane links between seemingly unrelated experiences.
AN AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Set in the Scottish Third World hidden inside the First, this novel takes a savagely uncompromising and unsentimental look at the true nature of love and friendship in a city that, like its troubled characters, has lost all its old certainties.
London-based writer and single father Kevin Previn returns to his native Glasgow after an absence of ten years, his homecoming prompted by the death of a friend and mentor, junkie writer Mike Illingworth, author of The Book of Man.
Previn believes he’s trawling the streets of Glasgow in order to make sense of his old friend’s troubled life and death—but he’s on a personal journey, a quest to understand his own childhood brutalities, mental breakdown and lost loves, and the terrifying control the state can exert over the individual. Past and present become one as Previn discovers what he has really left behind.
It’s an opportunity a journalist and ex-boxer with a complicated personal life can’t turn down—joining the camp of the world title challenger, Ricky Mallon, in the run-up to the championship fight. For Billy Piers it’s more than work, it’s an escape from Karen, loving and beautiful but disturbed, and unaware of what he’s going through — that he’s in love with someone else, someone who can’t decide who she’s in love with at all.
Set in the urban wastelands of Scotland in the 1980s, The Champion’s New Clothes is about love and friendship, loneliness and violence, from the brutality of the boxing ring to the cruelty that goes hand in hand with love. As Ricky trains for the hardest fight of his life, Billy faces the hardest decision of his. Both men are driven by desire, and both men come to realize that nothing is ever what it seems, and that it is desire that creates the cruellest illusions of all. With wit and acute honesty, The Champion’s New Clothes warns: Beware of what you want. You might get it.
“A master.” — The Times
In this searing collection of stories, people try in various ways to escape the violence and depravity of urban Scotland. A brutalised child rescues his sister in the only way he can imagine. An alienated, drug-addicted boxer fights to live and then lives to fight. A family man slashes faces for money. Lovers, killers, the desperate and the mad search for meaning, or someone to hold, or something to eat, in some of the meanest streets ever rendered in fiction.
Andy Saunders knows how to survive. He survived all alone in Los Angeles as a teenager, and he survived in foreign combat zones as a soldier. He survived homelessness on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona, an unforgiving desert metropolis ruled by thugs, assassins, crooked cops, money and hate.
He’s had enough of surviving, and now enjoys life, living with his girlfriend, working as a handyman, teaching martial arts and playing in a punk rock band. But, when a friend falls victim to a hitman, and the police do nothing, Saunders decides to make some inquiries—then finds that he has passed the point of no return, and that the killer is now hunting him. He once again must fight for survival, and the fight will lead him to a truth more awful than anything he has ever known.
The wide open spaces of Arizona turn dark and claustrophobic in this violent, romantic and sexy neo-noir murder mystery of seething cruelty and rationalized evil.
“You might as well take your socks off...because they’ll be knocked off anyway by the writing of Dogo Barry Graham. Little diamonds of Zen blasted into your mushy brain to pry your eyelids open.”
— Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
No, this book doesn’t advocate suicide—it teaches something that takes a lot more courage: that we are always enlightened, and must take responsibility for realizing our enlightenment. It invites us to meet life on its own terms, wherever we are, whoever we are, right now, killing our false sense of self by seeing through it to our true nature.
This is Zen for real life, in the world of relationships, jobs, dirty dishes, teacups and toilets. Zen master Dogo Barry Graham eschews traditional institutions and dogmas and insists instead that we trust in ourselves. Zen is not a system of belief, or a theory about the meaning of life. It is beyond philosophy, beyond religion. It is more than mindfulness. It is true peace, true happiness, the gateless gate to freedom from suffering. The Buddha’s way of wisdom, compassion and enlightenment leads us home to our own heart.
— Tricycle: The Buddhist Review
No, this book doesn’t advocate suicide—it teaches something that takes a lot more courage: that we are always enlightened, and must take responsibility for realizing our enlightenment. It invites us to meet life on its own terms, wherever we are, whoever we are, right now, killing our false sense of self by seeing through it to our true nature.
This is Zen for real life, in the world of relationships, jobs, dirty dishes, teacups and toilets. Zen master Dogo Barry Graham eschews traditional institutions and dogmas and insists instead that we trust in ourselves. Zen is not a system of belief, or a theory about the meaning of life. It is beyond philosophy, beyond religion. It is more than mindfulness. It is true peace, true happiness, the gateless gate to freedom from suffering. The Buddha’s way of wisdom, compassion and enlightenment leads us home to our own heart.
Food on the plate,
tea in the cup—
say your thanks.
Say it to the sunlight,
say it to the rain.
Barry Graham’s second book of poetry may be read as a collection of haiku and tanka, or as one long Zen poem.
We live with so much pain and sadness, so much uncertainty and fear—but, if we understand the truth about reality, it doesn’t have to be a problem. Zen practice isn’t about improving yourself, or otherwise changing yourself—or, least of all, finding yourself. It’s about no longer identifying with the self, the personality, your story of who you think you are. It’s about stripping such delusions away, meeting life as it is without adding anything extra, and awakening to your enlightened nature. And that’s what this short book—with some chapters only a couple sentences long—does.
Although Zen has been described as “a special transmission outside the scriptures, and not dependent on words,” it has produced more written words than any other Buddhist tradition, more than most people can hope to read in a lifetime. The Buddha Dharma has been buried under words, ideas, beliefs and dogma. This book is an antidote.
“Bram Stoker... M.R. James... Stephen King... Now there is Barry Graham.”
— Scottish Field
The Bogey Man’s sinister chant used to scare the wits out of Gary Scott when he was a five-year-old, growing up in the worst part of Glasgow. But now, nearly twenty years later, he’s an experienced, and, he likes to think, hard-nosed journalist. He’s far too preoccupied with real life in all its seedy variety to worry about imaginary horrors. So why does he keep being drawn back to the dark closes and crumbling tower blocks of Maryhill?
A serial killer is at work there, killing animals and humans in an impossible and monstrous way. As one bizarre and grisly event succeeds another, as the deaths begin to pile up, Gary realises that he himself is, somehow, inextricably involved. Then, one night, the Bogey Man arrives under his window.
“This is how to write noir. Brilliant.” —Allan Guthrie, author of Edgar-nominated Kiss Her Goodbye
Mark Sharpton is a modern outlaw. Like many people nowadays, he’s had to take a second job to make ends meet. When not performing as a lounge musician, he commits armed robberies.
It’s all crime all the time in Phoenix, Arizona.
When Mark robs a joint owned by a mafia boss, a witness gets a look at his face. Then he falls in obsessive lust with her, and the mob and the cops team up to get rid of him, aided by the husband of one of his casual sex partners...
One for My Baby is a neo-noir tale of murder, romance, sex and free enterprise in the contemporary American Dream.
Scumbo is a Scottish singer and songwriter who’s half-rock star and half-monk. With too much sex, too little love and no money, this punk troubadour searches for a way to live life on his own terms.
In addition to the title novella, this book contains eight dark, funny and compassionate stories of love, friendship, sex and death, set in the urban jungles of Europe and the U.S.A. in the early 1990s. In this world of talking mailboxes, poverty, flowers, guitars, loneliness, beauty and sadness, things are never as they seem—and nor are they otherwise.
Barry Graham’s terse, resonant poems of urban Zen have been internationally published in anthologies and magazines, and broadcast on BBC radio. This, however, is the first book-length collection of his poetry.
This volume brings together his best poems of two decades, ranging from haiku and tanka to love poems and murder ballads.
Laura Ponto wouldn’t mind watching Frank del Rio being strapped to the executioner’s gurney, even if her job is to find mitigating evidence in death penalty cases. Frank’s not a client, but a long time ago he did unspeakable things to children—and Laura was one of them.
Now Frank is being released on parole, and they will both learn that their lives are still intertwined. Their story will end in a place even darker than it began in a shattering noir novel of suspense, sex, violence, love and death in the urban desert of Phoenix, Arizona.
Barry Graham’s horror fiction has earned him comparisons with Bram Stoker, M.R. James and Stephen King, while his neo-noir fiction has been compared to that of James M. Cain, Richard Stark, David Goodis, Quentin Tarantino and Jim Thompson.
In this collection of essays examining what Graham contends are the two most important and enduring genres, he combines literary analysis with memoir, and shows us that the monsters we imagine lurking in the shadows are all too real. In doing so, he remembers the significance of horror to a child in a Glasgow slum, and discusses artists including Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Robert Mitchum, Paul Schrader, Robert Bresson, George Pelecanos and David Goodis, and books and films including The Exorcist, The Moon of the Wolf, The Conversation and The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
He considers crime fiction as a Marxist art form, and, while sitting in a Scottish courtroom, observing a trial for attempted murder, he realises he has a met a werewolf.
This unclassifiable hybrid of harsh autobiography and hard reporting opens with an alienated Barry Graham arriving in Phoenix, Arizona, from his native Scotland in 1995. Plunging into chaotic relationships and empty sexual encounters, he also witnesses two executions and investigates Joe Arpaio, the corrupt and brutal Sheriff of Maricopa County. He investigates the deaths of unarmed young Latino men at the guns of cops, rides along with the Phoenix Gang Enforcement Unit, reports on the criminal trial of Governor Fife Symington, visits and revisits the city’s ghosts and legends, and finds refuge and healing in writing and in the practice of Zen.
Graham has staked out the Southwest as his territory, and written about it in a way that no one else has. His is not the Southwest of scenic natural wonders, petroglyphs and ancient Indian civilizations juxtaposed with modern spiritual seekers. His is the Southwest as gritty emblem of 21st Century America, of urban blight and the dispossessed, of the people left behind.
This unclassifiable hybrid of harsh autobiography and hard reporting opens with an alienated Barry Graham arriving in Phoenix, Arizona, from his native Scotland in 1995. Plunging into chaotic relationships and empty sexual encounters, he also witnesses two executions and investigates Joe Arpaio, the corrupt and brutal Sheriff of Maricopa County. He investigates the deaths of unarmed young Latino men at the guns of cops, rides along with the Phoenix Gang Enforcement Unit, reports on the criminal trial of Governor Fife Symington, visits and revisits the city’s ghosts and legends, and finds refuge and healing in writing and in the practice of Zen.
Graham has staked out the Southwest as his territory, and written about it in a way that no one else has. His is not the Southwest of scenic natural wonders, petroglyphs and ancient Indian civilizations juxtaposed with modern spiritual seekers. His is the Southwest as gritty emblem of 21st Century America, of urban blight and the dispossessed, of the people left behind.
They call him The Kid. He’s a killer, a dark legend of the Southwest’s urban badlands, “a child who terrifies adults.” They speak of him in whispers in dive bars near closing time. Some claim to have met him. Others say he doesn’t exist, a phantom blamed for every unsolved act of violence, a ghost who haunts every blood-splattered crime scene.
But he is real. He’s a young man with a love of cooking and reading, an abiding loneliness and an appetite for violence. He is a cipher, a projection of the dreams and nightmares of people ignored by the economic boom… and a modern-day outlaw in search of an ordinary life. Love brings him the chance at a new life in the form of Vanjii, a beautiful, damaged woman. But try as he might to abandon the past, his past won’t abandon him. The Kid fights back in the only way he knows – and sets in motion a tragic sequence of events that lead him to an explosive conclusion shocking in its brutality and tenderness.
BART LESSARD
Shanghaiing—for sailors on leave in Old San Francisco, a risk ever present. For two young sisters sold into vice, a means to survive. Yva and Julie-Marie’s stepfather has tasked them to bring the gospel to the notorious red-light district known as the Barbary Coast. Soon he is kidnapped and the sisters are left to fend for themselves. Thus they turn to crime at the Danse Joyeuse, a saloon and brothel, conspiring to abduct the very customers who would degrade them.
Auction City, 1830—corruption, smuggling, and graft run wild in the federal trade district, and no less so a dread of the unnatural. Gangs of resurrection men have forced Ned Tittle—coward, snitch, and procurer of human teeth—out of business at the gallows. One night he makes the best score of a career: a thousand dollars’ worth of raw material for the denturist. But along the way he becomes a witness and a target for the entire criminal underworld of the young United States—and for something risen up from hell.
Mildred Dephane works the graveyard shift on a hospice ward. For nine years she has slept through the daylight to help people die well. But her newest patient shocks her awake. Failing, helpless, over a hundred years old, he reveals child murders that have gone unpunished for a lifetime. This is the title novella in a collection of stories that defy genre to explore crime, beauty, and horror up close, always with room left for a joke. Here we might meet anyone, or anything, whether gunman, ghost, or giant lobster, and never far from home.
Joaquim Vanderas, degenerate and supreme swordsman, has come to Great Britain, hired by English Royalists to take on the armies of Parliament. He has done so before—years past, in the first outbreak of civil war—and the Roundheads remember his atrocities better than he himself. Taken prisoner, he faces the noose. A surprise development spares him: Charles Stuart is on the run. The Roundheads’ general offers pardon, and Vanderas is only happy to hunt down a king. But on meeting a mysterious Irishwoman he finds that he is not the only pawn among the ranks—nor the most dangerous.
He was hired to repel a fearsome enemy. He was worse. The Thirty Years’ War, 1643—the French have taken the Duchy of Lorraine, and the Saint-Empire of the Austrian Habsburgs is in ruins. But the fighting rages on, and Lemuel Vachon, retainer of the ducal house, will do anything to help his lady, Christine de Guise, escape her fate. Outgunned and outmanned, he hires Joaquim Vanderas, a cruel and degenerate drunkard who is also a professional killer of the highest order.
Vanderas makes good on his infamy, cutting a gruesome path through the dangers that await. But the mercenary also has ideas of his own—and a gift for trouble just as uncanny as his knack with a weapon.
ICY THUG NUTZ
Going to hit someone with a fast food tray covered in feces? Make sure it's not a psycho ex-cop named Murda Killa—a mistake any of us could make, and a valuable life lesson that Magnetz has to learn the hard way, fleeing the aftermath of a prank war gone bad.
What follows is a bloody, breakneck chase through the white-hot streets of Phoenix, Arizona. A juggalo and his young daughter on the run from a crazed killer with a mind for revenge and a truck with his name painted on the side.
Will Magnetz live to see the end of the day and keep his family safe? Probably not, but he’ll need his whole juggalo family to stand even half a chance.
Whoop! Whoop! is a crime story filled with juggalos, crooked cops, a guy named Chainsaw, a dollhouse collector in nothing but tighty whiteys, and a terrifying and pregnant crime boss. A psychopathic thrill ride full of craziness, violence, and suspense, all set to a horrorcore soundtrack (not included).
DAISHIN STEPHENSON
from outside into the cave combines the poetry and visual art of daishin stephenson, writer, painter, photographer, video artist and zen monk.