Atomic Fez Publishing discussion

Twisthorn Bellow
Tea or coffee?
Coffee always. I am a huge fan of tea, I can't live without tea, but I'm an even bigger fan of coffee. Too much coffee is one of my few vices. I used to drink 10 cups a day at least, then I cut down to one or two, for health reasons, now it has gone back up to five per day. And yet I don't want to disparage tea. I'm a tea enthusiast. But coffee is better. The best coffee in Europe seems to be found in Portugal. Here's a short piece I wrote on the very subject: http://postmodernmariner.blogspot.com...

City mouse or country mouse?
Country mouse. The urban environment isn't the environment I feel most comfortable with. I'm more at ease in a rural setting. I don't like being too far inland, though. I like the sea. A few years ago I lived in a fairly remote region of Spain, in the Alpujarras, on an organic farm in a narrow valley. It wasn't really a proper "farm," it was more of a hippy commune, the only crops were figs and marijuana, but it was far from the nearest town and I loved that! Eventually after a few months I began to feel uneasy. I needed a glimpse of the sea. I had to climb a nearby mountain just to be able to look over the other mountains in the range and see the Mediterranean. I did this at night when the full moon was shining on the sea. Magnificent! Then I was able to go back to the narrow valley with peace of mind. But anyway ... country mouse it is! In fact, to be completely honest, I'm more of a toucan than a mouse.

Wine or beer?
Another difficult choice! I like both. When I was younger I didn't realise that the beer we had in Wales wasn't very good. Good stuff can be found here, but you have to make a special effort to look for it. Anyway, it gave me the impression that beer wasn't such a great drink, so I switched to wine. But when I started travelling, I often ended up in countries with great beers, and then I finally understood what true beer really can be. The Czech Republic is probably the best place to go for amazing beers. These days I'm back in Wales, so I tend to drink wine, red wine. Or rum. My favourite spirit is rum, dark rum, but I don't drink that too often. I can't stand whisky or most other spirits.

Jazz or blues?
Jazz. Absolutely. I can appreciate the blues, the old Delta Blues in particular, and I like "African Blues" even more, that weird music from Mali and Senegal that sounds almost like very ancient Delta Blues, but I can't listen to it for long periods. Jazz, on the other hand, takes me away to another place and I'm happy to linger there for hours. I like most kinds of jazz, hot, cool and weird, only the freakiest free jazz frazzles my mind too much. I even like fusion jazz if it's done by bands who know what they are doing, like Weather Report, or some of Chick Corea's combos, or Herbie Hancock at his best, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And there's Latin Jazz too, of course, especially the bossanova Brazilian style.

Cats or dogs?
Cats. I've got nothing against dogs, but I don't have too much for them either. Cats are excellent to watch. I read somewhere that there's a parasite that gets into the brains of mice and makes them unafraid of cats, in fact it forces the mice to approach the cats, and the parasite does this deliberately because it wants the cat to eat the mouse so it can get into the cat's brain. It turns the mouse into a cat-loving zombie. There was some speculation about whether humans who dote on cats have the same parasite in their brains. I think this is a reasonable theory. Why else should we love such selfish creatures? But we do. And I do.

How do you feel about snails?
I'm not overjoyed to see them, but I don't resent them either. I love lettuce and other salad vegetables and snails do too, which makes them rivals, I suppose, but I don't eradicate them on account of that. If I went around eradicating all my rivals at everything, I'd have to go around pouring salt on other writers, and I can't afford that much salt.

How old were you when you got your first library card?
I had a children's library card. I can't remember when I first got that, but I'll guess I was about 4. I remember when I was about 9 I wanted to take out Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but I was told that it was an adult book and that I would have to wait until I was 14. Five years! That seemed like a lifetime, so I protested that I was old enough in my mind to read it. They said, OK you can take it out but only if you can pronounce the title absolutely correctly. I said, "Doctor Jek-ull..." and they said, "No, no, no! It's Doctor Jee-kill..." so I never got the book. When I finally read it, thirty years later, I was disappointed. I love Stevenson but it's not one of his best, by any means!

What's the first book you remember reading on your own?
Almost certainly a book about dinosaurs, but I can't remember the title or the author. I can see it vividly in my mind. It was my favourite for years! That book has coloured my conceptions about dinosaurs ever since. For instance I still think that Ankylosaurus was orange, even though there's no evidence at all for that.... The first adult fiction book I tried to read was Inter Ice Age 4 by Kobo Abe, when I was 8, but I gave up on it because I didn't understand it. The first adult fiction book I successfully read was The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells and I read that the following year. Then I went on a Wells splurge and read The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau and The First Men in the Moon before running out of steam. I didn't attempt an adult novel again until I was 14, when I read Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and that was the book that got me back into reading. I have been reading voraciously ever since..

What's the book you've reread most often (and why do you keep rereading it)?
There are very few books I have read twice and only a handful I have read three times. I suspect that I will always return to the "Qfwfq" stories of Italo Calvino, simply because for my taste they are perfect. They are funny, wise, whimsical, profound, impossible, implausible and yet believable. Certainly they are the finest fictions I have ever encountered. The Complete Cosmicomics is almost certainly my favourite work of literature. I have only read it twice so far, but I imagine I'll re-read it many times in the years and decades to come. I can't believe I'll ever go off it.

Who's the author/what's the book/to whom/with which you'd most like Twisthorn Bellow to be compared?
Twisthorn Bellow is probably a cross between Michael Moorcock, Mike Mignola and Donald Barthelme, in the sense that it's ironic fantasy but the irony isn't there to diminish the fantasy: it's there to expand it. I mean that although it's a comedy and a satire, the satire isn't against the fantasy element, but for the fantasy element. It's positive satire rather than negative satire. I wanted to write something that was very strange, very daft, but also logical and precise. The writers I have mentioned above were able to do that, to make the odd seem rational, and the daft appear sensible, and vice versa.

What's the one thing you'd like to say to say to someone reading Twisthorn Bellow?
You will encounter ideas that you probably won't find anywhere else. And it's full of monsters. And ghosts. And robots. And wordplay and unusual plot devices.

Why do you write?
I have a mind that froths with ideas all the time. The ideas won't stop bubbling up, effervescing into my consciousness. I don't know where they bubble up from, but if I don't fix them in stories the bubbles will probably destroy my mind. I get dozens of ideas every week. There's no way to switch them off. I write to save my sanity and to carpet the world with bubbles, the bubbles of my mind.

For those who share his taste in humour and thoughtful prose, Rhys Hughes is one of those authors it's easy to become obsessed with. Sadly, it can sometimes require an obsession in order to locate a large part of his work, as it almost exclusively comes from tiny publishing houses. With a combination of a quote from Mike Mignola and a recently acquired distribution deal, it's hoped that Twisthorn Bellow will find Mr. Hughes the wider audience he deserves.

When I compared books with Rhys here on Goodreads I was terribly disappointed to discover we had none in common. I suspect that's because he hasn't entered everything he's read. I look forward to reading some of his work. Daft and precise are rarely used to describe the same thing, after all. ;)