Republic of Consciousness Class of 2020: That Lonesome Valley by Melissa Lee-Houghton (Morbid Books)
Between now and 26th February when we announce our shortlist, we’ll be featuring each of the longlisted titles on our new blog page in some way. We are running Q+A’s with the five Republic of Consciousness debutants: publishers who haven’t appeared on our longlists until 2020. Today, we interviewed Morbid Books, publishers of Melissa Lee-Houghton’s That Lonesome Valley.
Who is Morbid Books?
Morbid Books is a publisher founded in 2015, currently building a Temple of Surrealism with a Patreon membership scheme that already has more disciples than Jesus.
Our materials have been written by Jeremy Reed, Stewart Home, and of course Melissa Lee-Houghton. Our visual aesthetics are maintained by Penny Metal and Karolina Grzelak with occasional input from Luke Mayakovsky in Paris. For book covers we frequently commission collages by the artist Shane Wheatcroft. Our bent spoon logo was designed by Ali Prater. The brand ambassador and clothing model is Saul Adamczewski from our favourite band, The Fat White Family, whose tour programme we made. The Temple of Surrealism recently formed its own musical band consisting of Aidan Clough and Marley Mackey from Insecure Men.
The editor and writer of the sex pamphlets, A Void magazine and other material is Comrade Lev Parker.
What was your relationship to books, reading and writing growing up?
Family and origins are not something we discuss.
I just read your first magazine publication A Void Magazine: Issue 1. I liked it, and was entertained. In the editorial, someone (you?) writes that '[p]olitical magazines rarely have good poetry except when Simic or Ashbery are in them, and not a single literary magazine has interesting politics'. Can you elaborate a little bit, and explicate the gap A Void, and by extension, Morbid Books, is operating in?
Like all great ventures, Morbid Books was founded because Lev did not see anything in the current market that pleased or excited him, so he decided to create his own books and magazines that reflected his tastes and interests. What started as a poetry magazine for formal experiments—A Void is named after the Georges Perec novel—has morphed into something much more diverse, and unlike anything else in the Poetry Library. The most recent edition, issue 3, is a porn magazine that blends archive research with original photography, erotic stories, personal ads, satire, cut-ups, interviews and critiques. There isn’t a single poem in it. We don’t see anybody else doing anything like this, apart from maybe what Tom Vague did with VAGUE magazine in the 80s and 90s, but not anymore. We don't regard it as a literary magazine anymore, and our publisher is Surrealist in the sense that we aim to provoke and expand people's consciousness using whatever means necessary.
In terms of the politics, we are not ideologues, although we have published members of the Situationist International, Stewart Home, feminist pornographers Stoya and Itziar Bilbao Urrutia, and we were the first and only magazine to interview Alexander Art, the Russian performance artist who petrol bombed Tate Modern in 2018. (See issue 2). Much of our material is controversial, but we aren’t just interested in shocking people. We regard this as simply a method of challenging people's perceptions as Dada and the Surrealists did.
Melissa Lee-Houghton is brilliant in the tradition of Jean Genet and Kathy Acker, while our other work of fiction, Takeaway by Tommy Hazard, is the monologue of a London ambulance driver ghostwritten by our editor. That is closer in tone to a bloke down the pub talking, although he has extremely unusual perceptions that go above and beyond "realism". These are books that could quite easily be marketed to a mainstream readership, although that isn’t something we are capable of doing ourselves, so we need a bigger publisher to take them from us.
That Lonesome Valley is your second fiction book, written by Melissa Lee-Houghton, an excellent poet. How did you come across her fiction?
A mutual friend sent us an extract, and we got in contact with Melissa fully expecting her to say it had been snapped up by a major or at least a more conventional indie press. We were astonished to learn that in fact, most publishers her agent had sent it to had turned it down because they thought it was brilliant, but too depressing. So we went to Blackburn to meet Melissa, stayed up all night talking, and came away with an agreement that we would publish the first edition and see what happens. Obviously we can’t pay big advances, but authors appreciate working with us because we edit collaboratively, and we don’t have a marketing department interfering with the text or even the cover designs. In short, we allow authors to put out the best version of their work unimpeded by commercial concerns.
You publish your books in limited print-runs, of 500 copies. Why's that?
Although our book are distributed by Central Books, we sell most direct through our website and to Patreon subscribers, so 500 is the maximum number we can handle. If more people want to read them, we would be happy to pass them on to a bigger publisher who can increase the volume.
What does 2020 (and beyond) hold for Morbid Books?
The Temple of Surrealism is releasing a spoken word vinyl album called Music for the Poorly Educated, featuring the leader’s poems and speeches soundtracked by Marley and Aidan from Insecure Men. It will be a joint release with Trashmouth Records, who are releasing some of the finest music of our era. In addition, there will be issue 4 of A Void magazine, at least one novel, some more poetry, a theatre adaptation of Takeaway by Tommy Hazard, and more surrealist merch. Patreon subscribers get all this for just $5 a month.
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Morbid Books is a Temple of Surrealist Literature based in South London. It publishes books in limited editions of up to 500 and an annual magazine, A Void, distributed in the UK and Europe by Central Books.
https://morbidbooks.net/