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Earth in the shallows of the 22nd Century where viable tokamaks have liberated all [well, most].
On the face of things, Slovenia is part of an alliance of predominantly anarcho-communist nations, but in truth it’s been co-opted by Potočnik, a crypto-tyrant with purple eyes. He dumps Sila, his friend Chu, his ex-friend Gašper, the physicist Nakagami, the militant Aleša and five other dissidents on a [prototype] ship and sends them off on a Mission of Progress; to develop a potential base on Mars.
The ship has strict rules: No out-going messages, no inter-crew communication longer than four hours each day, and no entertainment.
Can Sila & co. convince the ships AI to turn the ship round and ram bridge-first into Potočnik’s HQ?
Will Rasputin turn up at some point?
Messy cover above is from me [obviously] while the paperback version is done by the artist chained to my wrist, Soren, over at corpsehaus
This is my attempt at a sci-fi epic with anarcho-communist undertones [or just outright tones, really]. A bit of absurdism thrown in too, mostly to cover my weak science.
You can read the PDF version for free here or buy it for $9 on itch.io, or do both if you’re feeling weirdly altruistic.
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Yes, that mess above is a front cover drawn/scrawled by my own hand [that looks weird on a white background] and, yes, it is a pretty accurate tone-setter for my new experimental novella type thing out today over at Schism Neuronics.
There’s no plot summary cos there’s no plot, only chaos, but it does include the following at some point:
Trek, Phantasm, self-cannibalisation, Bava sci-fi riff, messy Chinese, the colour black, a sketch that started out as Barbara Steele in ‘Nightmare Castle’ and ended up a kind of void princess, a poem merging my anxiety and Hellraiser III, insane Chinese, Trash Lectosign etc.
Sounds like a lot but the whole thing comes in at 100 pages dead on. Even my wife is considering reading it!
Thanks to Gary J. Shipley for all his work publishing this.
You can read the e-book for free as a PDF here.
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A 215,000 word sci-fi megalith that is probably too long for anyone to commit to, but here it is, fully edited and thematically airtight.
Blurb:
Near future Baudrillardian void scape in the costume of a trash sci-fi serial about a Japanese student getting a brain swap and ending up in the gravity well of a fatigued alien puppet master who may or may not be a villain might even be something beyond it.
Big focus on concept of hauntological drift, especially in the non-action scenes.
Big struggle with consistency in terms of staying in the mind of a 22 year old MC with two sets of memories in his head, in a novel that was written on and off for nearly 15 years.
Big influence direct and other from Deleuze and Baudrillard and Kristeva and a dozen more I can’t think of right now, specifically the books of theirs that are available in my local library [Passwords, Fatal Strategies, Anti-Oedipus, The Fold, Cinema I and II, Powers of Horror etc.] Also, Leval and his book on Spanish Collectives during the Revolution, with Dolgoff’s text as a supplement/counterpoint. The novel is not a philosophical text, obviously, but all of the above were filtered in to some extent, mostly during the last four hundred pages.
All chapters are already available in serial form on this site, but this is the director’s cut without a lot of the typos so try this one.
Cover done by me in a trance state.
Too big and costly for a paperback so you can read the PDF for free here or buy the thing on itch.io.
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If it’s not clear from the cover, this is Purple Muon Castle, an attempt at surrealist Gothic.
Here’s the plot:
Wandering around Romania looking for the castle from Masque of the Red Death is pretty much it for Daniella and, even though that castle was probably nothing more than a matte painting, she finds something similar, eerily similar, with a Turkish-looking Prospero and a frustrating Juliana both jabbering non-stop Romanian at her.
Eventually, things settle
doors of Satan are sought after
minds buckle
and the purple above the castle anneals its cage.
Warning: occasional violence + Japanese/Derrida as a weapon
Uses the 1964 Vincent Price version of The Masque of the Red Death as a very rough template for 100 pages or so in the middle, then skewers it.
Should be available around January 2026, here as a free PDF, and on itch.io, if you want to help me out financially.
Purple Muon Castle on itch.io
Purple Muon Castle [free PDF]
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Using Fritz Lang’s Destiny as a very loose anchor, it’s a picaresque haze crawl across Europe, myth + myth simulacrum, best of all discarded worlds, includes: Slovene Quixote, Asaji in morning light, Krsnik, Cantonese, aswang intrigue, spine demons, ferry succubus, ennui, mania, delusion, sex under a Querelle poster.
Starts with a Slovene guy [plus green knife] talking to a locked cabinet and unravels from there…
It’s pretty long, around 700 pages. Started Chapter One in 2014, left it for a long while then came back to it two years ago [2021] and turned it into something much more unwieldy.
Special mention to Soren Häxan and their brilliant Lord of Astiigos, which served as spiritual inspiration for chapters 8-13.
There’s no paperback for this, so you can buy the PDF over on itch.io or read it here for free:
Fritz Lang’s Destiny on itch.io
Fritz Lang’s Destiny [free PDF]
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BLACK HOLES GENERATE NEW FORMS OF DAVID CARUSO
FOLDED, WARM, CAPABLE OF
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GRAVITY LOOKS AND ACTS LIKE A PERV
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Trying to adapt a poem with lines like these into a film script while his city gets absorbed by a fascist state, G. struggles in various ways until an instigator turns up, a guy called Ejaz who claims to be from Planet 9 [or its moon] in the year 2289.
At some point, having salt on you counts as an injury.
Setting: Hong Kong, KRV
Includes: portals, anarcho-communism, Slovenian, Cantonese, hostility, pinballing thoughts on Bakunin, DeBord, Deleuze, Sankara, Garak from DS9, Blake’s 7, the way forward etc.
Similar to Pale Fire, minus the pace.
Calculated to seem uncalculated, except for the more enervating parts.
Desperate.
This one is over on Schism Press – you can read the PDF for free or buy the paperback if that’s more your thing.
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1357: Pedro of Portugal dug up his dead mistress, made her queen, and forced loyal subjects to kiss her hand.
Billy makes a zine that no one reads, and puts it round London. At night he searches for 7 of 9 sex tapes and tries to understand fourth-wave feminist theory. Life stays like this until he gets an e-mail from ‘D’ in Ljubljana, asking him to come to stay. He thinks she’s a nut until she sends him eight grand in spending money. Off he goes, to Ljubljana, to Metelkova, to the outskirts of the city, to a castle on a snowy hill, to Damijana and her typewriter. One of them is a sociopath, can you guess which?
Plot-wise, it’s similar to the Star Trek DS9 episode where Jake Sisko gets yellow energy sucked out of his head by Meg Foster while writing his masterpiece, but this one’s set in Slovenia and is better.
Cover done by the legendary Soren who can be found/hired on corpsehaus
Note: this is a rewrite of an old book I wrote circa 2011 called ‘Ljubljana Witch’ – that one was around 40,000 words, this updated version is bordering on 100,000 so if you’re one of the few who read the original and thought it was a bit short, you’re in luck.
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‘Apparently there are three popular ways to kill yourself in Hong Kong.
Throw yourself off a building.
Hang yourself.
Burn charcoal in a sealed room.’
Oli is skirting the abyss but doesn’t want to die.
He wants to live.
And wants a dead Korean model to live too, even if she doesn’t.
This was one of my first books, 110 pages, mostly autofiction, written at some point in 2009.
Blurb sounds a bit wanky reading it back to myself now, but the key points are still there: endurance + black hole depression. Trying to find a way to keep going when your brain turns against you.
Summation: 1st half of the text, bleak, 2nd half, manic fantastical projection.
Cover by a very young Soren Haxan [think he was around 20 at the time].
There’s no paperback version so here’s a free PDF.
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![Psycho Holosuite Issue 1 by [Oli Johns, Berit Ellingsen, Thomas Stolperer, Frankie Sachs, Tyson Bley, Marc Horne, Soren Melville]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51qUNvEmTIL.jpg)
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Warning: contains strong language and content, so don’t buy if you’re under 16 years old or found Teenwolf dark and troubling.
Again, cover done by Soren at corpsehaus
Issue 1 has:
– fiction about immortality and cinemas by Berit Ellingsen
– Ray Bradbury misquotes
– fiction about a hybrid destined for Mars by Frankie Sachs
– a great cover by Soren Haxan
– adaptation of old German zombie story called ‘Meret’ by Thomas Stolperer
– Fake notes on the Freddy films by me pretending to be Robert Englund
– Chapter 7 of Automatic Assassin by Marc Horne
– Thoughts + half-assed analysis of Masque of the Red Death starring Vincent Price, as well as It Follows and the Town that Dreaded Sundown
– bizarro poem called ‘Barely Riker’ by Tyson Bley
– Other stuff
If you want a physical zine copy then email zizekpress@gmail.com and I’ll see if I can mail one to you [there’s still a few left as of Feb 2021].
At some point there will be an issue 2, not sure when…
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[As Cyan of Mogh]
[I’ll put the links up when they’re available to buy, should be around May/June 2025. No Fairy Fairy Tales is available now on some E-pub platforms, but I want to redo the cover and mess around a bit with the insides, and then put that version on itch.io]
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Sengoku-era Japan was already batshit crazy.
Now it’s got demons.
Japan 1542.
Miho, a young guy on the trail of his mysterious lost love, unwittingly saves the life of Akira, a cynical samurai.
By doing so, he incurs the wrath of a box demon who is too petty to let it go.
After that, it’s mostly downhill.
Includes: purple mist demons, portals, Yuki Onna, other demons, warlords, ashigaru, a try-hard mage, an eight-tailed fox and an endless litany of pathological liars.
Historically, it’s about as accurate as most Hollywood productions. Hopefully, a little better.
Will be available around November 2025, forest kami willing.
Sengoku Demons [Vol. 1] on itch.io
Sengoku Demons [Vol. 1] [free PDF]
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Kāatlandō: a giant continent of dogs, cats, turtles, tigers, hamsters, polar bears and snakes, all trying to get along without killing each other.
Life is tedious working in Knife Factory 7, so when local fighting legend Dog Lee is kidnapped, three workers spring into action and investigate. Or Luco the hamster does. Cha Cha the dog seems more interested in hanging out with DogTV star [and student of Dog Lee], Wu Dog Yan, while Zade the tiger just wants to avoid the police.
Luckily for this story, Luco gets his way and all three of them end up in Bambamboo Park, an area infamous for two things: fighting schools and being murdered. After scoping things out a bit, they zoom in on their number one suspect, Dog Hood, a dog so immoral he once tried to shoot a three year old with an arrow. But is he really the villain behind it all?
Features: tea house brawls, remote castles, secret tunnels, sinister purple mist, class struggle and a polar bear selling cheap VCDs.
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A collection of fairy tales without fairies, featuring sequels to Grimm classics, retellings of foreign legends and more than a few original tales from my own head.
Includes:
The wolf brutalized at the end of Little Red Riding Hood returns with robotic implants, desperate for revenge.
Snow White teeters on the edge of 40.
A Japanese fisherman saves a turtle and is rewarded two-fold: a guided tour of an underwater world and a shotgun marriage with a capricious princess.
Cinderella can’t stop cleaning the palace.
Pirates of the Qing Dynasty era square up against a bold young nut-seller and a talking fox.
The legendary assassins of Alamut haunt a paranoid Sultan.
For every wicked act, a new white hair appears on a young woman’s head.
And many more tales that, if summarised, would make this blurb go on forever.
No Fairy Fairy Tales on itch.io
No Fairy Fairy Tales [free PDF]
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[Others Coming Soon]
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A short[ish] picaresque novel where the picaro is everyone else.
The main character, Noble Wu, tries her best.
She’s a Left Wing Robot
Then a Right Wing Robot
Then Left again
With 80% programmed memory and 20% left to her own future experiences.
She starts in Cuba and travels to:
Venezuela
Hong Kong
Ljubljana
London
LA
Iran
Japan
Mostly in confusion as she deals with different forms of left politics [Marxist-Leninist, Essentialist, Hoxhaist, Chuist, defeatist, Cedric Sneerist] as well as the cynical middle and a faux-syndicalist new right that has somehow trained itself to say ‘trade union’ without retching.
Of course, my own position [Anarcho-Communist, from within the beast] is left untouched and spotless.
I’m gonna make it into a lovely PDF at some point, but until then, here’s the version I serialised here on Psycho H.
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As you can see from the cover, this is 160 pages of handwritten notes that takes the basic premise of Malzberg’s Galaxies and pushes way way beyond.
The sci-fi novella I’m trying to write inside it?
There are two main ones: Planet Rasputin, which I actually have written, and the titular Broken Alys which obviously gets stuck and pulled apart and reconfigured throughout.
It’s ready to go [no editing, it’s handwritten, all mistakes are eternal] but I’ll probably wait until the summer or autumn [2025] to put it out. Don’t wanna cram too many releases into a three month time frame, that would be suicide.
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I tried subbing this to two experimental presses and can’t be bothered subbing to anymore cos just look at the cover, no one’s taking this, and the interior is even more chaotic. Self-cannibalism is how I described it before and it still holds up.
There is a plot, kind of, buried in the vibes/aura. It’s basically 4 quasi-narrative threads intermixed with alt-universe film inserts [and background images/text from my own archived work].
Thread 1: AH-Bot on their brave new moon base.
Thread 2: Bounty Hunters with background bounties.
Thread 3: Ex-human cyborg + nonsense mission creep.
Thread 4: Count Duckula/Prince Prospero hybrid endlessly renovating his castle.
Everything bleeds together/tears apart and patches itself up again, and continues.
Not sure when I’ll put it out, maybe Christmas 2025. It’s tough, I do like Dranonika, I like all my babies, but it’s one of those that is almost unreadable for anyone else.
[Edit, October 2025: Maybe I should make it into a video novella??]
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And then there’s my beautiful Xxun, a tribute to Blake’s 7, my own brand of Anarchism, other brands of Anarchism, Star Trek, pessimism drowning itself in the near and far future, surrealism, absurdism, experimental collage, the journey into the diseased psyche of the night etc.
I won’t say anymore.
I think it’s beautiful and will put it out later this year, perhaps in the winter [2025/26].
PsYChO hOLosUitE [zine] 