To The Last Page

Lost Boys starts out like a Lord of the Flies examination of adolescent mindset and the dynamic between groups of middle-class boys who have come into contact with a darker side of the world and deep primitive impulses. It’s superbly compelling and sinister, establishing a slightly unsettling supernatural tone when the boys, many of them sons of foreign diplomats and high-profile international businessmen, start to disappear, lured away from their comfortable lives by a recurrent common dream of a young foreign boy. An investigator soon identifies the connections between the disappearances but the conclusions and the scale of the problem are too disturbing to contemplate. Lost Boys then takes on a J.G. Ballard tone, examining and relating the destruction of the middle-class Western family values and a generation exposed to increasing levels of violence, terrorism and wars, not only in video-games and on television, but in the whole nature of the turbulent state of world affairs. Thes...

Republished, reworked and expanded on from its original scarcely distributed 1970 publication Santana Morning , Mike Dolan's stories in this new edition are more classical in form than most of the modern slipstream publications from Elastic Press, but the connections are evident, and beneath the borderline horror and science fiction conventions lie real human concerns about love, communication, relationships and the impact of a changing world on people.  Each story is perfectly formed and standalone, but certain themes stand out, expanded on or examined from new angles, some showing traces of their origins over the book's long genesis into its current form, a testament to the author's determination to present them in whatever format necessary to see their publication. Hence there are racy adult stories, pulp fiction and conventional ventures into time travel, but above all what stands out is the belief in the power of ideas, imagination, dreams and storytelling itself to tr...

I don’t know about eternal damnation, but terminal boredom is certainly a possibility for anyone reading these pages. Maldición eterna a quien lea estas páginas is written entirely as a series of dialogues between two men – and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a method often used by Puig, extensively and effectively in Kiss of the Spiderwoman , and like that novel there is an intriguing relationship that develops between two men of different walks of life. In Maldición eterna , an old man in exile from political persecution in Argentina, Ramirez, recuperating in a New York hospital with shattered memories of the past, encounters and forms a friendship with a New York carriage driver, Larry, who has been hired to show him around the city. Although a driver, Larry is an educated man, but he also keeps his troubled past hidden or wrapped in a web of falsification. After the initial set-up however, the novel’s dialogues become rather baffling, some of them hallucinated by the sick ol...