Link Arms with Toads! (30 page)

I call this THE MOLECULAR THEORY OF FICTION and it’s central to my aforementioned literary movement. Shame therefore that the name of the movement is a portmanteau word consisting of two elements stuck (rather than blended) together. No matter! I’m still happy with it; and in the past I found it even more pleasing than I do now. Indeed, not long after coining the term ‘romanti-cynical’ I created a manifesto, as daydreaming founders are prone to do, that set out the broad aims of the movement. I kept them less dogmatic than I might have done, for the dogmas of today often turn into the caterwauls of tomorrow, and futuristic mockery is hard to join in when you are still living in the present.

So yes, I wrote a “Romanti-Cynical Manifesto”.

The problem is that I have lost it…

I don’t have a copy anywhere, even though I’ve hunted high, low and in-between for one, in boxes, on discs, under beds and elsewhere. I have attempted to trawl my memory to recover the general sense, but that’s no substitute for the real thing. Might it still exist somewhere? I think I sent copies to various people: Des Lewis, Mark Samuels, the musician David Tibet (who covered the strange Comus song ‘Diana’ with his Current 93 project) and Ray Russell too, of course; but it’s unlikely they preserved them. Why should they? If someone sent me such a manifesto I’d regard it as a useful way of starting a driftwood fire on the beach, although paper aeroplanes are also an attractive option.

But can I remember any of its contents at all?

Well, I’m sure it made the claim that the ‘absurd’ was a truer reflection of our universe than the ‘real’; that the convulsions of laughter are spasms of clandestine despair; that nothing is certain, not even this statement; that the type of fiction I most desperately yearn to write and read is one that simultaneously takes itself very seriously and mocks itself, with one foot in sober existential horror, one in ironic satire, one in progressive science fiction, one in nostalgic utopian fancies, one in magic, one in naivety, one in cunning, one in fable, one in rationality… with the crucial point being that the total number of these feet must always be
startlingly
greater than feasible. Even a millipede couldn’t manage so many! I also recall ending my manifesto with a singular injunction:

“
Link arms with toads!”

Why the devil not? The camaraderie of the image is as pleasing as that of a fox in pilot’s goggles banking a Sopwith Camel into a roll, or that of a stoat in the reinforced suit of a deep-sea diver surfacing from the wreck of an old Spanish treasure galleon. This urge of mine to absurdify animals is scarcely understandable in psychological terms, but as literary symbols they make perfect sense. To me at least.

Is that all? Anything else?

Indeed. As spiritual and aesthetic godparents and icons of romanti-cynicism, I seem to recall citing Lucian, Apuleius, Rabelais,
Orlando Furioso
, Voltaire’s
Candide
, Hoffman,
The Castle of Otranto
, Beckford’s
Vathek
, Jan Potocki’s
Manuscript Found in Saragossa
, the arabesques of Poe (rather than his grotesques), Anatole France, Max Beerbohm, Saki, Akutagawa, Blaise Cendrars, Flann O’Brien, Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian, the wry fantasies of James Branch Cabell, Italo Calvino and Karel Čapek, the irony-saturated stories of Donald Barthelme, and the work of the more original and outré science-fiction writers of the 1960s, such as Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Brian Aldiss, Tom Disch, John Sladek and Josef Nesvadba. Into this last category I most certainly would have inserted Cordwainer Smith if I had known about him at the time, but not R.A. Lafferty, for even though he is the writer I am most often compared to, I still haven’t read any of his books.

I doubt this helps. And yet…

Onwards, forever onwards! Link Arms with Toads!

Publishing History

The Troubadours of Perception --
Whispers of Wickedness
, Autumn 2003

Number 13 and a Half --
Ghosts & Scholars #23

The Taste of the Moon --
Roadworks #6
, 1999

Lunarhampton --
The Third Alternative #12
, 1997

The Expanding Woman -- previously unpublished

All Shapes Are Cretans -- previously unpublished

The Innumerable Chambers of the Heart --
The Skeleton of Contention
(chapbook), 2004

Pity the Pendulum -- previously unpublished

333 and a Third -- previously unpublished

The Candid Slyness of Scurrility Forepaws --
Whispers of Wickedness #11
, 2005

Ye Olde Resignation -- previously unpublished

Castle Cesare --
Bust Down the Door and Eat All the
Chickens #8

The Mirror in the Looking Glass -- previously unpublished

Oh Ho! -- previously unpublished

Loneliness -- previously unpublished

Hell Toupee -- previously unpublished

Inside the Outline -- previously unpublished

Discrepancy -- previously unpublished

Acknowledgements

This collection is a highly representative showcase of what I do, and what I have been doing for the past sixteen or more years. I would therefore like to thank those important people who made it possible. Firstly, myself. Secondly, various lovers, friends and rivals. Thirdly, you, for buying this book. I am much obliged!

My website is at:
http://rhyshughes.blogspot.com

About the author
:

Rhys Hughes was born in 1966 in Cardiff but grew up in the seaside town of Porthcawl. He began writing at an early age but his first publications were chess problems and mathematical puzzles for newspapers. He sold his first short story in 1992 and his first book,
Worming the Harpy
, was published in 1995. Since then he has embarked on a mammoth project of writing exactly 1000 linked ‘items’ of fiction, including novels, to form a gigantic story cycle. Many of these ‘items’ have appeared in journals and anthologies around the world, and his books have been translated into Spanish, French, Greek, Portuguese, Russian and Serbian. His work has attracted attention for its originality of ideas, ingenuity of plotting and rich playfulness of his language.

The author says, “Because I have experimented with so many different genres, styles and moods, not one of my individual books to date really provides a full overview of what I actually do.
Link Arms With Toads!
is different because it’s a fully representative sampler of my entire body of work and has been designed as a showcase of the new genre I recklessly tried to invent when I was younger. This book is certainly the best entry point to my body of fiction and if you don’t like
Toads!
you can be confident you won’t like my other books, so it’s also the financially wisest choice for any new reader.”

When not in the process of working, sleeping or scheming, Mr Hughes amuses himself with one of his many hobbies. He enjoys the world in general. He likes to travel around it, listening to its music, eating its food and conversing with its people. He is a keen amateur astronomer and a dismal piano player. He is enthralled with the twin ideas of designing and flying his own airship and setting up an inexpensive but acclaimed vegetarian restaurant inside an extinct volcano. He is resigned to the fact he will probably never convey guests to that restaurant in that airship. Not in his lifetime. Maybe he will do something else equally satisfactory and strange instead.

Other Books by the Same Author (as opposed to similar books by other authors):

* Worming the Harpy

* Eyelidiad

* Rawhead & Bloody Bones

* The Smell of Telescopes

* Stories from a Lost Anthology

* Nowhere Near Milk Wood

* Journeys Beyond Advice

* The Percolated Stars

* A New Universal History of Infamy

* At the Molehills of Madness

* Sereia de Curitiba

* The Crystal Cosmos

* The Less Lonely Planet

* The Postmodern Mariner

* Engelbrecht Again!

* Mister Gum

* Twisthorn Bellow

* The Coandă Effect

Also from Chômu Press
:

Looking for something else to read? Want a book that will wake you up, not put you to sleep?

“
Remember You’re a One-Ball!”

By Quentin S. Crisp

I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like

By Justin Isis

Revenants

By Daniel Mills

The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Chi
l
dren

By Brendan Connell

Nemonymous Night

By D.F. Lewis

For more information about these books and others, please visit:
http://chomupress.com/

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