The Uneasy

by Andrew Hook

In the Paris from which Andre Breton spun his webs of wild revolutionary art and which Louis Aragon documented through Le Merveilleux Quotidien, Andrew Hook weaves the poignant and erotic story of a British expatriate and her increasingly surreal quest for sexual fulfilment - a beautiful journey from the familiar to a place where sex itself becomes the ultimate unreality.

48 pages, Hardcover

First published March 20, 2019

About the author

Andrew Hook is a European writer who has been published extensively in the independent press since 1994 in a variety of genres, with over 170 short stories in print, including notable appearances in Interzone, Black Static, and several anthologies from PS Publishing and NewCon Press. His fiction has been reprinted in anthologies including Best British Horror 2015 and Best British Short Stories 2020, has been shortlisted for British Fantasy Society awards, and he was longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize in 2020. As editor/publisher, he has won three British Fantasy Society awards and he also has been a judge for the World Fantasy Awards. Most recent publications include several noir crime novels through Head Shot Press, a novella written in collaboration with the legendary San Francisco art collective known as The Residents, and his tenth collection Candescent Blooms (Salt Publishing) which received a 5-star review in The Telegraph and was recently shortlisted for a British Fantasy Society award for best collection.

Andrew is currently working on three separate short story collections.

Reviews

[Karl]

This hardcover is Eibonvale Chapbook Line #8.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE UNEASY
by Andrew Hook

“Nothing was so clear as interpretation.”

What is a pipette? This novella is. A powerful vision of a city and its cafes and pent-up sex. Its muscularity of wordy surrealism made of chicken parts in the mouth. Beast masks. A perfumery, too. Lavender. Leaving, suspensefully, its central synchroni-city of Paris nameless but clear. Our lady Imogen. A spent match mark on Imogen’s stomach followed later by another man’s cigarette mark on a wall. A peeled tattoo. A woman called Imogen on the rut quest in a foreign city; a woman stalking men, who could ever think it! A creative joining of disparate things as in Breton’s surrealism. Bacon and pork, where the former is an artist. Breton and a Briton. London day and Paris night. Hopefully not a spoiler, under a vulva sky, if not a vanilla one, she finds her man. Visits with him, by the end, among other places, the Ile de la Cité explicitly, amid “the sexual power of monuments”, where “Gargoyles tottered” in the heat. “Porcelain cracked”, not pork. “Fenders steamed.” She is finally our lady. “I am shame.” Arguably skewered like meat or even crucified by this weekend’s passion as I write this in real-time. Yet a hindsight prophecy about what just happened a few days ago in the same city, but written about here how long ago? A genius loci, supreme. A pipette squeezed spot on, I feel.

“It is easy to flirt with hindsight.”