Brown is the New Black

by David Rix

London after the breakdown ... For Jess and Jay, a former clothes designer and her partner, life has become a matter of scavenging round trying to keep going in a world of hunters and hunted. A world where the city streets have become a battleground with threats from both sides - where the 'survivors' of this disaster have reset themselves several levels downward on the scale of humanity, while the victims have become something else entirely. Based loosely on the paintings of surrealist artist Paul Delvaux, this novella dissects the trope of the zombie plague with the help of clothes design - clothes design inspired by insect camouflage. A portrait of a city filled with naked wanderers, dead railway lines, mouldering bones and almost beautiful silence.

36 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2016

About the author

David Rix is an author, composer, editor, artist and publisher active in the area of Slipstream, Speculative Fiction and Horror – not to mention hints of absurdism, miserablism, naturism and pissed-offism. Contemporary classical music, the seashore, urban underground, railways, rocks and canals. His published books are What the Giants were Saying, the chapbook Brown is the New Black and the novella/story collection Feather, which was shortlisted for the Edge Hill prize. In addition, his works have appeared in various places, the most notable being many of the Strange Tales series of anthologies from Tartarus Press, Monster Book For Girls from Exaggerated Press, Creeping Crawlers from Shadow Publishing, and Marked to Die from Snuggly Books. He also runs and creates the art for Eibonvale Press, which focuses on innovative and unusual new slipstream writing. As an editor, his first anthology Rustblind and Silverbright, a collection of Slipstream stories connected to the railways, was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award in the Best Anthology category. He is currently at work on his first novel A Blast of Hunters and several novellas.

Reviews

[PRINCESS · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Take the dark on its own terms. You can’t fight the dark, you have to embrace it.”
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London is dark and empty. Barely any lights can be seen, barely any human can be observed, and barely presence of any creature can be felt. London became city of ghosts. The city is crashed into violence and insanity. Jay and Jess didn’t know what is going on and why but they have accepted the current situation. While trying to hide from the world, they saw the insect in the dark adjusting its color t the environment around but it wasn’t black. And they thought most insects or animals do the same; adjust their colors and figures with their environments, is that for their safety? If so, then why they should try doing it?
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Human are the most intelligent creatures but they don’t know it until they get in a trouble or a chaos, ideas which comes out under the pressure are brilliant. It is indeed interesting how the brain works. They divide themselves in two separate parties; White and Black, Left and Right, Allies and Axis, Communist and Capitalist, Good and Evil. Each group has its own interest, principles and goals. They fight with whatever they have to proof to world they are right and when they reach to aim their goal they forget for what cause they were fighting.

Brown is definitely the new Black.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

nullimmortalis September 28, 2016 at 3:59 pm Edit
Pages 7 – 21

“‘It’s using fake shadows,’ he said. ‘Breaking up the shape.'”

A gradually involving scenario where you soon become camouflaged as a reader – from yourself, unaware perhaps you’re reading. This is a post-holocaust London scenario, beautifully, yet somehow sparely, evoked, the girl and boy couple failing to exploit black as their own camouflage from the slightly or potentially aggressive (so far) hunters and the noble naked wanderers… moths, bones etc., all seems naturally to fall into this genius-loci of situation and place. Even the potential provision of electricity, that I questioned about to myself earlier, but perhaps I couldn’t find myself to ask. So, it is good to break off as part of a real-time review, to think of these things. Like also asking why scissors are not mentioned when the girl starts making clothes from fabrics in various shades of brown, designs without a belt line etc., as what now seems to be an alarmingly efficient camouflage.
A delightfully oblique conjuration of an obliquity of dress.

nullimmortalis September 28, 2016 at 4:18 pm Edit
And thanks so far to this book for drawing my particular attention to the paintings of Paul Delvaux.

nullimmortalis September 28, 2016 at 8:28 pm Edit
Pages 21 – 40

img_2507“It is hard to grasp how high railway platforms are until you are on the tracks below them.”

…like looking up from between the lines of this text, looking at its slowly revealing meaning of how the world used to be before these railways became derelict and open to a walking (or even biking?) improvisation. The couple, sexually aware as well as naive, when parading sometimes half-naked, half-camouflaged, as the girl does, in front of the tall and noble slow-motion real-time fully naked wanderers, with, also, a brush against a hunter and his gun, and a brush against art in bookish and painterly form, while missing music amid the silence. This is a hypnotic journey, half mindless, half deliberate, a sleight of mind that prestidigitates the ‘group consciousness’ that at least this book contains as some sort of bridge between then and now. I have woken from the journey, having felt I dreamt it, not read it. And I mean that as a significant compliment.
By tear, rip or meticulously unpicked seam, a flash of flesh shows that white is the new moon…

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