Francis Mckee Even The Dead Rise Up

by Francis McKee

Even the Dead Rise Up, and the political becomes personal. In Francis McKee's first novel, observations of seances, scientific advances, group education outings, and Kurdish protests for the disappeared become mixed with his own Tarot-influenced visions; a haunting spirit appears; the relation between political resistance and Spiritualism is cast as an insurrectionary force and a millenarian energy. McKee pushes language to match the raw material of the stories, which are documented through journal entries that move from Scottish islands to Puerto Rico. The author is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. Since 2006 he has been the director of the CCA, Glasgow, and a lecturer and research fellow at Glasgow School of Art. He has written How to know what's really happening (Sternberg Press, 2016) and co-published extensively on the work of artists linked to Glasgow. Even the Dead Rise Up is published by Book Works as part of the Common Objectives series and edited by Nina Power.

150 pages, Paperback

Published September 19, 2019

Reviews

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange, dizzy, meditative book that veers widely in style, narration, and content. Somewhere between memoir, nonfiction, first person, and experimental/experiential prose, Francis McKee covers contemporary political protests as a photographer and dabbles in tarot and mysticism. Even the Dead Rise Up covers all this and more, from bog bodies buried as baronial boundaries lines, the influence of the Scetis Desert fathers on Ionian monks, the histories of spiritism and spiritualism to aging, policing, and poetry.