Defeated Dogs

This book is the fifth original fiction collection from one of the true eccentrics of modern British writing – stories that blend erudite skill and a startling emotional intensity, classical elegance and unexpected experimentation, sophisticated miserablism and innocent beauty.  A fairy tale as dark as they come amid a shattering clash of two opposing and poisoned personalities.  A Meyrink-tinged dream of atavism and Italy that awakens the dreamer to philosophy and fate. A quiet and perfectly observed journey through the far reaches of Japan.  Myth-working fantasy haunted by the motley ghosts of Lord Dunsany and Matsuo Bashô, and by the imps of postmodernism.  A vision of the afterlife where heaven and hell are entwined in torturous symbiosis. The sinister Black Dog folklore re-imagined as a cosmology of thanatophobia.

For all the diversity of styles in evidence, they are united by the author’s distinctive voice – a window into a crepuscular human world torn between magic and reality, earth and infinity.

“To call Crisp’s stories simple would be to malign them; to say that they are complex would be to slander, for the highest art is that which, in its directness, its naturalness, says what it has to say without pretence.”

- Brendan Connell – from the Introduction

Contents:

• Introduction by Brendan Connell
• The Fairy Killer
• Dreamspace
• Tzimtzum
• Sado-ga-shima
• The Gay Wolf
• The Temple
• Lilo
• Non-Attachment
• The Broadsands Eyrie
• The Gwyllgi of the Lost Lanes