The Suicide Machine
In a decaying suburban house, a narrator tends to his elderly mother while disturbed by nightmarish visions of his deceased artist brother, for whose violent death he blames himself. Hallucinations and conversations tell of possible futures, ambiguous pasts and surreal allegories. Of these the most fantastical of all may be The Suicide Machine itself: the discovery in an abandoned Glasgow villa of a cryptic black device linked to a dissident Russian physicist and his tragic lover, whose rumoured psychic experiments reverberate into the present. Family secrets and the enigmatic boundaries of life, death, sex and sanity all progressively give way and coalesce into an elegiac journey towards hard-won hope from the depths of despair.
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Douglas Thompson
Douglas Thompson’s short stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, most recently Albedo One, Ambit, Postscripts, and New Writing Scotland. He won the Grolsch/Herald Question of Style Award in 1989 and second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007. His first book, Ultrameta, was published by Eibonvale Press in August 2009, nominated for the Edge Hill Prize, and shortlisted for the BFS Best Newcomer Award, and since then he has published four subsequent novels, Sylvow (Eibonvale, 2010), Apoidea (The Exaggerated Press, 2011), Mechagnosis (Dog Horn, 2012), Entanglement (Elsewhen Press, 2012) and has two forthcoming in 2014, The Brahan Seer and Volwys, from Acair Publishing and Dog Horn respectively. The Rhymer is his eighth novel.
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