The View From Planet X

Charting the Postsurreal – Recent Non Fiction by A C Evans

From Hoffmann and German Romanticism, to the modern fantastic in horror films, fantasy has tried to erode the pillars of society by un-doing categorical structures. - Rosemary Jackson (1981)

‘Arcanum Paradoxa’, a brief survey of alchemy and its poetic links which first appeared here on CygnusX, has now been published as an article in The Monomyth Supplement 44 (Jan 2009) from Atlantean Publishing. ‘Arcanum’ is one of several investigative essays – an ongoing enquiry into the aesthetics of the post-surreal. Another contribution to this, no doubt, infinite project is ‘The Unique Zero Manifesto – Towards the Open Realism of Disclosure'’ (2002-2007) which probes further the ‘primal mechanics’ of the creative process. ‘Unique Zero’ is forthcoming from Salt Publishing , included in the anthology Troubles Swapped For Something Fresh, edited by Rupert Loydell of Stride.

Also there are several review articles now available online from Stride.
These include 'Nightmare Scenarios: Incursions of the Unacceptable’ (2007) a look at English horror films through English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema (2006) a reference survey by film critic and actor Jonathan Rigby. An abridged version of this review also appeared in the magazine Midnight Street.
‘A Hymn to Contorted Beauty’ (2008), a review of Prague-German writer Paul Leppin’s 1930s novel Blaugast: A Novel of Decline (‘In these pages we find the ultimate, amorphous horror of mere existence depicted in the most graphic way’) and, most recently, ‘Delusions of Cosmic Destiny’, an analysis of Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-religions by historian Ronald H Fritze. Check out a reaction to this review on Planet Clio.

The 2006 'Interview With Jane Marsh', culture correspondent extraordinaire, was reissued in print last year and appeared in Neon Highway 13. Known as ‘The Illustrated Jane’ this contained both artwork and documentary photos chosen to compliment the text.

Artist Mervyn Peake once asked; ‘what should we hope for as the curtain rises and lays bare the gratuitous stage where, unhindered a man may cry his ghostly manifesto? A miracle? Of course. For we have seen paper transformed into a cosmos of such vibrancy as made the room we stood in like a land of the dead.’ (Introduction to The Drawings of Mervyn Peake, 1949).

So... cry your ghostly manifestos!

Illustration: The View from Planet X, 1993