sniaM Publishing 2018
First published in UK 2019
Cover artwork: David Whitlam
Introduction: Reggie Oliver
My previous reviews of Johnny Mains HERE.
Please see first comment below…
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The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
Signed by Johnny Mains as Copy XX
I am most grateful to have received this book out of the blue. Or should I say out of the red?
I look forward to reading it outside the scope of my real-time reviewing.
But if I need to report back here below on any thoughts, in due course, I will do so.
GOd, despite getting this book without asking for it from Amazon, I must read it and comment at least. I usually refuse review copies, but this book is a genuine gift, I’m told. And I am deeply touched, seriously disarmed, by this act. I have red up to page 51 and I am staggered.
A dust-jacket folded a certain way, I now notice above, looks like buttocks!
Of interest to the late ChrisLee?
So pleased that I have been made aware of this book. It seems to be essential to those involved with the horror genre of fiction over the last few decades. Full of grotesque poked satumorous references as well as an autobiographical audit-trail that is very appealing as well as off the wall. But whose autobiography? I am determined to eke out my savouring of it. Stuporous and slickly alert.
The New Satiricon?
I myself have seen with my own eyes the sybil hanging in a bottle at Cumae. And when the little boys asked her “Sybil, what do you want?” she said, “I want to die.”
― the Satyricon of Petronius
Read up to page 68. I am excited this may be a new genre, AUTOFICTIOGRAPHY, as well as a version of Jeffrey Archer’s prison diaries. Full of the real names of people in the Horror genre (having glimpsed some pages ahead of me as yet unread by me) as well as made up names that seem slightly familiar, eg Desmond Lewton. Keeping my powder dry.
To ease my mind, I shall be transferring an amount of money into my book-reviewing fund earmarked to buy books to review, an amount equivalent to what I would have spent on Amazon to buy this book (if it is on Amazon?)
I note the book is not yet on Amazon but will be in due course. Until then, it is being sold privately by the publisher sniaM, I guess.
Up to page 77, when I had time to spare. Try as I might, I can’t seem to put this book down. It is really hard-hitting in a way that transcends the sometimes hilarious insights and grotesque horror and the nature of what is happening and to whom as named. Hard-hitting also to the author or narrator himself. He doubts his own sanity. I must say it is really well-written in the realms of what it seems to be attempting to achieve. Meanwhile, any spiteful reviewer could take some quotes or references out of context and make them seem what they are not. The bit about Bruce Forsyth, for example. I intend not to make any quotes, in case I do something accidentally.
This book has a ‘special place in Hell’?
The narrator, I should have said above, not the author — as Johnny Mains is mentioned specifically on page 98 as “massive twat”…
Read on today up to p120. Moved by the thoughts about prison life from where this autobiography of the past is written, the earlier sometimes bitter or crazy machinations (even pre-internet) of the horror literary scene, including the interviewing of King in America, and echoing my own thoughts about listening to authors reading aloud. So much better to hear their ‘voice’ by reading their words for oneself in books that I believe have souls. This is an acquired taste book with its own soul, but if you read it at all, even without really believing that it will be fitting with your taste or your own soul, I feel it would still have the potential to acquire you! Disarming, emotional, grotesque, sometimes strident or distasteful material — with some indefinable literary element (or person(s)?) yet to be nailed, I guess.
As I said at the beginning, this is not one of my real-time book reviews and, indeed, I have been secretly reading it since I left off yesterday, and finished it. Not savoured, but gulped. I have no reason to change anything I said above; in fact I would now reinforce what I have said further. Many elucidating glimpses of the audit-trail of the Horror fiction genre (even a top ten of cannibal films!) and of its people and commercial trends, plus striking glimpses into prison life, too, but, above all, many terrifying glimpses into the mind of its autofictiographical narrator, a new character to add to the icons of literature, whether psychotic or not. A strange and revelatory vision into celebrity and revenge. And into writing horror, simply that, gradually, towards the Internet age. Everything I say about this book is true even with – or especially because of – all of this book’s raw edges of style and crepitating stupor. Just wondered who had CF monogrammed on the sole of their shoes during a gang rape? Page 123 a lie?
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