Press News

I am thrilled to announce that we will be publishing brand new editions of Kenny Mooney’s first three books this year!

The Gift Garden is a breathless, claustrophobic novella about jealousy, mental deterioration, and the spaces we inhabit.

Desk Clerk is a novel-length fragmentary prose-poem exploring reality and boundaries. It is ‘a nihilistic attack upon all the organs of social control’.

In the Vast and Boundless Deep, memories blur… This is a novel of two parts, both feverish and experimental, set in a post apocalyptic world not quite our own.

Orchid’s Lantern readers are going to love them.

The releases will be throughout the year, so please check back for more details.

March 18, 2023 0

Book Review: Calibration 74 by William F. Aicher

I knew this book would be for me as soon as I read the description: an experimental, poetic, flow-of-consciousness exploration of reality, fantasy and all the spaces in between. Yes please!

This is the kind of book you bring yourself to, in that you’re never 100% sure whether your experience is what the writer intended or whether you pasted your own meaning over the top of their words. There’s enough continuity, enough thread to hang onto, to make the text flow through an arc, but it also leaves a lot to interpretation.

I read this as the narrator delving into and confronting his own psyche. Perhaps it comes from knowing this was written during the first pandemic wave, when many felt isolated and helpless, but I see someone grasping desperately at straws to find meaning; someone left alone with his thoughts and falling deeper into their clutches. He picks at scabs, seeks out dark corners, obsesses over repeating motifs and patterns, and he digs.

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February 9, 2021 2

Erin – Robert Dickins

Erin is a fast-paced novella written by psychonaut and editor, Robert Dickins. It follows protagonist Lije Baillie on an excursion to the Solpsycle festival with his friends, a cocktail of psychedelics, and some excess emotional baggage. Clinging to a warping, increasingly anarchic environment, he feels a darkness surging up within. It is something he isn’t admitting to himself: something only Erin can lead him to.

This book is a vibrant journey. It is a short read, but deceptively deep: something I didn’t fully appreciate until the very end when it left me contemplating. Dickins does a fantastic job of putting the reader right at the centre of the action, and I love his portrayal of a landscape I recognise:

“Grotesque, post-hippy caricatures are enticing me into their booths, trying to sell me sprawling colourful hats and baggy shawls, scratchy bags and day glo sticks. They want me to vanish as well; vanish into a cloudy, indistinguishable mass. But it’s impossible. I am lost and this is who I am…”

There are some laughs, some reflective chill-out moments, and some chaos. But Erin is more than that: it is an experiment in altered consciousness, not only for Lije but for the reader, too. There is a distinct impression that we are caught up in a trip: the gaps in Lije’s experience, a general confusion about the passage of time, and abstract sensory rhythms…

Continue reading “Erin – Robert Dickins” →

February 18, 2018 4