I’ll be reading excerpts from ‘Transmatic’ and ‘The Black Dog Eats the City’ at The Speculative Bookshop on Friday, April 11th with Spiderman writer Jim Alexander, stand-up Phil Differ and Sam Small. Should be a good ‘un:)

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An evening of pure, unadulterated speculative fiction in every form imaginable… almost.

https://www.facebook.com/events/526566194126225/

Really ecstatic to announce that my book “Transmatic” has been accepted for publication with Steven Scott Nelson‘s MorbidbookS AND “The Black Dog Eats the City” is coming out through Kate Jonez’ Omnium Gatherum!

Here’s an early sample of the cover  

Hopefully more good news to follow soon….

 

Blurb

“….part-time hitman/ exterminator, Ignius Ellis’s dream is to buy a candy-apple red Nova Supreme. In the process of trying to earn enough cash to make his dream come true he gets sucked into the rough world of Visitacion Valley, SF. When the tenants in his apartment complex reveal their various extracurricular activities this take an even more bizarre twist and Ellis soon becomes acquainted with the nightmarish Salve State…”

“I never thought I could use “aggro” for a novel, but Chris Kelso’s Transmatic is pure heat-white aggro in a new twisted way that will leave you breathless and wanting for more. Think Tarentino meets Ballard meets Burroughs, and you’re still in it for a surprise. A hard drug I sincerely recommend. I am now officially a craving Kelso addict.”

– Seb Doubinsky

“If Message From the Slave State was an odd radio frequency muffled by static, Transmatic is Kelso finding a clear signal from which to broadcast his Slave State mythos. One could examine it many different ways: a skeptic’s fable about the methods of Scientology, an appraisal of the panoptic society in which we find ourselves or even as an allegory of the Proletariat. However one views it, there’s one thing they cannot deny: its ambition.”

– Surreal Grotesque

“Engorged with ideas, Transmatic is a futuristic meta-romp populated by hitmen, apologetic aliens, vermin and Burroughsian understudies; where splitscreen realities and parallel worlds vie for the reader’s engagement, and fantasy and reality wrestle whilst falling downstairs. Reading Kelso is like sticking your head in a blender but retaining consciousness: a joy ride.”

– Fur-Lined Ghetto

“The world Chris Kelso’s has created is like a twilight Zone hosted by William S Burroughs, but in place of a fresh faced Charles Bronson, there is a rift in the time/space continuum set to a solid jazz soundtrack.”

– Sean Leonard Horrornews.net

“If you’re looking for an escape from the provincial and the commonplace, read Transmatic. It’s the literary equivalent of guerrilla warfare, an act of sabotage against the concretized myths of the establishment. Your eyes will water and your nose will run, and you won’t be able to stop until its over.”

-Preston Grassmann, author of Midnight in the Cathedral of Time, Locus magazine

“Language pornography that reads like a Burroughs confession in the throes of orgasmic euphoria.”

– Vincenzo Bilof, author of The Horror Show

 

You just can’t win

You feel it before you see it, The Black Dog – the Cimmerian demon with baleful breath, diminishing the light wherever it tracks…

…the size of a large calf, its footfalls are silent – the portents of death hidden behind caliginous evil.

It squeezes into the soul. You know it because he scrunches your stomach into a tight paper-ball and forces it out through your anus.

Then you’re a goner…

You just can’t win

 NEO-BEAT IS HERE….

 

My next neo-beat chapbook “Last Exit to Interzone” is coming out through Black Dharma Press (imprint of Jordan Krall’s Dynatox Ministries). Burroughs has been a huge influence on me. All the trademark tropes are here – universes that’re thermodynamically unstable, cut-ups and non-sequiturs and the lateral insertion of seemingly irrelevant information. 

I’m so excited! There are only 50 copies available so get your skates on. You can pre-order HERE

 

 

Artwork by David Anderson(above) & Justin Coons (below)

 

 

So here he is, Kip Novikov, the loathsome, hard-as-a-Glaswegian-winter, opiate addicted Time Detective and star of my next limited edition chapbook “Last Exit to Interzone” (Black Dharma Press/ Dynatox Ministries). He’s loosely based on my dad, who is also bald and bad-ass!

Thank you Justin T Coons! t-shirts hopefully in the offing 

 

First bit of news –  My story “Umbilical Rex” is appearing in an anthology of fiction inspired by David Lynch (edited by Cameron Pierce, published by Eraserhead Press). I’m really proud to be part of it!

“In Heaven, Everything is Fine: Fiction Inspired by David Lynch” has officially been turned in. That’s 38 authors, 120,000+ words of sheer Lynchian brilliance!

I’m honored to have a piece in there, amongst these stunning lovelies: Michael J Seidlinger, Matthew Revert, Ben Loory, Blake Butler, J David Osborne, Cody Goodfellow, Violet LeVoit, Sam Pink, Jeffrey Thomas, Andy Adams, Garrett Cook, John Skipp, Bradley Sands, Laura Lee Bahr, Kevin Sampsell,Gabriel Blackwell, Matty Byloos, Kirsten Alene, Suzanne Burns, Nick Mamatas, Jarrett Middleton,  Ed Morris, Joseph S. Pulver Sr., M.P. Johnson, Jody Sollazzo, Jeff Burk, Liam Davies, Jeremy Robert Johnson, Kris Saknussemm, Mike Kleine, Simon Logan, Thomas Ligotti, Nick Antosca, and David J (David J!).

Secondly, my novelette “Moosejaw Frontier” has been accepted for publication by Bizarro Pulp Press who operate mainly on the world-wide-web, but are centrally located in South East, Texas in the Golden Triangle.

BPP are all readers and are passionate about what they do. I believe this is the best home for this piece and founder, P.A. Douglas, is the author of more than half a dozen books, so he knows what he’s doin. Having a vast understanding of the independently run market of creative industry, Pat has teamed up with a fine group of talented-competent editors, all who have a love for the macabre. Who they are in relation to Bizarro Pulp Press is a direct correlation to what they do. And what they do is strive to publish books that they, as readers, would want to read.

See me – HERE

Praise for Bizarro Pulp Press

“Bizzaro Pulp Press is a great place to get weird!” – Eric S Brown, author of the Big Foot War Trilogy

“A fresh and exciting new voice in the Bizarro world. BPP has raised the bar just a bit higher.” – Mark C. Scioneaux, author of Insurgent Z and Slipway Grey

“Happiness In Slavery: On Chris Kelso’s A MESSAGE FROM THE SLAVE STATE”

by Edward Morris

 

 Joseph Perry, ed. Book Cover Design By D.T. Griffith Interior Design       

  By Stephen Tallarico

  Western Legends Press, 2013

   http://www.facebook.com/WesternLegendsPress

  From the first paragraphs of the first    page of A MESSAGE FROM THE SLAVE STATE, the Sheckleyan principle of Psychology Trumping Technology is illustrated. Only at the end of the last paragraph do we learn the year. The head in a bag Your Humble Narrator finds on page One is taken as mere par for the course, and the duty-cop in the second scene really is the “insect” he is described as.

Then the fun starts… And there I begin to self-apply Duct Tape to my mouth about the actual story. Because it has to be encountered.

What the reader takes as metaphor in Chris’ work is, often, far stranger and deeper than mere description. Every chapter of this work is in a different voice, pace and key, and they all fit. They all work. I barely want to explain any of the plot, because it has to be encountered, like a ranting homeless brain-case who suddenly makes more sense than anyone you ever met, when you actually listen. The tale that this street-Tiresias tells is suddenly a whole world, to you, one which mirrors the unendurable present in inarguable language.

The commonplace is twisted through a funhouse mirror into utter, enduring awfulness, while the awful has become commonplace in the Dystopia of this story. Even the quasi-linear beginning brutally twists into a junk-fueled urban jungle of a vast dictatorship whose every cog and gear answers to no rules but its own. Every one of those disparate parts moves the larger picture of the story along with a skyrocketing speed and technical skill that takes a good few reads to fully fathom.

Further, what should be funny becomes horrible, and many of the most horrible parts are bleakly hilarious. As a bouncer, the scene with Danny Smear yelling, “I HAVE A FACE!! LOOK AT IT!!!” to the entire crowd had me in near-tears of laughter, though the scene around it had me anywhere but. I knew I shouldn’t laugh. I couldn’t help it. Many more such exemplary incongruities abound… to say nothing of the places where the blowtorch of language turns up to a sentence like: “He stepped into the shower, washing off tears too proud to fall.”

No matter what the year, the Slave State is Life. Insanity and Sociopolitics are etched in as different limbs of the same rough beast slouching somewhere of far greater future significance than Bethlehem. In perceiving this pattern, the reader doesn’t necessarily escape it, but realizes their own enmeshment to such a degree that, by the end of this Venn Diagram of a tale, you can See What He Really Did There, crossing the axis from one kind of fiction to the other, from one influence to the other, to tell a meta-tale that both encompasses and reaches beyond each.

People make the comparisons to Burroughs, Bukowski, Dick and Trocchi with Chris’ work, and they’re fair. But there are so many other influences here, in deft interplay. Some writers wear their influences on their sleeves (raises hand)… and some, such as Chris Kelso, juggle with those influences, and weave them into a tapestry with a larger purpose than mere homage.

I was shocked and delighted, for example, to follow the pacing of the patricide scene very early on and realize that I was looking at similar technical tricks used by Cormac McCarthy in SUTTREE (a work I consider at least somewhat Bizarro, although that’s another review.) And the only structure I can compare to this work is one of my favorite pieces in this vein, a radio-play written in the madhouse by Antonin Artaud called “To Have Done With The Judgement Of God.”

 

This book is to Bizarro what CAT’S EYE, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN or NECRONOMICON are to the film genre: a clockwork of several stories whose larger shape is different than any part, or even the sum of them. You can’t read this book just once. Nor should you.

 

 John Palisano with “A Message from the Slave State” at the LA Times Book Festival, Carlton Mellick III with my book 🙂

>Enter a mind full of transcendental drugs, doomed punks, voyeuristic puppets and
omnipotent intergalactic prisons in Chris Kelso’s debut short fiction collection.

BUY IT HERE – SCHADENFREUDE

So it’s finally here. I’ve been waiting on this coming out for a looooong time. I feel like a great albatross  has been lifted from around my neck and I can breath easy knowing the book made it. Be a doll and pick up a copy!

It also has a beautiful cover design by my sister from another mister, Vikki Hastings!

Chris Kelso is a writer of wide and varied obsessions. In Schadenfreude he shares all of them. This collection is just the right amount of raunchy, and is guaranteed to uplift the heart of today’s most discerningly jaded nihilist’

—Tom Bradley, author of Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch

‘Impressive debut. Schadenfreude is more than a short story collection; it’s a way of life’