Spotlight on Eibonvale Press

7th December 2011

Eibonvale Press is either a best kept secret of genre publishing or, depending on your taste for the gruesome, best kept secret. It styles itself a publisher of "horror, magic realism, slipstream and the surreal". Its books are often positioned on the edges of easily-defined genres, and at the opposite of mainstream genre publishing.

One good way to get an overview of the press is to read Blind Swimmer. This is a showcase anthology featuring all of the writers they have published since its origins around the winter of 2005 up until 2010. Three defining features emerge: the stories are frequently highbrow, weird, and occasionally intensely violent. Sometimes they're all three at once.

When it comes to making readers think, it's hard to pick out any single book from their catalogue that illustrates this better than the others, because none of Eibonvale's authors are writing to a formula. Breaking the rules of what a story should be seems to be the rule. So in Feather David Rix plays with the idea of looking for meanings in stories, whilst in The Silver Wind Nina Allen keeps changing the details of her story until the five linked short stories she presents become much more than the sum of their parts. And then there's Sylvow, Douglas Thompson's ambiguous tale of environmental rebellion and relationship breakdown. This is writing that doesn't shy away from being challenging and different, and the authors aren't talking down to their readers.

Oddities

A lot of Eibonvale's output is unusual, but one of their most flat-out strange novels has to be Jet McDonald's Automatic Safe Dog. It's hard to explain how strange it is, you've just got to read it. It's a satire about corporate greed and cruelty featuring pets that have been turned into living furniture, pipework that seems to be trying to communicate, and insane board meetings. This is an extremely freaky novel until you get to the end, when all the madness fits together and makes a strange sort of sense. It's not the most readily accessible style, but this emphasis on strange stories is far more interesting and intelligent than the usual tired horror tropes.

Risk taking

Brendan Connell's Unpleasant Tales is also very weird, but it's disturbingly shocking to boot. Human musical instruments vie with cannibal dinner party hosts, putrimaniacs and mad, cruel doctors to horrify readers the most in this short story collection. It's extreme, and this is the sort of book that would have been banned a century ago. It illustrates Eibonvale's willingness to take risks by publishing books that are very niche in their appeal, and to do so without pandering to commercial considerations. Highbrow, violent and weird is hardly a recipe for commercial success after all, but it's at the fringes of what the reading public expect that you can often find the most exciting new literature.

Sometimes this approach pays off spectacularly well, such as with Terry Grimwood's Bloody War. This brutal vision of a modern Britain in the grip of an all-out war that's come terrifyingly close to home is, at this point, my favourite book published so far in 2011. It's grim and horrific, but its gritty realism is part of what makes this book essential reading.

The look

The covers are mostly the work of David Rix, and they share a grungy, down-to-earth aesthetic. These aren't glossy, airbrushed fantasies, and the covers reflect the way the stories within are often grounded in a warts-and-all view of human nature. Happy endings aren't guaranteed and in spite of the fantasy leanings, nothing is ever as simple as a fairytale.

If you think this grown-up interpretation of genre fiction might be for you, check out http://www.eibonvalepress.co.uk/ for more information.