Dreams in the Black Smoke (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798295761621)

Amidst the Great Age of polar exploitation, Captain Blaz Ritter leads a doomed expedition into the Arctic in search of the Fountain of Youth (and a very special banana).

Dreams in the Black Smoke is an experimental novella: part Kipling, part hallucination, part grotesquerie-by turns absurd, poignant, incomprehensible, exquisitely poetic, and unexpectedly hilarious.

Join Captain Blaz on a psychedelic descent where edges and centres fold in on themselves. An expedition that becomes its own distortion, a strange mirror in which exploration turns back upon itself, revealing the beginning of its own end.

Haunting children's games, secret manuscripts, indiscreet seductions; scenes carved in ivory and street-grime. Characters that cling like a prickle at the back of the neck, or a sudden shudder-Blaz himself like a piece of food between the teeth, sore and insistently present.

At once classic and sickeningly modern, otherworldly and as mundane as a nail through a shoe, the novella builds a growing sense of grim delight that circles back on itself irresistibly. An exploration of the inside of your head as much as the author's, and a seductive invitation to lose the boundary between the two.