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308 pages

English

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A propos
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Extrait

Description

A dark novel set in the 'Lovecraft Villages' of Devon, spanning several thousand years, from the time it was occupied by the Dumnonii, through the 19th century to its more contemporary occupation by holiday park dwellers, marketing professionals, doggers and other romantics.

Sujets

Performance art

Walking

Informations

Publié par	Triarchy Press
Date de parution	01 août 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781913743079
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0625€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Published in this first edition in 2020 by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, UK
www.triarchypress.net
Copyright © Tony Whitehead and Phil Smith, 2020
The right of Tony Whitehead and Phil Smith to be identified as the authors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBNs:
Print: 978-1-913743-06-2
ePub: 978-1-913743-07-9
pdf: 978-1-913743-08-6
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Contents
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
About the Authors
Also from Triarchy Press
Preface
In Bonelines we wrote and we were written.
The angels and monsters of the novel were not our inventions. They stepped forward to us from places that then reappeared, anonymously, in the writing; from the rood screen in the church at Torbryan, the nearby medieval ruins of a cave-chapel, and the haunts of the ancient Dumnonii people up on Denbury Hill. We had set out with no particular outcome in mind; our starting point was to see if we could find any resonance of the works of US author of weird fiction H. P. Lovecraft in the villages of his ancestors in south Devon (UK). We began by walking a Lovecraft Triangle as if his stories were maps of these places. Very soon we felt a prefiguration of the fictions there.
Our project quickly changed, however. We had found physical evidence of the Lovecrafts, for sure; from an ancestor s oddly geometrical grave to a church where a great uncle had been choirmaster (before some now obscure controversy saw his removal) and an inn where another great uncle was publican. Far more powerful, though, was the way our quest triggered a more ambiguous and less literary mythos. Unplanned, we found ourselves conducting some kind of ambulant conjuring of story, ecology and ambience that entwined local technologists with lay archaeologists and their folkloric theories with the culture of the local iron age Dumnonii people and the qualities of the local geology. What we found was partly there and partly our imagining. We shored up our intuitions with desk-based research and we consulted local historians, archaeologists and museum keepers, but the myths came firstly from their places; for a few months it was as if we could walk the stories out of the lanes and hills as a stylus plays the music in the grooves of a record.
Dialogue was another of our ways in; unfolding themes together as we walked. Of course, some of what emerged we brought with us, or borrowed as we went along, and certainly the shape of the land and the activity of flora and fauna responding to the changes of the season finessed our ideas, but mostly it was the places that spoke up above the low rumble of the Lovecraft fictions. Cthulhu and the Shoggoths were minor and indistinct agents in the Triangle ; the patterns that uncovered themselves were more local, unpredictable and less consistent than a literary world ; the stinging, brushing, blowing, seething and tripping terrain directed us to what it desired.
There is space here for one example: West Ogwell.
We approached this scattered community through green fields and herds of Devon reds, the yellowish tower of its deconsecrated church appearing between canopies of giant oaks. It all felt just a little too aesthetically bucolic, and later we discovered that these were the repurposed landscaped grounds of a former manor house, now Gaia House (a meditational retreat) with a Hermit s Tower and a Walking Room presided over by a cross-legged skeleton.
The scatter of dwellings and church, with neither village green nor cross-shaped Fore Street, was indicative of its pre-Saxon iron age origins. The church was sat on top of a knob of metamorphic rock. On our first visit, we found behind the altar a fetish of feather, rag, flowers, twine and stick; on our second a large hornbeam bough covered in green lichen placed before the altar where it caught the sunlight falling through the windows. Outside in the churchyard we were regaled with tales of apparitions by The Whistler , the self-appointed guardian of the graves.
It turned out that a rather good found-footage horror movie ( The Borderlands , 2014), which we had each both seen and enjoyed, had been shot in the church and in the nearby lanes; its climax is the awakening of a Lovecraftian serpent sleeping curled up inside the hill beneath the church.
Everywhere we went there were similar out of kilter tales, hidden layers and quirky details or perverse artefacts; yet none of this ever felt alien, arbitrary or disconnected. Instead, these oddities joined with us in dialogue, they reappeared and then reappeared again, weaving in and out of an ever-thickening spread of quilted narratives we were accruing.
We had walked troubled. Our walking and writing together coincided with personal upheavals for both of us, and this almost certainly played some part in opening us quite so intensely to what came through in the lanes. At the same time - and these processes were never wholly discrete - we were self-consciously formulating, through walking and talking, responses to wider upsets than our own; climate catastrophe, political malaise, and a crisis within discourses with which we had some sympathy: left politics, green activism, wyrd practices and thinking.
We were frustrated with the dullness of green politics and their fixation on threat, apocalypse and moralistic reparations; with the trajectory of much esoteric practice towards respectability and a place on a continuum with Christianity or into questionable systems that leant themselves to control and submission. We were unnerved by a moulding of public discourse that included a shift within accelerationism to dark enlightenment and the dalliance of some deep ecologists with nationalism, coincident with a new waywardness in neo-liberal opinion that was being manipulated across digital and conventional media to ingest eugenicist, transhumanist and hypermodern ideas.
We never had any planned intention, nor the means to do anything about any of our speculative rambling, but over the months that we walked and talked what seemed to us to be obscure obsessions began to appear high up the news agenda on social media and on news websites: extreme weather, Cambridge Analytica, Elon Musk, far right infiltration of ecological activism, Extinction Rebellion
When the novel Bonelines was written, it was more of a spillage into fiction of what seemed impossible to contemplate (let alone implement) in reality, written in strokes of frustration. In opposition to the takeover of both establishment and its oppositions by malign alternatives that hid opportunism within authoritarianism and authoritarianism within libertarianism and anti-flesh digitised transhumanism deep within the sleeves of the moment s Matryoshka doll. In fiction we were able to imagine an alternative to all of this that was self-organising, DIY, multiplicitous and non-functionalist, a way to realigning conviviality with amoral forces in the ground. The writing of Bonelines performed a reverse version of our playing the stories from the ground with our walking bodies; this time we dragged the discourse of the terrain across the grooves of computer keyboards to engrave it in the writing.
The ground from which Bonelines rose lies mostly between Newton Abbot, Totnes and Ashburton in the southern part of the county of Devon (UK). There is an anonymity there, the area has no encompassing name; it consists of gently rolling hills, scattered communities punctuated by an occasional Saxon cruciform village, and a complex of often deserted Devon lanes, footpaths and pedestrian hollow ways. The density of habitation is low and there are few local jobs to be had these days. Unlike neighbouring Dartmoor and the South Hams, it is not a destination for tourists, and visitors are rare even from neighbouring towns; if we met anyone on the lanes they were almost always locals. There are some very remarkable places in the Lovecraft Triangle , but they are generally hidden from sight, on private land, or outwardly unappealing.
As stories emerged from this landscape, and as in our long pedestrian conversations we began to flesh out the skeleton of an exemplary fable with elements of a roman clef, we widened our geographical scope and walked the land between Dawlish and Exminster, around Bovey Tracey and the lower Teign Valley, and the backstreets of Torquay; guided by the unfolding narrative demands of the novel. At the same time we were subjected to an intensity of coincidence and connection that would have been frightening if it had not been quite so exciting.
On one occasion we stood on the footpath of the coastal road between Torquay and Paignton with the poet Sam Kemp, discussing the fantasy of subterranean aliens conjured in the novel Vril: The Power of the Coming Race b