The Phantasmogenetic Centre
(Hobo Borealis) paperback book $16.00
An outlying milestone in weird fiction, socio-sexual satire and artisanal plagiarism, The Phantasmogenetic Centre is a timely, cruel repurposing of the untimely words of dead and largely forgotten authors. This ghost-ridden pornographic antibildungsroman was carefully assembled no more than two lines at a time from hundreds of public domain books digitized by Project Gutenberg. Fragments of fiction, philosophy, psychology, erotica, biography, theology, poetry, mysticism and instructional texts form a coherent mosaic narrative connecting the nightmares of the early 20th century to those of the present day. See if this plot doesn’t resonate: Drawn to one another by their fear of women, three sexually overwrought young men of Edwardian England cast in their lot with a mysterious professor, heir to a South African diamond mine, whose underground laboratory houses an electronic brain powered by the residual thought-energy of putrefying corpses. Disillusioned first by boarding-school orgies and then by industrialized necromancy, the three friends resolve to enter politics with a daring proposal to banish women and children to a selective breeding facility on the moon. Routed by suffragettes, they are obliged to seek whatever remains of their fortune in the limb-strewn trenches of an unspecified war, where death waits as the penultimate disappointment. 174pp