The Etched City by K J  Bishop

The Etched City

K J Bishop

The protagonists of this fantasy world Beat novel meander through 200-odd pages trying to reconstruct their shattered lives. Then the numinous invades the mundane... I still don't know what to make of it but I loved it! It stimulated my mind and filled it with baroque images. Not for the faint-hearted, though...

Extract
'When I came to this city, I would have agreed with anyone who said there was little mystery left in the world. But in you, madam, first in your image, then in your living self, I saw the allure of something as far away and as secret as the stars. As I reached towards this unknown, I began to feel like a man who has ridden through a vast desert, never knowing anything but the sand around him and the dry road under him, then comes upon the mirage of a garden and a city, and finds that the mirage is real, and that it is bigger than the desert; that the desert was, after all his walking, only a small part of the mirage.'
Parallels
  • Shadow Dance by Angela Carter
  • Veniss Underground by Jeff Vander Meer
  • The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stephen Donaldson
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Violence
Explicit sexual Content