Books

In this the inaugural volume of Richard Craven’s Bristolian Chronicles, disreputable Bristolian gym manager Herod swears vengeance against the microbe colony infesting the spa hot tub and blamed for the genital gangrene which has unmanned him. In the pursuit of his vendetta, he recruits a gallery of corporate psychopaths, spiritual charlatans and raving homoeopaths. As a signifier of his quest he sports an outsize marital aid, the White Willy.

In this second volume of Richard Craven’s Bristolian Chronicles, meet dissipated parrot architect Hawksmoor Perroquet as he arrives in Bristol and promptly succumbs to a ketamine frenzy at the Anarchist Bookfair, during which he sells his wife, brainless budgerigar Arabella Melopsittica, and their egg to a passing ornithologist. Prompted by his remorse to eschew equine tranquilizers, in his newfound sobriety he commences his ascent of the greasy pole of human endeavour. His progress towards the dizzy heights of the Bristol Mayoralty is aided by the machinations of depressive provincial merchant banker Sir Hearty Luncheon, but then his wife and presumed daughter rematerialise, precipitating his usurpation by genial Scottish crow Ian Corby, and a headlong descent into drugs and disgrace.

In this third volume of the Bristolian Chronicles—and his only work for the stage—Richard Craven delivers a full-length revenge tragedy in verse, complete with masques, murder, and a cast of the most biblically sordid reprobates ever to grace the theatrical page. At its centre stands Squalor: prologue-speaker, filth-savant, and gleeful herald of the action’s descent. Around him swarm tantrically deluded gurus, demented Tolstoyans, vengeful daughters, and moral pariahs locked in a spiral of ritual humiliation and baroque retribution.
 

After a night spent as the front end of a pantomime horse in the Startling Farter, dissolute aristocrat Lord Snatch fails to return home to … er … Squattocrat Towers and the loving embrace of his wife, the fragrant poshtitute Kelly Snatch

Drawing on the Odyssey but refusing its redemptions, Odour Issues replaces gods with ideologues, trials with punitive enemas, and heroism with flatulent defiance. It is an epic clogged with paperwork and metaphor, stained by ritual and rot, and propelled by a language that veers from the exalted to the excreted without apology.
 

 Collected Shorter Verse Vol. 1 gathers the first tranche of Craven’s poetic work, drawing from the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian and the Odes, Epigrams & Further Sonnets. What emerges is a dual corpus of iambic attack, civic lament, and philosophical invective. The sonnets are formally impeccable and morally exasperated; the epigrams cut with Augustan precision; the couplets march in step with Pope, Dryden, and Swift- only to find themselves parked outside a Travelodge on the M4

In this fourth instalment of the Bristolian Chronicles, Helix Folt emerges from the squalor of Bath Buildings, Bristol BS6 with earnest hopes of civic virtue, only to be swept into the swirling derangements of the City of Fools. Presided over by his occult-minded adoptive crone Amelia De’Ath and thwarted by grant-snouting Crass Cheseham, Folt’s attempts at rectitude collapse into encounters with bigamists, demimondaines, socialist agitators, and the ever-triangulating Dr Mark Wankstain, all presided over by baleful eminence gris Sir Hearty Luncheon. His quixotic stand for tradition soon becomes a riot of octopi complaints, Maoist tribunals, and municipal farce, rendered in Craven’s trademark blend of rancour, filth, and baroque comic intensity.

Mr Nice’s Bottom and Other Short Stories gathers a quarter-century of Craven’s most scabrous, deranged, and oddly erudite fictions. From the psychotic institutional labyrinth of Lolitasaurus to the obscene rise-and-fall of the inverted Mr Nice, these tales chart the slow moral collapse of late-century Britain with a blend of farce, bile, and philosophical mischief. Juvenile obscenities evolve into full-blown satirical onslaughts as gangsters, hypochondriacs, nudists, cultists, academics, and fallen utopians jostle through a landscape where high ideals and low appetites are equally compromised.