Amoeba Dick or A New Tale of a Tub
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.
Pretty Poli or Monsieur Perroquet’s descent from a high perch
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.
The Senseless Counterfeit, an idle frippery or play
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.
Odour Issues, a Novel
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.