Brian Catling is a poet, sculptor, and performance artist whose work encompasses installations and tempera portraits of imagined cyclops. He teaches at the University of Oxford and is an author of novels. His artistic practice is multidisciplinary, weaving together visual arts with performance and literature. His works often explore archetypal imagery and embodiment.
From the author of the Vorrh Trilogy comes an epic odyssey following a group of mercenaries hired to deliver a church's ultimate power-a sacred oracle-as the decadence of carnival gives way to the gravity of lent and the mystic landscape grows ravenous.
Lose yourself again in the heady, mythical expanse of the Vorrh.
Lose yourself again in the heady, mythical expanse of the Vorrh.
A standalone novel by iconic artist and author of cult bestseller, The Vorrh
"The Vorrh follows a brilliant cast of characters through a parallel Africa where fact, fiction, and fantasy collide. Tsungali, a native marksman conscripted by the colonial authorities--against whom he once led a revolt--is on the hunt for an English bowman named Williams. Williams has made it his mission to become the first human to traverse the Vorrh, a vast forest at the edge of the colonial city of Essenwald. The Vorrh is endless, eternal; a place of demons and angels. Sentient, oppressive, and magical, the Vorrh can bend time and wipe a person's memory. Between the hunter and the hunted are Ishmael, a curious and noble Cyclops raised by Bakelite robots; the evil Dr. Hoffman, who punishes the son of a servant by surgically inverting his hands; and the slave owner MacLeish, who drives his workers to insanity, only to pay the ultimate price. Along with these fictional creations, Brian Catling mixes in historical figures, including surrealist Raymond Roussel and photographer and Edward Muybridge. In this author's hands none of this seems exotic or fantastical. It all simply is"--
Published in a back-to-back double-A-side format are Brian Catling's account of the recovery of the enormous Ahnighito meteorite, from Greenland to New York, by explorer Robert Peary in 1897, and the psychogeology of Iain Sinclair's hunt for meteorites across 21st-century London.