More than a year ago I started work on a collaboration with the writer Forrest Armstrong, the result is the illustrated novella: This City is Alive.

From cold dead island with archaic fragments of a society long since passed to sprawling city of metal and bone; Chevy decides he might as well take the trip and what he loses and gains along the way sends him into existential malfunction; deprogrammed rebuilt across withered façade, a skeleton stripped hung from sky jaws of synthetic life set to swallow –

This City is Alive is a surreal novella featuring illustrations by Jason Daniels. It merges the experimental nature of beat writers like Burroughs or Ginsberg with the modern surrealist sensibility of Steve Aylett’s novels. The story follows two lines; Chevy as he leaves the bleak, empty island he was born on, and a homeless man named Simon Klepper enduring life on an eerie dystopian city in the middle of the ocean.

Chevy leaves on the Captain’s raft with Nail and his son, Mesa. Shortly after heading into sea they realize they no longer have the option to return – Nail is an addict abusing the drug ‘protoplasmic flash’ and the mayor wants him for his involvement in his son’s overdose. They travel through the ocean in search of land or food. Through ghost ships running on deep dream aesthetics, receiving letters from martyrs screaming for an escape, losing half their crew to horrors of the seas and pure, unbridled rage... while Simon Klepper lives as an outsider in a city where deviancy from the plan is unacceptable. The Emperor doesn’t seem do anything but prune the imperfections; this includes ‘deportation,’ when a prisoner of the city is packed away in a red capsule and shipped out into the ocean to die...

This story is essentially about what it means to be an outsider. Whether alienated by addiction, deformation, or failure to recognize their function in society, every character is detached.

"The combined talents of Forrest Armstrong and Jason Daniels make for an impressive, mind-altering force. With This City is Alive Armstrong resuscitates the reader's amputated interest in contemporary literature, slapping apathy from our eyes with a tale as engrossing as it is brutal. The final outrage against complacency is the stunning visual art supplied by Daniels, evocative of worlds perhaps dreamed by tumors grown drunk on fermented carcinogens. One can only hope (fear?) that they will continue their collaborative rampage."

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 I am kind of hoping that in 20 years somebody will present a copy and ask me to sign it, either that or a find a moldy copy being scuffed around a car park in Germany or some such place, many years from now. 

Thanks to all who purchased a copy, I think I can speak for Forrest and myself when I say that we really appreciate your support, we shall both continue to produce art as indiviuals, as well as future collaborations, for as long as our bodies will allow.

"if an odd, self published book gets nominated for a Wonderland award, can you still use it as emergency toilet paper?"