2 November 2021. 7pm.
£5 entry on the door.
The Horse Hospital,
Colonnade, Bloomsbury
, London WC1N 1JD
Do you know the language of the birds?
Strange Attractor Press present a Launch event for Neighbor George by Victoria Nelson.
This evening, Victoria Nelson will be in conversation with Roger Luckhurst, Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck and editor of the forthcoming Gothic: An Illustrated History for Thames and Hudson.
Victoria Nelson’s first novel, Neighbor George, is a disarmingly engaging, and ultimately terrifying, tale of cosmic horror set in the Bohemian enclaves of 1970s California. Deeply informed by her own studies of the supernatural, charted in her widely-admired non-fiction books, The Secret Life of Puppets and Gothicka, Neighbor George is an enigmatic story of psychological horror enacted in the space where the natural and supernatural collide.
“This is not just a horror novel, not just a coming-of-age psychological thriller, but (like all of Victoria Nelson’s work) it subverts and questions the trappings – the very roots – of genre. It is deeper than death or initiation alone – rather it’s about what is written in our bodies from the other side, before we are born, in the womb, and how we are messengers in that way, to the outer world. And the ways we cover up the old injuries until the time comes to re-open and heal them. And within that personal – and collective, AND seemingly impossible – struggle for autonomy and truth, we find our power – in that we attempt it at all.” Sibyl Kempson
“If Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock had collaborated to write a novel that would scare you senseless, they might have come up with Victoria Nelson’s Neighbor George. Lulled for the first few pages by Nelson’s brilliant description of Bolinas, a laid-back, eccentric small town in West Marin, California, you may soon find yourself double locking your doors and searching frantically for a nightlight as Nelson piles on twist after unexpected twist, horror after unexpected horror in this deadly dance of predator and prey.”
Mary Mackey, author of A Grand Passion.
“In this vivid page-turning gothic novel centered around the wry portrait of a decaying California left-coast hamlet on the fog-bound Pacific, a thirst-for-life quest turns ominously into a journey into self-abolishment and murder as Victoria Nelson exposes old lust meeting young need and New Age wacky mantras colliding with hungry ghosts seeking souls in a bohemian utopia haunted by restless spirits and death drives. Light-drenched and wit filled, brilliantly composed, Neighbor George will join canonical California novels like Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, Denis Johnson’s Almost Dead, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, and Louis B. Jones’s California’s Over.”
Rob Sean Wilson, author of Waking in Seoul, Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted, and Beat Attitudes.