Victoria Falls Introduction

My latest book is another short story collection, Victoria Falls And Other Stories. Bloody hell, Lesia outdid herself with the cover for this. It truly is magical. In my wildest dreams, I couldn't have come up with a better cover. This is the exact London-Dungeons-Roald-Dahl-Hunter-S-Thompson cover I wanted, one that conveys the manic energy of the book and its absolute nightmarish darkness.

This book, while not set in the Victorian-era, is a colonial-treatise on the lines of Ugly Botany, my book from right at the start of the year. Of course, there are many differences: the fifties era of Victoria Falls with its British Empire in the twilight years; the (mostly) United Kingdom setting; the broad daylight setting; the M.R. James tribute of Victoria Falls (as opposed to Ugly Botany and its Conrad dressing). Victoria Falls also hearkens back to The Pixies with its Egyptian horrors.

Which book do I prefer? Of course, Ugly Botany. A truly brilliant book, one of my best, I humbly add, and what a wonderful time I had, around this time last Christmas, writing it. Victoria Falls was a much more torrid time writing, though I did have a trip to Manchester to see the band Haim perform.

All that being said, the cover is amazing and I do really like the book's narrative structure. Its stakes feel much higher than Ugly Botany; it is, so to speak, a different book for a different time. That was a Joe Biden book, written just before the crack of dawn of a new Trump administration, whereas Victoria Falls (and other stories) is very much a Trump book, well into the first year of the Orange Monster's new term, and it wears the weathers and age of one much shattered and exhausted. It's easy to forget how exhausted we were at the end of 2020.

While I wrote this book, my day job was really stressing me out. So you can see that in the book's themes of being trapped, being under attack, and having to eventually confront monsters. Both Shaw and the unnamed private narrator are in service of this monolithic enterprise (the British empire/ my job). Both represent the academic side and the thug side of the individual, Athens and Sparta, (myself).