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Louis Mason
THE ATTENDANTS. SIXTEEN STORIES, 2023





If you listen very carefully in the moments when the wind drops you will hear the soft movements deeper in, far back and away from these theatres of display and bad commerce, slow movements through rooms where that other game is played, where the light is cheap and white and very bright and where every single detail is inscribed for all time in exactly the mode that it was originally conceived.

The Attendants is a collection of fiction, written over a five-year period, from 2017, when the author moved to London, to early 2023. All the stories in this collection were written in response to art exhibitions or works of art. They represent an attempt to develop a coherent response to art: what it does and how it functions (and occasionally ceases to function) in London now. Many of the stories are genre pieces, horror, fantasy, and science fiction, but all have the complex interrelations of the image, the city, the eye, and the body at their centre.

‘Disrobing life as much as against nakedness. No escape from the head, never more certain of moving towards the point of rupture, or is that rapture, binding, increasing lucidity, slap, binding, drill at the deserving, the body is ever present. We visualise what has been lain on the page, written, drawn, coloured and feel the pulse: abound and bound, binding, grounded.’
–> Paul Buck

‘Bodies between the rigid and the porous and nameless characters move through spaces—room, gallery, ruin—with the sense of being in the aftermath of a disaster, yet waiting for something, where the options are to survive or succumb. The reader is drawn through intensely physical and precise descriptions and atmospheres into strange yet plausible worlds and encounters. These stories by an artist are cinematic, sculptural, painterly, and riveting.’ –> Michael Newman

Louis Mason is an Australian-Polish artist and writer currently based in London. In 2018 he was a co-director of the public programme Partial Versions, and a founding member of the South London Speculative Fiction Writing Group. He is the director of ge hinnom small group love, a gallery based in South London. His work has been shown internationally, and his fiction and critical writing have been commissioned by ICA London, Art+Australia Magazine, How to Sleep Faster, Obsidian Coast, and Praz Delavallade LA, among others

152 pages
120 mm x   190 mm
80 mm French flaps (cover)
Format: Paperback
ISBN 
978-1-910055-96-0  

£13.99




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