CVT preview: Books
Preview page for the Cravenverse theme (local test site only).
Amoeba Dick A New Tale of a Tub
WELCOME TO RICHARD CRAVEN'S BRISTOL A TWISTED, SATIRICAL LANDSCAPE WHERE CHAOTIC MISADVENTURE IS MET WITH WIT, VENGEANCE, AND A TOUCH OF THE GROTESQUE. In this the inaugural volume of Richard Craven’s Bristolian Chronicles, disreputable Bristolian gym manager Herod swears vengeance against the microbe colony infesting the spa hot tub and blamed for the genital gangrene which has unmanned him. In…
Pretty Poli or: Monsieur Perroquet's descent from a high perch
ENTER RICHARD CRAVEN'S BRISTOL ONCE MORE - A DARKLY COMIC URBAN MAZE WHERE WILDLY ABSURD MISADVENTURES COLLIDE WITH SHARP WIT, UNEXPECTED REVERSALS, AND A SPLASH OF THE MACABRE. In this second volume of Richard Craven’s Bristolian Chronicles, meet dissipated parrot architect Hawksmoor Perroquet as he arrives in Bristol and promptly succumbs to a ketamine frenzy at the Anarchist Bookfair, during…
The Senseless Counterfeit An idle frippery or play
ENTER ONCE MORE INTO RICHARD CRAVEN’S BRISTOL—A RANCID, RHETORICAL HELLSCAPE WHERE VENGEANCE PLAYS TO THE CHEAP SEATS AND NO ONE ESCAPES UNMARKED. In this third volume of the Bristolian Chronicles—and his only work for the stage—Richard Craven delivers a full-length revenge tragedy in verse, complete with masques, murder, and a cast of the most biblically sordid reprobates ever to grace…
Odour Issues A Novel
ODYSSEY MEETS OBSCENITY IN RICHARD CRAVEN’S BRISTOL—A CITY OF FADING SPLENDOUR, BROKEN MYTH, AND THE UNMISTAKABLE WHIFF OF SOMETHING GONE VERY WRONG. After a night spent as the front end of a pantomime horse in the Startling Farter, dissolute aristocrat Lord Snatch fails to return home to ... er ... Squattocrat Towers and the loving embrace of his wife, the…
Helix Folt, the Conservative
Welcome to Craven’s Bristol - a city where every committee becomes a kangaroo court, every philanthropist a pagan oracle, and every cause célèbre an excuse for public indignation. Into this whirlpool blunders Helix Folt, a hapless Tory innocent confronted with arts bureaucrats, therapeutic nannies, and the small-beer zeal of pub-room radicals. He is tugged from massage parlours to mock tribunals,…
Collected Shorter Verse Volume 1
Richard Craven writes as if the last two centuries were a ghastly misunderstanding -and he's here to put things right. Collected Shorter Verse Vol. 1 gathers the first tranche of Craven’s poetic work, drawing from the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian and the Odes, Epigrams & Further Sonnets. What emerges is a dual corpus of iambic attack, civic lament, and philosophical invective.…
Mr Nice’s Bottom and Other Short Stories
From the endless corridors of a deranged hospital to the mouldering bureaucracy of a seaside theocracy, Mr Nice’s Bottom and Other Short Stories escorts the reader through three decades of misrule, hypocrisy and bodily collapse. In these tales, the high-minded meet the abject: a traffic-stopping phallus stalks the complacent avenues of West London; a CCTV hypochondriac prays for the millennium…
Bile Drugs, Torture and Europscepticism
I began writing Bile in the Summer of 1996, shortly after completing my Philosophy BA at UCL. I was in my early 30’s and it was my first novel. Despite its relatively short length it took more than two years, mainly because we had two small children by then and I took a moderately active share in parenting them. Thirty…