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Cover of Odour Issues

Novel

Odour Issues

A Novel

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 fragrant poshtitute Kelly Snatch.

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Published
27 May 2025
ISBN
979-8285524762
Chapters
27
In the book
136 entries

Overview

ODYSSEY MEETS OBSCENITY IN RICHARD CRAVEN’S BRISTOL—A CITY OF FADING SPLENDOUR, BROKEN MYTH, AND THE UNMISTAKABLE WHIFF OF SOMETHING GONE VERY WRONG.

Drawing on the Odyssey but refusing its redemptions, Odour Issues replaces gods with ideologues, trials with punitive enemas, and heroism with flatulent defiance. It is an epic clogged with paperwork and metaphor, stained by ritual and rot, and propelled by a language that veers from the exalted to the excreted without apology.

Ambitious, baroque, and gleefully impure, Odour Issues advances Craven’s project to resurrect classical form in an age unworthy of it—and to see what leaks out in the process.

Richard Craven is a British-Canadian former academic philosopher who has spent the last twenty years in Bristol. Since leaving academia, he has dedicated himself to writing mordantly satirical literary fiction and the resurrection of formal verse for a 21st century readership. Odour Issues is his fifth book, following Bile, Amoeba Dick, Pretty Poli, and The Senseless Counterfeit.

Reviewed in

Cover of Obscura Literaria Obscura Literaria Review by Euphemia Vexwell In Odour Issues, Richard Craven proves himself not merely a parodist of classical texts but a mythmaker for the absurdities of modern existence. Read the review →

People in this book

See all 48 in People with their descriptions

Places in this book

See all 36 in Places with their descriptions

Organisations in this book

See all 8 in Organisations with their descriptions

Artefacts in this book

See all 18 in Artefacts with their descriptions

Glossary in this book

See all 23 in Glossary with their descriptions

Chapters

  1. Front matter
  2. Prologue, or Trigger Warning
  3. The Orgy Of The Suitors
  4. A Suburban Bildungsroman, And A Council Of The Gods
  5. Telemachus Consulteth Nestor At His House Of Muscle Which Is At Easton
  6. The Palace Of Menelaus Overlooking Hotwells.
  7. The Enchantment by Circe.
  8. Nausicaa.
  9. The Court Of Alcinous At Bedminster
  10. Demodocus The Chugger
  11. The Fall of Pergamon.
  12. Polyphemus at St Werburghs Farm; And the Lotophagi of Mina Road.
  13. La queixa i llàgrimes del cabrer
  14. The Aeolus of Mangotsfield, and the Ecdysis of Marsyas the Illuminatus.
  15. Lord Snatch’s Nequia or Katabasis.
  16. The Sirens in the Jacuzzi and the Bouldering Room.
  17. Gibbons Decline and Fall.
  18. An Innopportune Meltemi.
  19. The Resurrection and Subsequent Hospitalisation of Our Lord
  20. Sergeant Drew of the Unauthorised Enema Squad.
  21. Lord Snatch is Gnawed by his Cunker.
  22. Lord Handjob’s Caviar.
  23. The Social Awkwardness of J.J.Beast
  24. Zeus, Relaxing with his Gentleman’s Tailor and his Fruiterer, Suffers an Interruption.
  25. Odysseus Interrupts the Carousal of the Suitors.
  26. Appendices
  27. Bibliography

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