Your Dark Meaning, Mouse is the ultimate field guide to the most bewildering and elusive topic in all literature: Dark Meaning, a subject that hitherto has only been accessible after deep study and courageous initiation to the most resourceful and sagacious of scholars, withdrawn, lab-coated persons who occasionally may be found stumbling about in forests, taking cryptic notes in their squared-paper moleskins from closely attended birdsong and astronomical observations. Now this indispensable collection of essays, stories, poems and scripts blasts the subject into public consciousness and beyond.
Notices
“What have I read here? Moles mixes poetry, theatre, essays, diagrams and stories to mess with the reader’s consciousness…. Somehow Moles has taken the ’normal’ tenuous links in short story collections and created a vortex that it is quite impossible to escape from…. The sense of humour is very wicked, all the Beatles experiments/theories had me laughing big time…. This is a very good book, I’ve enjoyed the experience of it’s madness, I’ve most definitely not understood all that has gone down but I think that’s the point, it’s all part of the experience.”
—Jason Denness, in Gnome Appreciation Society
“In this collection, Stephen Moles deconstructs our understandings of cultural phenomena, like Shakespeare or the Beatles or the Word document, and reconstructs them in new and wholly unexpected ways. Your Dark Meaning, Mouse is smart, surreal, and darkly funny.”
—Jesi Bender, author of Kinderkrankenhaus
“These ink-drenched pages contain a series of cryptic essays, stories, poems, song lyrics and scripts dedicated to navigating in detail the arcane literary phenomenon of Dark Meaning. Quite what this is I’m still unsure, but Moles writes about it with immense erudition, insight and authority in a volume that merges Swift’s academy of Lagado (where, you’ll recall, the resident projectors attempted to turn cucumbers into sunlight), Flann O’Brien’s ‘physicist, ballistician, philosopher and psychologist’ de Selby, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s all very silly, and very funny—a generous, beguiling, immersive wunderkammer of a book.”
—David Collard, author of Multiple Joyce
Stephen Moles is the author of seven books, including Paul is Dead (CCLaP) and The More You Reject Me, the Bigger I Get (Beard of Bees), as well as many other shorter pieces. He regularly carries out undercover literary assignments aimed at both fighting the centralisation of meaning and bringing about the linguistic singularity for the benefit of society. Stephen is also the founder of the Dark Meaning Research Institute, a group of parasemantic investigators and quantum linguistics pioneers who are currently working on a way to blast him off the page and turn him into the world’s first zero-person author.