James Champagne's Blog

So here's one of the mystery projects I've very vaguely hinted at over the last few months: the powers that be behind Snuggly Books and Occult Press have today announced the launch of a new imprint, Purple Bearded Uncle, and they've selected my short novel, PULP FIN DE SIÈCLE, as one of their two launch titles (the other being RUINATION IN BLOOM by Charles Schneider).

"Over the course of 24 hours, on a Spring day in Paris in 1893, seven archetypal figures of the “Yellow Nineties”—a priest, a Symbolist, a dandy, an actress, a whore, a diabolist, and a Decadent—drift into and out of each other’s lives, sometimes taking center stage, other times assuming bit parts. The resulting narrative mosaic created by these seven interwoven tales can thus be described as both the summation and the reflection of late 19th-century Parisian Decadentism re-mannered as a Neo-Decadent novel."

Written on-and-off over a long period (from 2019 to this year), this is the book I've sometimes in the past tongue-in-cheek referred to as being like MONSIEUR DE PHOCAS meets THE CANTERBURY TALES. It's target audience would be either people who are really into the writers of the 19th-century French Decadence, or those who might be curious about what that milieu was all about, in that I hope my book is a reasonable facsimile of the tropes and styles of the writers of that era (warts and all), while at the same time also being a reflection of my own aesthetics and interests.

Designed by Brendan Connell (and featuring sumptuous cover art by Aaron Lange), this is quite a fancy item: this hardcover edition is "thread-stitched and lithographically printed in Italy on rough-textured 140 g/m Italian paper, with 120 g/m Terra Rossa endpapers (made from 10% cotton fibres, virgin fibres and recycled fibres)." The cover, meanwhile, is "printed on white Fedrigoni Imitlin, with a similarly illustrated dustjacket printed on a 180 g/m clay-colored version of the same paper as the endpapers." Do we have a dustjacket? Yes, we have a dustjacket!

This edition is limited to 75 copies, so get it while it lasts!

https://purplebeardeduncle.com/pulp-f...

Contributors to the Neo-Passéism Substack are periodically being interviewed, and I was picked as the first subject. Topics covered include virginity, books written by my brothers, my interest in Medievalism, Shakespeare as a fan fiction writer, my long out-of-print debut novel CONFUSION, my forthcoming French Decadent short novel PULP FIN-DE-SIÈCLE, and (most importantly) why Lady Gaga is more important than Rihanna. Thanks to Justin Isis for the questions and Dan Heyer for the artwork (I was happy to see he included the northern boundary line of my chest hair)

https://neopasseism.substack.com/p/ja...

Yesterday I finished work on my third novel, PULP FIN-DE-SIÈCLE. For those keeping track of such things, it’s literally been almost nine years since I finished the first draft of my second novel HARLEM SMOKE (on Jan. 20, 2016); of course, in that span of time, I did do a few other books. This new one began life as a short story/novella that I wrote back in 2019 (back then, it was called THE POISONED CITY). Over the last five years, I kept adding bits and pieces to it on a periodic basis, and it kept expanding and getting longer and longer, eventually more than doubling its original size. Finally, last year I decided to just start thinking of it as a short novel. At over 40,000 words, it’s slightly shorter than, say, something like THE GREAT GATSBY. But I think every author should have at least one short novel in their bibliography: Camus had THE STRANGER, Orwell had ANIMAL FARM, Steinbeck had THE PEARL and OF MICE AND MEN, Conrad had HEART OF DARKNESS, and so on. But I should stress that I view it not as a novella, but as either a short novel or just a plain novel period!

The project can be (tongue-in-cheek) described as MONSIEUR DE PHOCAS meets THE CANTERBURY TALES, and is kind of a tribute to all of the 19th-century French Decadent authors I’ve been reading and enjoying over the last 20 years or so (in particular, Jean Lorrain, J.-K. Huysmans, and Leon Bloy). It’s set over a period of 24 hours on an April day in Paris in 1893, and is divided into seven 10-15 page sections, each of which revolve around a stock character from the books and stories of that era: a Priest, a Symbolist Artist, a Dandy, an Actress, a Prostitute, a Diabolist/Occultist, and a Decadent Novelist . . . but all of the characters drift in and out of each other’s sections/stories, hence why I somewhat jokingly gave the book the current title it has. Of course, even though it’s something of a mosaic novel, the true main character of the book is Paris itself, with its churches and cafés, its opera houses and artist studios, and so on and so forth.

https://onyxglossary.blogspot.com/202...

This month Zagava has put up for order a new story of mine entitled "CAW: Colossal Abandoned World" as part of their ongoing Infra-Noir chapbook series. This story was kind of a throwback to my older Ligotti-inspired pessimistic earlier short fiction (which might please some of my older fans), though it was also heavily influenced by (among other things) various reoccurring dreams I've had throughout my life, and also the unoccupied RNG rooms and endless corridors of the Kowloon high rises in SHENMUE II (which I think are actually some of the most unsettling environments I've encountered in a video game).

Anyway you can get it here:

https://zagava.de/shop/caw-colossal-a...

Incidentally, this is my first solo publication since the HARLEM SMOKE novel/THE MAN WHO MURDERED HIS MUSE chapbook double whammy of 2019... the last few years since have been pretty fallow ha ha

It's been almost 3 years in the making (the project began as a few handwritten stories scrawled into a journal during the pandemic lockdown in 2020), but my 4th short story collection, PLEASANT TALES III, is finally complete (for the curious, the first PLEASANT TALES was written by Brendan Connell and the 2nd by Justin Isis).

At close to 150 pages and around 59,000 words, it's not as long as my prior collections, but, I think, a good read for those in a hurry. I still have some editing/proofing to do on it, but the main text itself is done.

The contents will be:

1. The Rainbow Road Apotheosis
2. A Soused March Hare
3. The Immaculate Restroom
4. Super Uneventful Oregon Trail
5. Black & White Vagina Odyssey
6. Exquisite Corpse
7. Dazed and Confused
8. Gay Homosexuality (co-written with Justin Isis)
9. Gwschend and I at the Blue Cat Café

For the last few weeks now I've been posting my writing tips/advice on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. For those who don't partake of such mediums, today I collected the entire series and posted them on my blog for posterity:

http://onyxglossary.blogspot.com/2020...

http://onyxglossary.blogspot.com/2020...

Today my blog has posted a new interview with Justin Isis, conducted by Colby Smith (both friends of mine), in advance of the publication of Smith’s essay “Hiccups in Paradise: the Fiction of Justin Isis and Alienation” (which is being put out by Snuggly Books this year). Topics include occultism and magick, Marxist fiction, Neo-Decadence and Post-Naturalism, the perils of craftsmanship and professionalism, and other topics of interest:

http://onyxglossary.blogspot.com/2020...

Today marks the one year anniversary of the publication of my second (professional) novel HARLEM SMOKE. Thanks to everyone who purchased it and were nice enough to send me their thoughts regarding it.