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The Smell of Telescopes
Welsh writer Rhys Hughes regards this as his favourite book, and with good reason. It is one of the funniest and most intelligent books from the lighter side of macabre writing I have ever seen. It clamours with a cast of pirates, floppy-wristed welsh bards, explorers and inventors, imps, squonks, moving public houses, M R Jamesian revenants, M R Jamesian punctuation, blueberry pies, trousers, noses, clocks, carrots . . . I cant list them all here, there isn't room. Like all the best books, this quirky and surreal collection is hard to classify, but it lies in that region where the macabre and eerie worlds of classic horror and fantasy become a basis for something else - for a dark and original sense of humour filled with unexpected cross-references, homages, satires and black comedy. What makes this collection remarkable is not just the delightfully murky and skewed tales themselves, but the complex and ingenious way they all lock together and interrelate. I was going to say 'tessellate' but if this is a tessellation then it is filled with impossible-sided polygons, non-Euclidean three-dimensional geometry, unexpurgated curves and cracks from which blueberry-scented steam emerges with a screaming hiss. But what is without doubt is that 'The Smell of Telescopes' is a magnificent book and a cornerstone of the rather oddly shaped corner of literature that it occupies. Since the first edition went out of print, the unavailability of this book has been a great crime of literature. And Eibonvale Press is, as always, dedicated to the righting of the world's more substantial wrongs.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2000
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143 people want to read
About the author
Rhys Hughes
326 books320 followersA writer of Speculative Fiction who uses fantasy and comedy to explore unusual concepts. Known for his original ideas, intricate plots, love of paradox, and entertaining wordplay.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 10, 2014
The book features 26 interconnected short stories, subdivided into a number of story cycles that interact with each other and are resolved and justified by the final story.
Michael Moorcock has rated The Smell of Telescopes as one of the ten most overlooked speculative fiction classics
The contents:
The Banker Of Ingolstadt
Ten Grim Bottles
Spermaceti Whiskers
The Blue Dwarf
The Purloined Liver
The Squonk Laughed
Telegram Ma'am
Depressurised Ghost Story
Thanatology Spleen
The Tell-Tale Nose
A Girl Like A Doric Column
The Orange Goat
Nothing More Common
Muscovado Lashes
A Person Not In The Story
Bridge Over Troubled Blood
Burke And Rabbit
The Yellow Imp
Lanolin Brows
The Haunted Womb
Mister Humphrey's Clock's Inheritance
There Was A Ghoul Dwelt By A Mosque
The Purple Pastor
The Hush Of Falling Houses
The Sickness Of Satan
Omophagia Ankles
This is copy 199 of 250 signed numbered copies.
Michael Moorcock has rated The Smell of Telescopes as one of the ten most overlooked speculative fiction classics
The contents:
The Banker Of Ingolstadt
Ten Grim Bottles
Spermaceti Whiskers
The Blue Dwarf
The Purloined Liver
The Squonk Laughed
Telegram Ma'am
Depressurised Ghost Story
Thanatology Spleen
The Tell-Tale Nose
A Girl Like A Doric Column
The Orange Goat
Nothing More Common
Muscovado Lashes
A Person Not In The Story
Bridge Over Troubled Blood
Burke And Rabbit
The Yellow Imp
Lanolin Brows
The Haunted Womb
Mister Humphrey's Clock's Inheritance
There Was A Ghoul Dwelt By A Mosque
The Purple Pastor
The Hush Of Falling Houses
The Sickness Of Satan
Omophagia Ankles
This is copy 199 of 250 signed numbered copies.
January 27, 2009
Smell Of Telescopes features short fictions that are fermented out of batches of Victorian adventure tales, Beckett’s sad/funny absurdism, gothic parodies, English nonsense poetry, M.R. James’s ghost stories, Arabian nights entertainments, and E.A. Poe, and the end result is tales dense with humor, weird jokes, impossible events, puns, references to history and literature, peopled with ghosts, pirates, living dolls, gorgons, imps and lots of tricksters. It’s all a little insane, but also endlessly fun.
June 27, 2009
This is a new edition from Eibonvale Press from 2007 of a collection of short stories first published by the highly respected small press, Tartarus Books, in 2000. I don't have the original version for comparison, but this one has a couple of oddities: like the other Eibonvale books so far, each paragraph begins with a gigantic indent, creating hundreds of unintentional ellipses, and full stops are followed by two spaces instead of one, which gets annoying over the course of a whole book. Also, the space between each story includes two to four blank pages: providing time to decompress, perhaps, but adding up to about sixty blank pages in total. On the other hand, this edition adds striking illustrated title pages to each story, and the author has said that this is his preferred version of the text.
Though each of the stories works alone, there are connections between them. Largely they fall into four categories.
One set deals with Captain Morgan's retired pirates, scoundrels such as Spermaceti Whiskers, Thanatology Spleen, Muscovado Lashes, Lanolin Brows and Omophagia Ankles. These were the stories I had most trouble with - the first couple I found almost entirely impenetrable - I had to nail my eyes to the page to stop them running away. Lanolin Brows, though, was brilliant: a pirate makes himself a suit of armour from wood, and goes on to create an entire city from the stuff. Omophagia Ankles ties together many of the book's threads for a very satisfying conclusion.
Four stories tell of two troubled lovers, Myfanwy and Owain, and their travails with pies, imps, trousers and souls: The Blue Dwarf, The Orange Goat, The Yellow Imp and The Purple Pastor. The first was almost painfully quirky, but the last was superb, leaving the hero in a most unusual position.
Five stories concern the strange town of Ladloh, its inhabitants and politics: Ten Grim Bottles, The Purloined Liver, A Person Not in the Story, Burke and Rabbit, and The Hush of Falling Houses. These were my favourites in the volume, in particular The Hush of Falling Houses, in which Ladlow must face its final fate - again.
Twelve stories are more or less standalones: The Banker of Ingolstadt, The Squonk Laughed, Telegraph Ma'am, Depressurised Ghost Story, The Tell-Tale Nose, A Girl Like a Doric Column, Nothing More Common, Bridge Over Troubled Blood, The Haunted Womb, Mr Humphrey's Clock's Inheritance, There Was a Ghoul Dwelt by a Mosque, The Sickness of Satan. All of these were very good, and are the most accessible. My favourites were Depressurised Ghost Story and Mr Humphrey's Clock's Inheritance, a story on the perils of licking furniture.
This was a very challenging book to read. Every line is so dense, so filled with allusions, in-jokes and puns that I halted and stuttered in my reading, reminding me of when I began to read novels in French for the first time. Every line needed to be decoded, sifted for meaning before I could understand it or move on to the next. But the more of it I read, the more I settled into it, the more I enjoyed it. I started to pick up on the internal connections, stopped worrying so much about catching every nuance, and stopped looking up the words I didn't know in a dictionary. By the time I finished The Count of Monte Cristo I was reading French very well; by the end of this book I wouldn't say I was fluent in Hughes, but I was making my way with more confidence, and looking forward to the next volume.
When you read a book of short stories, it's easy to assume the stories appear in chronological order. I don't know if that's the case here, but even allowing for my steady acclimatization to Rhys Hughes' writing, my impression was that as the book went on the puns became less laboured, the twists became more natural, and the stories were better. The first edition of this book dates back to 2000, the stories I imagine are even older: I'm very much looking forward to reading the author's subsequent work, especially the forthcoming Twisthorn Bellow from Atomic Fez.
Though each of the stories works alone, there are connections between them. Largely they fall into four categories.
One set deals with Captain Morgan's retired pirates, scoundrels such as Spermaceti Whiskers, Thanatology Spleen, Muscovado Lashes, Lanolin Brows and Omophagia Ankles. These were the stories I had most trouble with - the first couple I found almost entirely impenetrable - I had to nail my eyes to the page to stop them running away. Lanolin Brows, though, was brilliant: a pirate makes himself a suit of armour from wood, and goes on to create an entire city from the stuff. Omophagia Ankles ties together many of the book's threads for a very satisfying conclusion.
Four stories tell of two troubled lovers, Myfanwy and Owain, and their travails with pies, imps, trousers and souls: The Blue Dwarf, The Orange Goat, The Yellow Imp and The Purple Pastor. The first was almost painfully quirky, but the last was superb, leaving the hero in a most unusual position.
Five stories concern the strange town of Ladloh, its inhabitants and politics: Ten Grim Bottles, The Purloined Liver, A Person Not in the Story, Burke and Rabbit, and The Hush of Falling Houses. These were my favourites in the volume, in particular The Hush of Falling Houses, in which Ladlow must face its final fate - again.
Twelve stories are more or less standalones: The Banker of Ingolstadt, The Squonk Laughed, Telegraph Ma'am, Depressurised Ghost Story, The Tell-Tale Nose, A Girl Like a Doric Column, Nothing More Common, Bridge Over Troubled Blood, The Haunted Womb, Mr Humphrey's Clock's Inheritance, There Was a Ghoul Dwelt by a Mosque, The Sickness of Satan. All of these were very good, and are the most accessible. My favourites were Depressurised Ghost Story and Mr Humphrey's Clock's Inheritance, a story on the perils of licking furniture.
This was a very challenging book to read. Every line is so dense, so filled with allusions, in-jokes and puns that I halted and stuttered in my reading, reminding me of when I began to read novels in French for the first time. Every line needed to be decoded, sifted for meaning before I could understand it or move on to the next. But the more of it I read, the more I settled into it, the more I enjoyed it. I started to pick up on the internal connections, stopped worrying so much about catching every nuance, and stopped looking up the words I didn't know in a dictionary. By the time I finished The Count of Monte Cristo I was reading French very well; by the end of this book I wouldn't say I was fluent in Hughes, but I was making my way with more confidence, and looking forward to the next volume.
When you read a book of short stories, it's easy to assume the stories appear in chronological order. I don't know if that's the case here, but even allowing for my steady acclimatization to Rhys Hughes' writing, my impression was that as the book went on the puns became less laboured, the twists became more natural, and the stories were better. The first edition of this book dates back to 2000, the stories I imagine are even older: I'm very much looking forward to reading the author's subsequent work, especially the forthcoming Twisthorn Bellow from Atomic Fez.
January 26, 2020
Each individual story in this collection is well written, clever, and fascinatingly macabre, and many of them are funny. The problem is that they are too similar to each other, and across the length of the book, I became less and less interested.
April 19, 2021
This is the first Hughes book I ever read, loaned to me by a friend who collected unusual texts. It’s an incredibly clever work, super weird interlinking stories that reminded me of twisted fairytales or some demented short films I’ve seen. There’s a whimsy to the language I haven’t come across in any other authors work, and the stories become addictive. I think Hughes’ collections still constitute the most books by a single author on my kindle.
January 10, 2021
A rolling conceit-to-conceit classic of this author, with a probably unique style for the year 2000 when it was published, and only this author has maintained such a supreme level of fictionatronic absurdity since then.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.
May 17, 2017
Very unusual and very entertaining with a clearly British style of humor mashing against a macabre backdrop.
July 8, 2017
Incredible imagination. Most of the stories were too baroque for me. But still four stars, because the other stories make it all worth while.
February 5, 2015
Rhys Hughes writes stories that are dense with allusion, full of whimsical flights of fancy and weird horror. This was his 2nd book, originally from Tartarus Press in a lovely hardcover edition, reissued by them as an ebook. The formatting looks good, with no noticeable errors in the text. The book was re-re-issued by Eibonville press in HC, which I have not seen (another reviewer here didn't care for the production values of that edition, at all). The author claims this as his favorite of his books, and I'd agree. It is a great introduction to his work, too, if you are a new reader. You can read several of the stories, here, in the ebook preview.
Any attempts at summaries of Hughes works tempt spoiling the plots, so I'll just say I enjoyed the book a great deal. The stories reminded me at times of Angela Carter, Lord Dunsany, & Maurice Richardson (all acknowledged influences).
Here are the Contents:
The Banker of Ingolstadt
Ten Grim Bottles
Spermaceti Whiskers
The Blue Dwarf
The Purloined Liver
The Squonk Laughed
Telegram Ma'am
Depressurised Ghost Story
Thanatology Spleen
The Tell-Tale Nose
A Girl Like a Doric Column
The Orange Goat
Nothing More Common
Muscovado Lashes
A Person Not in the Story
Bridge Over Troubled Blood
Burke and Rabbit
The Yellow Imp
Lanolin Brows
The Haunted Womb
Mister Humphrey's Clock's Inheritance
There was a Ghoul Dwelt by a Mosque
The Purple Pastor
The Hush of Falling Houses
The Sickness of Satan
Omophagia Ankles
Any attempts at summaries of Hughes works tempt spoiling the plots, so I'll just say I enjoyed the book a great deal. The stories reminded me at times of Angela Carter, Lord Dunsany, & Maurice Richardson (all acknowledged influences).
Here are the Contents:
The Banker of Ingolstadt
Ten Grim Bottles
Spermaceti Whiskers
The Blue Dwarf
The Purloined Liver
The Squonk Laughed
Telegram Ma'am
Depressurised Ghost Story
Thanatology Spleen
The Tell-Tale Nose
A Girl Like a Doric Column
The Orange Goat
Nothing More Common
Muscovado Lashes
A Person Not in the Story
Bridge Over Troubled Blood
Burke and Rabbit
The Yellow Imp
Lanolin Brows
The Haunted Womb
Mister Humphrey's Clock's Inheritance
There was a Ghoul Dwelt by a Mosque
The Purple Pastor
The Hush of Falling Houses
The Sickness of Satan
Omophagia Ankles
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews