The Qliphoth

Beneath the Pleasure Zones #0

by Paul A. Green

Paul A Green's cult novel, first published by Libros Libertad in 2007, is now available on Kindle. It's a dazzling fusion of occult fantasy and speculative fiction that evokes a wild transmutation of everyday life. Magick collides with physics to create a fissile reality – a voyage into dangerous zones that veers between hilarity and horror...

Lucas, a bewildered student, seeks out his dad Nick, psychedelic-era wreck and self-proclaimed channel for "Qabalistic knowledge", now confined to a mental hospital alongside Wolfbane, a forgotten rock & roll icon. Pauline, his rationalist teacher mother dreads their encounter.

Her nightmares seem realised when Nick escapes and Lucas disappears – to enter a parallel world, peopled by a rogues' gallery of bohemian riff-raff and sexy priestesses, whose operations – artistic, erotic, criminal or magickal – are scribed with hallucinatory intensity. Think Mervyn Peake meets William Burroughs - and add a dash of Aleister Crowley...

This genre-bender is worm-holed with dark wit and satire. The manias of an imploding alternate world are revealed as a modulation of our obsessions, here at the base of The Qabalistic Tree, amid the broken shells and wreckage – the Qliphoth – of our Creation. And sea-side resorts will never seem the same again...

Genres: Horror, Dark Fantasy

Unknown Binding

First published March 10, 2007

About the author

I grew up in London, and studied at Oxford and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Poetry and short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, ranging from New Worlds to Poetics Journal, while my novel The Qliphoth is available on Amazon, published by Libros Libertad. A digital version for Kindle is also available, published by Libros Libertad UK. My Selected Poems were published in 2012 by Shearsman Books.

Another novel Beneath the Pleasure Zones was recently published by Mandrake of Oxford and a sequel is due next year.

Plays include : The Dream Laboratory (CBC Canada) ; Ritual of the Stifling Air (BBC Radio 3); Power_Play (Capital Radio); The Voice Collection (RTE Ireland) ; The Mouthpiece (Resonance FM London); Terminal Poet (New Theatre Works Hereford) and Babalon ( Travesty Theatre London ).

Other audio work has been broadcast on CBC, WFMU-FM and the Pacifica Network. A selection can be found on the Radio QBSaul podcast and at www.culturecourt.com. founded by my long-time collaborator Lawrence Russell, which also features my essays and reviews.

Video work includes The Slow Learning, a collaboration with digital artist Jeremy Welsh as The Quantum Brothers. Recent work on-line includes our latest multi media collaboration A Beginner's Guide to Radial City. A selection of texts and images from the project is available in e-book format, while one of the Radial City stories is featured in the recent Unthank Books short fiction collection Unthology 2

Reviews

[Bryan Wigmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very difficult to rate/review. It's exuberant, intelligent, sometimes brilliant, also frustrating, unclear, and self-indulgent to the point of encouraging skim-reading, especially towards the end. In some ways it's almost a match for The Invisibles -- Grant Morrison's superb graphic novel series -- but misses its heights of revelation and its sense that it genuinely has anything important to say about the nature of reality (though it does about the nature of society). I wonder if my previous knowledge of the Qabalah helped or hindered me here. Without it I might have been even more confused, but it possibly led me to expect more clarity and explanation than was on offer. I think it was probably a mistake to treat this as in any way a mystical/magickal novel, despite its appearances.

In the end I've rated it a 4 because it's almost unique, and I did enjoy 80%+ of it. I was thinking of dropping a star because of the many typesetting errors in this Createspace print version, but though I'm normally very picky about this kind of thing, I didn't find they actually affected my enjoyment much. I'll probably read the sequels at some point.

[Chloe Thurlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hooked & Aroused
As the world grows ever more dangerous, literature by contrast becomes safer, genre-bound, formulaic.

We don't have a Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon; there are no writers like the elegantly-restrained Nicholson Baker who portrays in The Mezzanine, a man who through 70,000 compelling words rides the same escalator; or Mark Danielewski, who brings in House of Leaves an experiment in typography, font sizes, academia and horror.

There are exceptions, and I would place the English writer Paul A Green on that flimsy list. I came across a battered, creased, underlined copy of his offbeat, weirdly named The Qliphoth some years ago and the whole Burroughs meets Kafka mystery came washing back into my mind like a forgotten excursion into Bedlam when I discovered that the book is now available for the Kindle world of digitization.

Like HG Ballard, Green takes the ordinary, the mundane, and sticks a firecracker in its rectum. The explosion is a magma eruption of mad, vividly-drawn characters who can make us laugh and weep, despise and even envy.

Now, who's who in this magickal realm: the faded rocker Wolfbane, a sort of live Jim Morrison; the bipolar Pauline, fearing an encounter with Wolfbane, with anyone; the dazed and confused Lucas seeking help from Nick, long gone on the ultimate acid trip from which no one ever returns. Nick's his dad, the sort of dad you imagine in the worst nightmare.

This is an hallucination of distorted realities and mirroring, parallel worlds peopled by the vane, the beautiful and the dead heads of a lost bohemia. The Qliphoth is rich in imagery, lyrical, beautifully written and you are sure to be using the highlighting tool if you download this truly unique and powerful novel. Click on the sample and, like a pinch of Spanish fly, you will be hooked and aroused.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wonder if there is a genre called jocular-horror, perhaps a very English genre where social satire and dystopianism meet. If so, Paul Green’s ‘The Qliphoth’ may be classed as a masterpiece of the type.

I must declare an interest straightaway. Paul is a friend who gifted me the book. According to my rules, this means that I have to be tougher on him than I would otherwise be. And, indeed, he was almost busted down a star at one moment for reasons I shall come on to.

But let’s start with the positives. Green’s novel, which ends almost too abruptly though I understand a sequel will justify this eventually, is yet another fruit of the creative interest around London and some American centres in the imaginative potential of occultism, magic and place.

There is a danger that this interest will burn itself out as all style but it has been a romantic revolt against the incredible dullness of most literary fiction, pushed out at its most dire as chick-lit and interminable eviscerations of neurotic middle class people who need to get a life.

Whether the crew around the Strange Attractor Journal, the psycho-geographers, relatively unknown experimental writers like Stephen Grasso or genre majors like China Mieville, the horror, science fiction, dark fantasy, fortean and magical worlds collide in what we might call chaos literature.

What else do they have in common? A certain playfulness with language, sometimes to the point of incomprehension. Hapless heroes who are driven by events beyond their full control (reflecting the lives of struggling writers). A darkness under the surface or chthonic forces malign or benign.

‘The Qlipoth’ inhabits this world. With its cultural conceit (all of this literature presupposes fascination with some esoteric system or with the hypnogogic imagination) being the idea of the ultimate shadow side of our material world, the formless chaos of the Kabbalistic ‘Qliphoth’.

Green takes the recurrent mythos of Crowleian magickal exploration of the dark side and, with great skill, draws it into a more modern tale of corporate greed that sub-consciously (given the 2007 publication date) foretells the mass sense of loss of control over market forces after the Crash.

It reminds us, as ‘sensitives’ might have told us at the time and tried, that the bubbling up of fear about a world in which great forces drive us up to wealth and tension and down to poverty and stress has been present for a long time. Green makes it ‘qliphotic’.

This political aspect of the book might easily be missed but Green is at his very best when he describes what life is like for people struggling to survive in a chaotic society. Chapter 13 set in an Inner City School is pure genius and alone ensures that fifth star.

Pauline, the female ‘heroine’ in a totally dysfunctional trio of father, mother and son, is the type of the dreary Marxist activist, that oppressive type whose dreams of a better world are at the heart of our inability to come to terms with the real ‘qliphotic’ in contemporary society.

Yet Pauline becomes a character with whom we have to sympathise because – as with all the other characters, including policemen and grubby occultist dim-wits – Green paints them all as rounded and confused. We are all rounded and confused. We can empathise.

With one or two thoroughly wicked exceptions, humanity is painted as out of control and, like all good horror stories, there are no resolutions that satisfy our desire for ‘closure’. None of the characters behaves as if they are anything other than deluded, with too little data to work with.

There is so much meat in the book (I will come to the criticism soon) that almost every concern of the ‘new imaginative’ writing is there but it is, above all, a critique of inhuman power-crazed and deluded magickal practice where imagined reality is treated as a tool of power.

The in-joke is entirely on those moderns who wear black and think that they can control chaos instead of it controlling them. They are just grubby tools of the real masters of the qliphotic.

A heart, Green (who may or may not deny this) is a subversive tool of the Enlightenment in opening us up to the stupidity of playing with dark forces for reasons solely of power or greed.

As for the writing, this is where Green almost lost a point until I realised what was going on and lost myself in it. Green is a poet as much as a novelist and he is trying to describe indescribable experiences (madness, chaos, magical experience, the breakdown of reality).

His brave attempts to do this through dense language at key points could be alienating because, in fact, no one can succeed at what he is trying to do. The point about the experiences of chaos and madness and of the breakdown of reality is that they are beyond words.

But if words can have any meaning, then the poetic is going to be more effective than the narrative. To ‘get through’ the bursts of linguistic legerdemain (which really are rather remarkable), it is best to employ two tricks.

The first is ‘read them aloud in your head’, to take them away from the normal flow of causality and declaim them as just words or incantations. Green understands declamation and he is literally radio broadcasting experience (a method which he obliquely alludes to more than once in the text).

The second is to read through the words regardless, hold the words and wait on events in the narrative which will retrospectively open the mind to the experience. This technique of retrospective comprehension was last seen by us in Tim Powers’ similarly dense ‘Declare’.

This sort of ‘supernatural’ novel has often required second reading for full comprehension – a recent example in our reviews has been the remarkable Charles William’s novel of the Christian supernatural ‘Descent into Hell’.

‘The Qlipoth’ is not up to the standard of ‘Descent into Hell’ if only because style (as in all ‘chaos literature’) does tend to verwhelm consistency of vision but it is still an achievement that just slips into the first rank.

I may have given the impression above that ‘The Qlipoth’ is difficult. This would be misleading. It is difficult in places because of its subject matter and its narrative can appear disconnected (and one suspects Green does like to write in set pieces) but the tale flows well enough.

It would be best to consider the book as the expression of a narrative dream set within a real framework. Social realism is intruded upon by a parallel narrative of a rather grubby parallel world punctuated by the close-to-indescribable.

It is also a very sexy book. Real magical practice is about power and self development. Crowley was a half-baked Nietzsche. It works magic on the person through analogical thinking with the constant risk (indeed standard result) that the magician is taken over by the analogy.

Personal power and self development is actually about libido which is more than simple sex but is rooted in our sexuality. The qliphotic sits at the other end of the constrained and restrained cold sexuality of Pauline, our Marxist anti-heroine. Somewhere in the middle is where it’s at.

Lucas, our teenage hero, experience a variety of dream state sexual adventures. His 'real' posh teenage totty is in the past and the magic takes place around the classic male dualism of pure lustful transgression in Leila and pining unfulfilled desire for the lovely Robyn.

Paul is clever here. He opens the door to the alchemical resolution of the erotic self through these archetypes and leaves us dangling. He subversively introduces (to male readers) their own inner selves and then walks away with the tale unresolved and unfulfilled – just like real life.

Meanwhile, while this magickal imagination ferments the male soul, outside is reality – the cool matriarchal feminism of Pauline and of policewomen. Never has the plight of the emasculated modern male in politically correct liberal society been better or more subversively expressed.

So, despite the poetic difficulties, a highly recommended and disturbing novel that may not quite make it into the big league but demonstrates both a superb writing talent and an insight into the mood of the time amongst our proletarianised urban graduate class.

On the evidence of this novel, I would say that a ‘qliphotic eruption’ may not be too far away if current conditions in the real and material world worsen in the coming years ... we are being warned by subtle means.