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Troglodyte Rose
- GenresFantasy
200 pages, Hardcover
First published October 30, 2009
11 people want to read
About the author
Adam Lowe
28 books56 followersAdam Lowe (he/his, mostly) is a writer, performer and publisher from Leeds, UK, though he currently lives in Manchester. He is the UK's LGBT+ History Month Poet Laureate and was Yorkshire's Poet for 2012 . He writes poetry, plays and fiction, and he occasionally performs in drag as Beyonce Holes. He is of Kittitian, British and Irish descent. He graduated with both a BA and MA from the University of Leeds, and is currently researching for a PhD in creative writing at the University of Manchester.
Adam Lowe writes about disability, LGBT+ experiences, and the lives of mixed-race Black British communities. Carol Rumens of The Guardian describes him as a 'versatile and widely published young writer'.
With afshan d'souza lodhi, Adam founded and runs Young Enigma, a writer development project for young writers; is Editor-in-Chief of Vada Magazine and Dog Horn Publishing; and is Publicity Officer for Peepal Tree Press. He has performed around the world, at festivals and conferences, including the Black and Asian Writers Conference. He is an advocate for LGBT+ rights and sits on the management committee for Schools OUT UK, the charity that founded LGBT History Month in the UK. He is chair of Black Gold Arts, which supports artists who are queer, trans and intersex people of colour (QTIPOC) in Greater Manchester.
In 2013, he was announced as one of 10 Black and Asian 'advanced poets' for The Complete Works II (founded by Bernardine Evaristo) with Mona Arshi, Jay Bernard, Kayo Chingoni, Rishi Dastidar, Edward Doegar, Inua Ellams, Sarah Howe, Eileen Pun and Warsan Shire, which resulted in the anthology Ten: The New Wave, edited by Karen McCarthy-Woolf (Bloodaxe). He was mentored on the programme by Patience Agbabi. He also made the list of '20 under 40' writers in Leeds for the LS13 Awards, where Lowe was given as an example of 'the non-conformist and boundary-breaking approach to writing in Leeds'.
In 2022, Adam edited the anthology The World Reimagined, featuring 30 poets writing on the subject of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Poets in the anthology included Benjamin Zephaniah, Keisha Thompson, Malika Booker, Dorothea Smartt, Nick Makoha, Tanya Shirley, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Shivanee Ramlochan and Shara McCallum.
Adam is also an alumnus of the Obsidian Foundation, and has taught for The Poetry School, PEN, the University of Leeds and the University of Central Lancashire.
Adam Lowe writes about disability, LGBT+ experiences, and the lives of mixed-race Black British communities. Carol Rumens of The Guardian describes him as a 'versatile and widely published young writer'.
With afshan d'souza lodhi, Adam founded and runs Young Enigma, a writer development project for young writers; is Editor-in-Chief of Vada Magazine and Dog Horn Publishing; and is Publicity Officer for Peepal Tree Press. He has performed around the world, at festivals and conferences, including the Black and Asian Writers Conference. He is an advocate for LGBT+ rights and sits on the management committee for Schools OUT UK, the charity that founded LGBT History Month in the UK. He is chair of Black Gold Arts, which supports artists who are queer, trans and intersex people of colour (QTIPOC) in Greater Manchester.
In 2013, he was announced as one of 10 Black and Asian 'advanced poets' for The Complete Works II (founded by Bernardine Evaristo) with Mona Arshi, Jay Bernard, Kayo Chingoni, Rishi Dastidar, Edward Doegar, Inua Ellams, Sarah Howe, Eileen Pun and Warsan Shire, which resulted in the anthology Ten: The New Wave, edited by Karen McCarthy-Woolf (Bloodaxe). He was mentored on the programme by Patience Agbabi. He also made the list of '20 under 40' writers in Leeds for the LS13 Awards, where Lowe was given as an example of 'the non-conformist and boundary-breaking approach to writing in Leeds'.
In 2022, Adam edited the anthology The World Reimagined, featuring 30 poets writing on the subject of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Poets in the anthology included Benjamin Zephaniah, Keisha Thompson, Malika Booker, Dorothea Smartt, Nick Makoha, Tanya Shirley, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Shivanee Ramlochan and Shara McCallum.
Adam is also an alumnus of the Obsidian Foundation, and has taught for The Poetry School, PEN, the University of Leeds and the University of Central Lancashire.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 26, 2009
Personally, I am a huge fan of books that can be read in a day, better still an afternoon. If a writer has anything worthwhile to say they should try to say it in as compact and precise as a manner as they can, any other objective verges on self-indulgence.
Adam Lowe’s Troglodyte Rose passes this “read in a day” test and a few others. I feel privileged to be one of the only one hundred owners of a beautiful limited-edition hardback copy (from Cadavarine Publications) released almost six months before the paperback in Spring 2010. I am envious of the quality of this book as a printed object, complete with magnificent colour illustrations by Kurt Higgins and Zelda Devon. There aren’t enough of these kind of writer-artist collaborations going on, given the potential freedom to do so that exists in the small-press short-print-run world. A new young writer, with experience as an editor of “Polluto” magazine, Adam Lowe is to be congratulated on what is a bold, fresh high-adrenalin debut novel. By accident rather than design perhaps, the delayed paperback will hit the shops after over a year of trailering on Lowe’s website dedicated to the book (where the wonderful illustrations flicker with interactive life), and I see he has already achieved good Google ratings for the name of the book…. a media-savvy child of our times of course.
The odd name “Troglodyte Rose” ironically turns out to be one of the more logical things about this book: being situated as it is, in an underground cave-dwelling city. Rose is a tearaway low-life in a world of hand-to-mouth crypto-cannibalistic existence, constantly breaking the law in pursuit of cheap drug highs and on the run from the “Justicars”: weird harpy-like winged monsters in wooden-beaks and flared trousers and trench coats that swoop over the grimey streets. Shadow and filth and atmosphere predominate, and Lowe has fun leading us through it. Rose’s partner-in-crime and lover is a hermaphrodite called Flid, (a great name, one of many) and to make us consider this implication properly Lowe even bends the English language by fusing “his” and “her” into “per” when referring to Flid. I had momentary hopes that this device might throw light into gender-sexuality issues, in the manner say, of Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand Of Darkness, but the book eschews any such serious over-arching intentions. But Lowe seems to love being Rose as he writes and to favour butch femininity generally amongst the book’s cast of characters, and therein perhaps lies a gentle kind of emancipation that anyone will enjoy.
Lowe’s imagination is untrammelled to say the least. I loved the first half of this book, and many sections throughout the second, but felt that mid-way through some kind of change of direction or surrender to convention had crept in. I imagine this writer grew up playing computer games, and to some extent the whole book feels like one big computer game, a mysterious treasure-hunt in the first half, a blockbusting shoot-em-up in the second half. That’s where he began to lose me a little though: in emulating the all-action finales of films like the Matrix, Terminator etc, he started at times to veer off towards cliché, into territory frankly, where we would better watching a film than reading a book. The strength and interest of this book (which is considerable) for me lies in what Lowe does that films can’t (or are unlikely to) do: strings of mad ideas like octopus women and half-wolf half-porcupine families, glass hand-held orbs swirling with orange gasses that transport those who inhale it to a golden world from which they can carry back real people and objects. Casinos peopled by animal-headed guests served drinks by pterodactyls. Of course I adore that kind of stuff, and prefer it served up with a minimum of sense and post-rationalisation. Every writer should only do what he wants and inspires himself most, but from my viewpoint I admire the Adam Lowe that reads like the books of Anna Kavan: voyager through a succession of pure irrational dreamscapes, more than I would admire the re-hasher of Hollywood’s dumbest action-packed count-downs.
I have long harboured the hope that film might have changed writing in much the same way as photography changed painting, and that we are therefore in a bold new era where novels don’t rely on the sequential any longer, but are a series of paragraphs each as good as a poem. Adam Lowe achieves this for at least two-thirds of this book, and that’s at least two thirds more than most of his contemporaries. The writing is not showy, but at its best a kind of evocation or invocation, a summoning up of wonderful new worlds before the reader’s eyes. He does this with modesty and generosity, so that the reader feels involved, there at the birth rather than just dumped with a fatherless baby. I suppose I mean he makes it up as he goes along, but he does it very nicely.
Adam Lowe’s Troglodyte Rose passes this “read in a day” test and a few others. I feel privileged to be one of the only one hundred owners of a beautiful limited-edition hardback copy (from Cadavarine Publications) released almost six months before the paperback in Spring 2010. I am envious of the quality of this book as a printed object, complete with magnificent colour illustrations by Kurt Higgins and Zelda Devon. There aren’t enough of these kind of writer-artist collaborations going on, given the potential freedom to do so that exists in the small-press short-print-run world. A new young writer, with experience as an editor of “Polluto” magazine, Adam Lowe is to be congratulated on what is a bold, fresh high-adrenalin debut novel. By accident rather than design perhaps, the delayed paperback will hit the shops after over a year of trailering on Lowe’s website dedicated to the book (where the wonderful illustrations flicker with interactive life), and I see he has already achieved good Google ratings for the name of the book…. a media-savvy child of our times of course.
The odd name “Troglodyte Rose” ironically turns out to be one of the more logical things about this book: being situated as it is, in an underground cave-dwelling city. Rose is a tearaway low-life in a world of hand-to-mouth crypto-cannibalistic existence, constantly breaking the law in pursuit of cheap drug highs and on the run from the “Justicars”: weird harpy-like winged monsters in wooden-beaks and flared trousers and trench coats that swoop over the grimey streets. Shadow and filth and atmosphere predominate, and Lowe has fun leading us through it. Rose’s partner-in-crime and lover is a hermaphrodite called Flid, (a great name, one of many) and to make us consider this implication properly Lowe even bends the English language by fusing “his” and “her” into “per” when referring to Flid. I had momentary hopes that this device might throw light into gender-sexuality issues, in the manner say, of Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand Of Darkness, but the book eschews any such serious over-arching intentions. But Lowe seems to love being Rose as he writes and to favour butch femininity generally amongst the book’s cast of characters, and therein perhaps lies a gentle kind of emancipation that anyone will enjoy.
Lowe’s imagination is untrammelled to say the least. I loved the first half of this book, and many sections throughout the second, but felt that mid-way through some kind of change of direction or surrender to convention had crept in. I imagine this writer grew up playing computer games, and to some extent the whole book feels like one big computer game, a mysterious treasure-hunt in the first half, a blockbusting shoot-em-up in the second half. That’s where he began to lose me a little though: in emulating the all-action finales of films like the Matrix, Terminator etc, he started at times to veer off towards cliché, into territory frankly, where we would better watching a film than reading a book. The strength and interest of this book (which is considerable) for me lies in what Lowe does that films can’t (or are unlikely to) do: strings of mad ideas like octopus women and half-wolf half-porcupine families, glass hand-held orbs swirling with orange gasses that transport those who inhale it to a golden world from which they can carry back real people and objects. Casinos peopled by animal-headed guests served drinks by pterodactyls. Of course I adore that kind of stuff, and prefer it served up with a minimum of sense and post-rationalisation. Every writer should only do what he wants and inspires himself most, but from my viewpoint I admire the Adam Lowe that reads like the books of Anna Kavan: voyager through a succession of pure irrational dreamscapes, more than I would admire the re-hasher of Hollywood’s dumbest action-packed count-downs.
I have long harboured the hope that film might have changed writing in much the same way as photography changed painting, and that we are therefore in a bold new era where novels don’t rely on the sequential any longer, but are a series of paragraphs each as good as a poem. Adam Lowe achieves this for at least two-thirds of this book, and that’s at least two thirds more than most of his contemporaries. The writing is not showy, but at its best a kind of evocation or invocation, a summoning up of wonderful new worlds before the reader’s eyes. He does this with modesty and generosity, so that the reader feels involved, there at the birth rather than just dumped with a fatherless baby. I suppose I mean he makes it up as he goes along, but he does it very nicely.
September 24, 2010
I was given this book to review.
There are lots of ways one could define Troglodyte Rose, urban dystopia, bizarro...but at its heart Troglodyte Rose is a fairytale, an old one, straight out of Grimm's more far fetched imaginings. Rose and Flid (a hermaphrodite) live in a dystopian world, half-described, half felt, where they're something of a Bonnie and Clyde. In their search for meaning or life in a world that's simultaneously been sterilized and organized for the benefit of some, and is dirty and savage for others, Rose and Flid come across a drug, Haze, which functions almost like bottled hope.
While they're high everything is possible, including traveling to other worlds and rescuing princesses, or even the more mundane--feelings of satisfaction and peace. But of course Haze is highly illegal. The only way to get it is to steal from the pipes that carry it up to the upper classes, the elite (and captive) who are the only ones allowed to dream. When Rose and Flid get caught siphoning the pipes the full force of the Justicars come crashing down on them. Homeless, destined for only death or slavery, Rose and Flid set out to bring the whole world down with them, via revolution.
A very visual, but chaotic tale Troglodyte Rose is never without either the fairy tale feeling, or the brutal hope that Rose and Flid can make better lives for themselves. Some readers will be put off by the completely illogical world setting, but others will find within these pages a beautiful tale of freedom that skirts traditional storytelling rules.
There are lots of ways one could define Troglodyte Rose, urban dystopia, bizarro...but at its heart Troglodyte Rose is a fairytale, an old one, straight out of Grimm's more far fetched imaginings. Rose and Flid (a hermaphrodite) live in a dystopian world, half-described, half felt, where they're something of a Bonnie and Clyde. In their search for meaning or life in a world that's simultaneously been sterilized and organized for the benefit of some, and is dirty and savage for others, Rose and Flid come across a drug, Haze, which functions almost like bottled hope.
While they're high everything is possible, including traveling to other worlds and rescuing princesses, or even the more mundane--feelings of satisfaction and peace. But of course Haze is highly illegal. The only way to get it is to steal from the pipes that carry it up to the upper classes, the elite (and captive) who are the only ones allowed to dream. When Rose and Flid get caught siphoning the pipes the full force of the Justicars come crashing down on them. Homeless, destined for only death or slavery, Rose and Flid set out to bring the whole world down with them, via revolution.
A very visual, but chaotic tale Troglodyte Rose is never without either the fairy tale feeling, or the brutal hope that Rose and Flid can make better lives for themselves. Some readers will be put off by the completely illogical world setting, but others will find within these pages a beautiful tale of freedom that skirts traditional storytelling rules.
November 28, 2010
An awesomely bizarre short novel of rebels in a dystopian science fantasy punk world, Trog Rose lives in an underground city with her hermaphrodite friend/lover Flid. The two struggle with daily living, avoiding grotesque police forces that could enslave them or turn them into the food source (canabalism of the "undesirables" is apparently a-ok in this future-scary as frak), and daily escape in any way they can-violent VR games, fleeting drug trips, anything to take them away from the despondent world they are bound to. Simultaneously discovering a wild new hallucinogenic that might be a literal gateway to other worlds, and a quartet of four fairytale princesses that quickly adapt to their grungy new surroundings, Rose and Flid begin to enact a plan for permanent freedom, by any means necessary. My main minor complaint/wish was that this had been longer: I really wanted to know more of Rose and Flid themselves; was it the sheer desperation and dependency of their world that caused them to almost never argue? Their lovable characters, and I wanted more. The detour with the fantasy princesses surprised me, but I understood it as a smart continuation of theme by the end, though with the shorter length, it did take me away from Rose and Flid. While the layered mesh of apocalyptic science fiction, horror, and traditional fantasy is recognizable, Lowe's depiction of the passionate yearning for escape and control of their own destinies is not. The greatest thing of Troglodyte Rose is its essence as a story about yearning, for control over your own life (right wing Justicars, leave us glbt people alone!) and stories that amaze, enlighten, and cast wonder on our mundane lives.
August 5, 2013
I recently stumbled upon this novel in Wattpad, where it's available for free as a novella. I was drawn to it because it was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, an award that celebrates "the best lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender books of the year".
Troglodyte Rose is a sci-fi that feels like a mesh between Mad Max and Tank Girl. It's written in short, psychedelic sentences, mostly through the eyes of a young woman, Rose, who lives in an apocalyptic underworld with her lover Flid, an intersex (hermaphrodite) referred to in the text with the gender-neutral pronoun "per" (borrowed from Margaret Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time".)
Rose and Flid are addicted to a drug that blurs reality and fantasy, and their lives are centred on stealing this drug while also dreaming of one day escaping to the overground. They nonchalantly save four princesses from a nearby world early on and the princesses join them in their robberies. Like most dystopias, this one has its monsters that keep the population in check: the Justicars hunt down anyone perceived to have committed a crime and are terrifying creatures nearly impossible to destroy. Soon, one of them is after Rose, Flid and the princesses.
This was an enjoyable, punchy read that left me wanting more. Some of its zest reminded me of Poppy Z. Brite's early novels. I look forward to whatever Adam Lowe comes up with next.
Troglodyte Rose is a sci-fi that feels like a mesh between Mad Max and Tank Girl. It's written in short, psychedelic sentences, mostly through the eyes of a young woman, Rose, who lives in an apocalyptic underworld with her lover Flid, an intersex (hermaphrodite) referred to in the text with the gender-neutral pronoun "per" (borrowed from Margaret Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time".)
Rose and Flid are addicted to a drug that blurs reality and fantasy, and their lives are centred on stealing this drug while also dreaming of one day escaping to the overground. They nonchalantly save four princesses from a nearby world early on and the princesses join them in their robberies. Like most dystopias, this one has its monsters that keep the population in check: the Justicars hunt down anyone perceived to have committed a crime and are terrifying creatures nearly impossible to destroy. Soon, one of them is after Rose, Flid and the princesses.
This was an enjoyable, punchy read that left me wanting more. Some of its zest reminded me of Poppy Z. Brite's early novels. I look forward to whatever Adam Lowe comes up with next.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews