The Phantasmagorical Imperative and Other Fabrications is D. P. Watt’s wonder cabinet of obsessive, carefully written supernatural stories told by a breed of bachelor narrators who are a cross between M.R. James’s buttoned-down antiquarians and H. P. Lovecraft’s high-strung, slightly hysterical misfits—with a dash of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Bruno Schulz thrown in. The collective fate of these characters is to bend matter or be bent by it into strange new dimensional realities...
- Victoria Nelson
The book collects two novellas and eight short stories (two of which have never appeared previously in print), as well as specially written forewords and afterwords, by Victoria Nelson and Eugene Thacker respectively. The full table of contents is as follows:
Foreword by Victoria Nelson
The Phantasmagorical Imperative
Laudate Dominum (for many voices)
By Nature’s Power Enshrined
Holzwege
Dehiscence
The Ten Dictates of Alfred Tesseller
...he was water before he was fire...
14ml of Matt Enamel #61
Vertep
A Harvest of Abandon
Afterword ‘As If’ by Eugene Thacker
The book is a lithographically printed, 224 page sewn hardback with colour endpapers, limited to 250 copies.
