Metal Sushi
David Conway
Oneiros Books pbk, £7.95 (ISBN 1 902197 00 3)
Reviewed by John Coulthart

First of all let me declare a partisan position here: I produced the cover art for this book so anyone expecting an impartial review will have to look elsewhere. When David Mitchell’s newly established Oneiros Books enquired about a commission, I was more than happy to oblige for this extraordinary collection.

Confessions to one side, what have we got? Six stories from David Conway, Jesuit-schooled erstwhile member of My Bloody Valentine. Grant Morrison’s introduction describes Conway as ‘the most powerful and distinctive writer of horror fiction since Clive Barker made his debut a decade ago.’ He is that and considerably more. Where Barker was merely extending the horror tradition maintained by writers like Ramsey Campbell, adding his own themes of sexuality and body-horror, Conway transcends genre altogether, forging a unique vision from an amalgam of generic modes. This is a characteristic of all great imaginative writing when it functions as the Sargasso Sea of fiction, an unfrequented zone where many currents run together and the inscription on the map states ‘Here be monsters.’

The monsters in Metal Sushi are rich and strange. ‘Eloise’ gives an account of paternal incest and genetic miscegenation which weds the Poe of Berenice with the age of death-camp doctors and DNA vivisectors. ‘Eloise’ is good but the next one up, ‘Manta Red’ is simply incredible, the single best story I’ve had the pleasure to read in a long, long time. To call this story science fiction (or worse, cyberpunk) is to demean and circumscribe its intensity. Inevitably a flat description of events (psychotropic carnage, hermaphrodite mutation, physical and psychological metamorphosis) conveys nothing of the story's principal qualities, namely the vivid concentration of the writing, ‘prose... made to be snorted rather than read’, says Morrison. If that were not enough, the invention at work here puts to shame the entire output of legions of lesser writers.

'Omegaville' follows, a story of quantum disintegration on a distant planet, birthed in the radiance from that dark star called J G Ballard. Which raises a question: why does Ballard, one of Britain’s greatest living writers, seem to exert no influence on his contemporaries? Answer: because they lack the vision. David Conway has the vision and, importantly, the means to convey it. In the long centrepiece Metal Sushi he drags HP Lovecraft’s piscatorial congeries squirming and thrashing into Blade Runner dystopia to tremendous effect. That he braves the tropes of Ballard and Lovecraft demonstrates his ambition; that he can pull it off shows his brilliance.

After so much wild imagining the caricatures of 'Zapruder Boulevard' come as a disappointment but things pick up again with 'Black Static', another Lovecraftian apocalypse weaving astrophysical, quantum and biological inquisition in a churning, fervid maelstrom.

This is a book which leaves the senses convulsed in the delirium one might expect after a week spent mainlining mescaline. Walter Pater said: ‘to burn always with a hard gem-like flame, that is success in life’. David Conway’s flame is diamond bright, and it burns with the fury of an exploding sun.