The Urban Book of the Dead

Urban Book of the dead is my second book to be published, after 'The Unrequited Zombie'. It is a rather less experimental work, though still unusual, vivid, and descriptive. I would describe the book as both psychedelic and surreal, being rather pedantic about the use of those two words. That is, if it were surreal I would be dealing with a psychological work, something that looked towards expanding knowledge of the Id, that primitive part of our nature that is repressed by social conventions and the need to plan to get what we want. It is, in that it is self gratifying without recourse to opinion, it is every animalistic urge that can only be released through art, because to do it any other way would have terrible repercussions. Having said that, next to my early work, it is not particularly arty or deep. It is psychedelic because it looks to reaching a higher consciousness by through creativity, to reach a state beyond the normal level of seeing things, it is also psychedelic and surreal in the commonly understood sense, it is 'trippy' and sometimes deals with drugs. It starts like this. "I floated above my body, I was a bubble fit to burst, I squeezed and struggled with my form, my clothes gripping and distorting my figure with their relative solidity, were the same ghost like material as the rest of me. Down below my face stared back at me; distorted and grotesque as the spirit shapes on the bark of trees, I felt my ghost face and it was etched there too, deforming me, chiselled by a million molecules of heroin, I had my wings, hung as from a pin, spread and feathered, and spanning the whole nicotine ceiling. I stared at the blue marbled arm; growing out like the gnarled branch of a tree, the fingers gesturing me towards it, and hanging from it, the syringe full of bubbles, blood and a quicksand of powdered death whirling like a vortex. A spoon lay on the floor and a small bit of cigarette filter in it, all having served a purely symbolic process. It seemed years of injecting powders and stuff flicked down to a dirty lemonade had paid off, perhaps a bubble could kill you after all." The book is I think taking one thing at least to a new level in literature, egomania. That is because the concept of the book is I the authors fight with god who is defeated, whilst at the same time dealing with my real life struggles as I go back through things that really actually happened to me in my drug filled and violent life as a drug dealer and through prison etcetera, and, changing them. I say egomania but again I mean the Id, the ego compromises, the Id does not. It is a very angry book because I am taking back the control that was taken from me, in that, to a very large extent I did not choose my life but it was forced on me, as with all the mishaps of all my dead friends who did not survive, through suicide, alcoholism, heroin overdose and murder. Enter God. God then is a symbol for society, capitalism, and the state, and also, plain bad luck. So is God then not God, is the book not satanic? My interest in black magic personally does not extend to believing in it, or God in any accepted sense either. I believe in magic as will, that Hitler could gain power through will is magic, that people can realise the future not through clairvoyance but precognition, taking in the world around them and understanding consciously or unconsciously where it is all going to lead, that kind of magic I believe, the other sort I only have a fair knowledge of as an interest and I am not a Satanist, that would be a misplacement of effort. "The noise got louder, but lower, rather than higher, so it travelled further and vibrated the walls. Crack's appeared in the walls in the form of a hundred distorted faces of people I had known, adventured and suffered with. A fragment of glass from a picture of 'Judith with the head of Hollerfernes' hit me in my eye, almost bursting my substance, which it settled in like a bloody monocle, magnifying the Africa