Necrosmologies by Anthony Cartwright

Description

That the beetle god was dying was clear enough — maybe the fact it was dying meant it had never been a god. How would we know?

“Both real and unreal, both beautiful and bordering on terrifying”.
—Kerry Hadley-Pryce, author of The Black Country, God’s Country and Gamble

“There are ghosts, lindworms, the undead and more unfathomable creatures besides. Cartwright reminds us the landscape is alive—what we thought were inanimate soils are rich with creatures and stories that illuminate who we are, who we’ve been and who we could be again. I’m livid with envy I didn’t come up with this. It’s sensational!”
—R. M. Francis

Perfect for fans of Italo Calvino, and Jorg Luis Borges, Necrosmologies is a collection of speculative fiction that that reimagines industrial process and the experiences of working-class families, centring on the Black Country in the English West Midlands.

Set in a series of overlapping realities: worlds dealing with environmental catastrophe; an alternative reality where magical creatures perform the work of industrialisation, the real town of Dudley and its subterranean mirror-world, Yeldud; an alternative political history, where Labour leader Mary Macarthur almost becomes British Prime Minister in the 1920s and a 1970s Birmingham where workers catch space-ferries to quarries on the moon.

ANTHONY CARTWRIGHT was born in Dudley in 1973. His first novel ‘The Afterglow’ won a Betty Trask Award & was shortlisted for several other literary prizes; his second novel ‘Heartland ‘was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize & was adapted for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime; his third novel ‘How I Killed Margaret Thatcher’ was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize & was a Fiction Uncovered 2013 selection.