Elmer Crowley

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A Katabasic Nekyia
Tom Bradley
(illustrated by David Aronson & Nick Patterson)

Elmer Crowley / USA & AUS / $22.00

Elmer Crowley / UK / £15.00


Elmer Crowley
A Katabasic Nekyia
Tom Bradley, David Aronson, Nick Patterson.
Format: Softcover/132 pp – illustrated – many in colour.
ISBN: 978-1-906958-55-8
US $22.00 / UK £15.00
Subjects: Aleister Crowley & Thelema/picaresque graphic novel.

Bless me,
curse me.
For better or worse, my fallopian fall into matter. . .

After making careful preparations to ensure himself a proper reincarnation,
the dying ALEISTER CROWLEY flubs one syllable of the magickal incantation . . .
and comes back as ELMER FUDD.

———————–

– Back story on this publication –

David Aronson has become ill, and is unable to complete the illustrations for ELMER CROWLEY. But the good news is that the great Nick Patterson has agreed to step in. Nick collaborated with Tom Bradley on a couple of books, including FAMILY ROMANCE (Jaded Ibis Press)–

www.thedrillpress.com/sad/2012-08-01/sad-2012-08-01-romance-tbradley-01.shtml

Just by coincidence, this happens to work out perfectly.
After making careful preparations to ensure himself a proper reincarnation, the dying Aleister Crowley flubs one syllable of the magickal incantation…and comes back as Elmer Fudd.

The pictures David Aronson did before getting sick are black and white. They take Crowley from his death, through his judgement in the Hall of the Divine Kings, and stop just as he is being sucked into Looney Tunes Land.

At that point, Nick Patterson takes over, and the color is switched on. It’s like the old movie, when Dorothy gets out of Kansas and arrives in Oz. The different style of pictures announces the big change in scene.

—-

– Praise for Elmer Crowley: a katabasic nekyia

Reading Elmer Crowley is like reading Crowley’s inner dialogue at 3am, after an intensive journey into his own inner abyss. It is, therefore, a magickal working that Crowley himself would be proud of.
– Gwendolyn von Taunton, author of Northern Traditions

Of Aleister Crowley’s many fictionalizations, this novel gets best into his head. Erudite, prideful, lascivious, funniest man of his time, and the mightiest spiritual spelunker–he speaks and shouts from these pages as clearly as he did in his Autohagiography, which is paradoxical, given the irreal setting.
– Barry Katz, HTMLGIANT

This book…captures the feel of Crowley with his bawdy, politically incorrect irreverence, his arrogance and his committed magickal spirituality and awareness.
– Charlotte Rogers, author of P is for Prostitute

The voice is dead perfect…I can’t imagine a hip Thelemite NOT having this book in her library.
– Don Webb, author of Through Dark Angles, former High Priest, Temple of Set

This self-described “picaresque graphic novel” reads like an account of Crowley’s death-bed fever dream or an afterlife bardo journey gone terribly wrong, wherein the fifty-eight Wrathful Deities take on the aspect of warped and sinister versions of Looney Toons archetypes…. the result reads like a trippy, post-mortem, long-lost epilogue to The Confessions.
– Richard Kaczynski, author of Perdurbo: The Life of Aleister Crowley

Tom Bradley

When Tom Bradley was a little boy he was given a gazetteer for Christmas. As little boys will, he looked up all the places in the world that start with the F-word. There were two, Fukien in China and Fukuoka in Japan. Little did he suspect that he would one day be exiled to both.

Tom is a former lounge harpist. During his pre-exilic period, he played his own transcriptions of Bach and Debussy in a Salt Lake City synagogue that had been transformed into a pricey watering hole by a nephew of the Shah of Iran.

He taught anglophone literature to Chinese graduate students in the years leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was politely invited to leave China after burning a batch of student essays about the democracy movement rather than surrendering them to “the leaders.”

Tom wound up teaching conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese “imperial university” where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at festive banquets. But his writing somehow sustains him.

Tom’s latest books are Family Romance, a novel illustrated by Nick Patterson (Jaded Ibis Press), A Pleasure Jaunt With One of the Sex Workers Who Don’t Exist in the People’s Republic of China (Neopoiesis Press), Bomb Baby (Enigmatic Ink), Vital Fluid (Crossing Chaos), Even the Dog Won’t Touch Me (Ahadada Press), Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch (Dog Horn Publishing), My Hands Were Clean (Unlikely Books) and Put It Down in a Book (The Drill Press), which was named 3:AM Magazine’s Non-Fiction Book of the Year. Further curiosity can be indulged at http://tombradley.org.

Reviews and blurbs:

Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something so strange that it might well be genius.
— Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily

I tell you that Dr. Bradley has devoted his existence to writing because he intends for every center of consciousness, everywhere, in all planes and conditions (not just terrestrial female Homo sapiens in breeding prime), to love him forever, starting as soon as possible, though he’s prepared to wait thousands of centuries after he’s dead.
— Cye Johan, Exquisite Corpse

The contemporaries of Michelangelo found it useful to employ the term “terribilita” to characterize some of the expressions of his genius, and I will quote it here to sum up the shocking impact of this work as a whole. I read it in a state of fascination, admiration, awe, anxiety, and outrage.
— R.V. Cassill, editor of The Norton Anthology of Fiction