FROM CRYPTOPOLIS TO OUTER SPACE!

Back on Friday the 13th (a coincidental but appropriate date), I appeared on Tarek Al-Ubaidi's popular Austrian podcast, CROPfm, for over three hours. During the first half of the show we discussed my book, CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES, and the second half was devoted to my recent NEW DAWN MAGAZINE article called "Freemasons from Outer Space." CROPfm is a long-running podcast intended for a German audience. Only half of his listeners can speak English, so every time the host invites me on he immediately loses about fifty percent of his audience! From this, I can only conclude he likes having me on as a guest (this was my third appearance on the show). 

Feel free to listen to the show and learn the bizarre secret origins of such enigmatic short stories as "Cryptopolis" (2012), "Initiation" (2009), "Dr. Apocrypha's Manifesto" (2009), "Bring Me the Head of André Breton!" (2011), "Adventures in the Head Wound" (2024), "Esthra, Shadows, Glass, Silence" (2001), "The Sheet" (2017), "The Loser" (2020), "The Lemon Thief" (2020), "The Pharmacy" (2020), and "The Detective with the Glass Gun" (2019). I also talk about the time I had coffee with George Clayton Johnson and Dennis Etchison on Ray Bradbury's birthday, among other odd anecdotes.

CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES, released by Lethe Press on January 13^th of last year, collects twenty-five short stories published over the course of about twenty-three years, from 2000 to 2022. Many of the stories in this book have Gnostic/hermetic/alchemical/Masonic/Kabbalistic themes. For example, I wrote the title story, “Cryptopolis,” in between undergoing the second and third degrees of Freemasonry. I wrote the ninth story, “Initiation” (originally published by cyberpunk legend Rudy Rucker in his FLURB webzine), right after undergoing the third degree of Freemasonry. “Dr. Apocrypha’s Manifesto” deals with the topic of Freemasonry in less metaphorical ways. “Bring Me the Head of André Breton!” (also published by Rucker) is my absurdist meditation on the connections between UFOlogy and surrealism. If you’re interested in the more outré aspects of JFK assassination theories, you might want to check out “Adventures in the Head Wound," which is dedicated to the memory of Paul Krassner (the late iconoclastic satirist and editor of THE REALIST). The final story in the book, “Esthra, Shadows, Glass, Silence,” deals with the connections between the Kabbalah and quantum physics. Many of these stories emerged directly from dreams. “The Sheet” is an almost scene-by-scene translation of an extremely vivid dream I experienced over twenty years ago. Parts of "Cryptopolis" emerged from a disturbing dream my father experienced when I was a child.

As you can see in the photograph below, even Alice's White Rabbit is flabbergasted by the bizarre contents of CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES!   

If you want to check out this epic interview, simply click HERE (the show switches to English about six minutes after the hour)!

PRAISE FOR CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES: 

"The stories in Cryptopolis feel like the bloody, star-filled lovechildren of Burroughs and Delany, with each tale ostensibly one part of a greater whole; abstract limbs and organs tethered together by strained flesh. Cryptopolis will take readers on a hallucinogenic journey through worlds fractured by time and place—slipping through liminal dimensions with seamless abandon to unveil unsettling illusions and heartbreaking realities—and totally worth the trip."

--Philip Fracassi, author of Boys in the Valley

"If you're tired of the same wines and you're curious about the vintage only just whispered about, have a deep draught of Robert Guffey's Cryptopolis. You don't have to descend with Fortunato to the deepest cellars to find this bottle of Amontillado. Here it is! If Poe collaborated with Robert Anton Wilson...if Borges had a lovechild with Lovecraft, which was subsequently adopted by Kafka...you might get Cryptopolis. I think too that Clark Ashton Smith would admire this collection. Written with the obsessive precision of a mysterious staircase descending into the abyss, Cryptopolis will take you to strange epiphanies..."  

 

--John Shirley, author of The Feverish Stars

 

"Once upon a time, weird and speculative fiction had an underground full of stories that were not written as calling cards or as film treatments or as extended internet memes. Guffey's tales resist genre gentrification; they move into your mind to turn it into a punk house squat!" 

 

--Nick Mamatas, author of Move Under Ground and The Second Shooter

 

 "In Cryptopolis & Other Stories, Guffey's free-ranging intellect meshes wonderfully with his command of the language."

 

--John Oakes, author of The Fast

  

"Guffey brings together 25 horror shorts that swing wildly between terrifying mindtrips and gritty realism. Throughout, Guffey’s blunt prose lends a sense of normalcy to the fantastic as his cast of losers from all walks of life face the cruelties of their existence—sexual violence, drugs, war, parenthood, and poverty [...]. Though not for the faint of heart, this bizarre and over-the-top collection is sure to thrill devotees of weird fiction."

--Publishers Weekly   

"Cryptopolis may end up being a gateway drug into Robert Guffey’s work. I don’t use that term spuriously. So many of Guffey’s stories in Cryptopolis have a hard-bitten edge and gritty feel to them that I could see him crafting a metatext about an author whose books are physically addictive. Across the collection’s twenty-five stories and vignettes, Guffey displays a range of interests and foci with such depth and heart that I wouldn’t be surprised if he became one of my favorite modern writers [...].

"Affect, the experience of emotional response, seems to be at issue in every one of Guffey’s offerings. From the opening eponymous story (which is the only outright Lovecraftian story in the collection), with its resonances of love as a torturous paralytic, to the last, 'Esthra, Shadows, Glass, Silence,' a parable of alternate lives and lost possibilities, the emotional response drawn from the reader appears to be the crux of every piece. These stories are engines designed to make the reader feel."

--Géza A. G. Reilly, Dead Reckonings