MY IMMINENT RETURN TO CROPfm!

 

Heads up! On Friday the 13th, I will be appearing on Tarek Al-Ubaidi's popular Austrian podcast, CROPfm, to discuss CRYPTOPOLIS & OTHER STORIES and related insanity. Most of Al-Ubaidi's shows are in German; however, he also does an occasional English interview from time to time. Friday the 13th will be one of those occasions. Click HERE to listen to the interview LIVE at 10:00 a.m. (PST). The show will switch to English about five or 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