Friday, 29 August 2025

Alrightreads: Further adventures in the futile Rhys Hughes completism odyssey

Rhys Hughes, The Postmodern Mariner

2008 / Ebook/audiobook / 160 pages

****

A thoughtful centrepiece adrift in a sea of daftness.

 
Rhys Hughes, Bone Idle in the Charnel House: A Collection of Weird Stories

2001–14 (collected 2014) / Ebook/audiobook / 245 pages

****

At this point, it's rare to find one of his collections that I haven't mostly read in other forms, but many of these were entombed in solitude and hit the sweet spot of absurd strangeness.


Rhys Hughes, Thirty Tributes to Calvino

1995-2015 (collected 2015) / Ebook / 202 pages

*****

Like a naive fool, I'd expected an expansion on the earlier Ten Tributes to the tune of 20 additional tales, but that would be too normal. There's minimal overlap for those who want to explore both, though admittedly I had read nearly all of them in other collections. It's a fine set.


Rhys Hughes, Cloud Farming in Wales

2017 / Ebook / 160 pages

****

A confidently insecure novel, or thematic pun scrapbook.


Rhys Hughes, Crepuscularks and Phantomimes: Gothic, Ghostly & Lovecraftian Tales in the Ironic Mode

2002–20 (collected 2020) / Ebook / 119 pages

****

Nearly all new tales, the Lovecraftian elements mainly amount to puns, which is sure to delight any die hard acolytes checking it out on that basis.