Metal Sushi
© Grant Morrison 1998
Conway's combination of superheated, superdense prose - part Lovecraft, part Manga, part post-human porn - seemed made to be snorted rather than read. 'Manta Red', like all of Conway's work, comes in hard on a narcotic rush of subconscious imagery; obsessive, fetishistic descriptions of technology and flesh in constant copulation, souls burning and flowering in the appalling light of quantum armageddons, men and women transfigured in episodes of dread-inspiring cosmic grandeur. There was horror there, no doubt, and there were also elements of science fiction and comic book bravado but the story seemed to me to defy genre and aspire instead towards the visionary ecstasies of Coleridge or Artaud or Lautreamont. I was hooked.
And then for years, nothing.
SOME FRIGHTFUL, CARNIVOROUS THING
Now, at last, we have this collection of Conway's best stories and the time seems right, here at the last gasp of the last thousand years, for a new audience to discover these supersonic roller-coaster rides into psycho-technological delirium. There are stories here that seep into the brain-folds like squid-ink. Stories that don't wash out easily. Stories that reveal a vast new world where all flesh is unstable and in flux, all matter is fluid. Stories,all of which seem to yearn towards some inexplicable boundary-shattering apocalypse when we are made monstrous, angelic, unknowable.
IN MAY THE INSECTS CAME
David Conway is the most powerful and distinctive writer of horror fiction since Clive Barker made his debut a decade ago (examine the state of your mind after reading this book in one sitting and tell me otherwise) but that's only part of what the stories in 'Metal Sushi' reveal.
The rest is for you to find out.
Treasure 'Metal Sushi' as a seminal, essential work. These are the fables of a species yet to be born, straight out of the head of an argumentative bastard from Dublin.
Inhale...
Grant Morrison, CDG Airport 1998
I remember reading 'Manta Red' a few years ago and feeling the same excitement I'd felt as the first kid on my block to discover Lovecraft or Burroughs or 'A Clockwork Orange'. Here was something new and filled with energy and dazzling originality. And there was something so uncompromisingly misanthropic about it; here was writing that held the 'human condition' in contempt, which treated the 'human condition', in fact, as something not too far removed from eczema. Here was a voice that demanded nothing less than the complete and ultimate overthrow of humanity and all its works. Here was a blazing, demented demand for a new, transcendental biology and a new language with which to describe it.
A NAMELESS HYBRID MONSTER
Conway argues with everyone about everything. I don't wanna fuck him or nothing but I like the cut of his gib.
There are a bunch of us, the lees of the drunken 'counterculture'; dodgy publishers, chaos magicians, artists. We're talking about the death of Princess Di and about Myra Hindley, and the moon goddess and all the stuff you talk about when you're over the eight with people whose minds run on the same curious tracks as your own.
October in some 'Pig and Trotter ' pub in Soho. David Conway;black suit, black tie, black hair. He looks like he's just risen up out of the oil slicks of the Persian Gulf. It's all there for the biographers; the Jesuit upbringing in Ireland, concussed by a hurly ball as a kid, the rock years playing in My Bloody Valentine. He's a natural.
IN MY TORTURED EARS
Originally published in Metal Sushi by David Conway (Oneiros Books, 1998)INTRODUCTION
