Splinters

Warren Ellis on Savoy Books: "They grew a list of selected reprints, an eclectic and vital catalogue; the Sixties TV criticism of fantasist and commentator Harlan Ellison, the newspaper columns of Jack Trevor Story, the gothabilly art of Cramps album illustrator Kris Guidio. And, apocalyptically, Dave Britton’s transgressive novel LORD HORROR. Which got them prosecuted on obscenity charges, slammed through the system by James Anderton, Manchester’s notoriously Christian Chief Constable. Anderton was a creature that could only have existed in the slightly surreal atmosphere of Thatcher Britain; repressively conservative, of dubious competence, and given to worrying statements about hearing God’s voice while Manchester filled up with guns and pushers.

LORD HORROR was strong drink, to be sure: a hallucinated vision of Lord Haw-Haw, the English traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain during World War 2. It was difficult, horrifying work, the Nazi atrocities made superreal with the tools of DeSade and Bataille, very much an extension of the “New Worlds school” and its intent to use fantasy as a way to present the real world in a new light for our consideration. Britton is neither a self-hating Jew nor a childish monster. He is clearly haunted by the pre-1945 world.

And they sent him to prison."

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