#21 - Emilianna

by Douglas Thompson

56 pages

Published October 2022

"Did I only dream of Emilianna? Everything about the domain of Emilianna was unearthly, where other rules, or no rules, might apply. When we took each other’s clothes off it was as if we were tearing out the pages of the books of ourselves. Each white page caught fire and turned into autumn leaves. Violent conflagrations that consumed us, turned us prematurely grey in the end, reduced us to silver ashes then black dust."

Contemporary master of the surreal, Douglas Thompson, takes us on a wild ride of obsessive desire between an eccentric writer and his musical muse, where reality is transmogrified at random and is progressively enslaved towards the mystical and violent. By turns humourous, capricious, menacing and melancholy, Emilianna is a paean to lost love and that great symbol of forgotten glory and fallen empire itself: the city of Glasgow.

Douglas Thompson is the former Chair and Director of the Scottish Writers Centre and author of more than 20 collections and novels including Ultrameta, Sylvow and, The Brahan Seer: Scotland's Nostradamus. He also has a following in Europe and America as an exponent of darkly surreal 'weird' fiction, in the Scottish tradition of James Hogg, R.L. Stevenson, and Alasdair Gray. He won the Herald/Grolsch Question Of Style Award in 1989, 2nd prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition 2007, and the Faith/Unbelief Poetry Prize in 2016. https://douglasthompson.wordpress.com/