Bible of the Gun

About the Book

‘Bible of the Gun’ is a collection of stories, from the novel of the title, to the novella of ‘Bathory and the State’, to the long shorts of ‘The Destructive Urge’ and ‘The Rose of John Hamlet’. The stories have several things in common. The first of these is brevity; none of the stories have anything that is inessential, not a single line that the author did not enjoy writing that was not a curiosity or a puzzle to be solved. The second is surrealism. All the stories are surrealist in one sense or another, all steal something from dreams, and all try to unlock something of the animal from the Id. The author aligns himself with Bizarro, because the work clearly is, however, it is also seriously surrealist. Thirdly, violence in all the authors work is never treated morally, but let loose, you don’t have to read the stories from the point of view of a ‘good’ person being shown ‘bad’ things, which fascinate, and yet you are never allowed to be a part of, but just as if you were in a dream or were a child, you have no moral compass and are lead into violence without condemnation, are told to identify with it, even when its source is apparently evil. To go back to surrealism before we discuss the actual stories. I, the author, am a surrealist anarchist, and a surrealist creator, for three reasons. One is a fascination with dreams, their strangeness and wonder, where they come from, their unrestrained adventures. Two is a political interest, from the point of view that the super ego, the restraints of the opinions of society, therefore, the opinions of the state through all aspects of media and coercion, is a cowardly internalised source that restricts our freedom and makes everyone slaves. Thirdly, is an attempt to unpeel this onion even further, let out the Id, the creativity, the desires, without the restraints of ego and super ego, to see the core of who we are, even if this is bad, I want to find good, but I do not want to find it at the bottom of being afraid because I do not want to consent to the pressures of every one and thing I despise, even if I am instead lead to evil that I despise more, and yet I find as a child, or in a dream, I am rarely lead to evil through lack of social inhibitions, in my work, I often am., but then, I have had a very violent life. Most of these stories however are rather more restrained than the earlier works of ‘Unrequited Zombie’ and ‘Urban Book of the Dead’, except for ‘The Destructive Urge’, also the most surreal here and the most recent. ‘Bathory and the State’ is from an earlier period, and a little primitive, which only means it is eighteen months old. ‘Bible of the Gun’ is a story about a man, who after strange events of a dream like and schizophrenic nature, goes to see a female psychiatrist. “I was lying on the leather couch, so much like a dental chair, the smell of leather had a clinical effect on the memories she extracted, as the sense of smell alerted me to smells from the past. Light fell on the couches black leather in shiny checks from the window light as the warm rays that read my mind with their heat signatures fell on us, they made the plant on the coffee table, with its lush green leaves, burble to me happily in a language I could not understand. Like pulling teeth she grasped each memory, examined it through her glasses leaning forward, she tapped each one with her pen looking for rottenness, tore it painfully from its protective flesh. Her mobile phone sat on the coffee table. Dismantled at my request, slim, orange and black, a Sonny Ericsson 880i, it had its spying guts removed. That is; its battery lay at its side so that the secret services or who ever they were could not pick up through its microphone, my conversation with my psychiatrist. My psychiatrist sat in a swiveling chair; I looked down at her red shoes, the sharp heels pointing from one side and then the other as she turned the chair from side to side with her long legs, occasionally

About the Author

Jonathan Cottam was born the son of a miner who became an English teacher. He went to two secondary schools in the late eighties and was expelled from the first for leading a school strike. Largely self-educated he has lived the greater part of his life on rough council estates, where due to everyday acts taken purely for survival; he has been arbitrarily imprisoned several times, “like winning the lottery”. Now reformed and living a quiet life, he still finds time to get involved in actions such as the German G8 and Climate Camp protests between books.