The website of writer and poet Daniel Bennett
'17, Hill Park lay on the left of the Rye as you looked south, caught between sine bleak low-rise flats and two or three point-blocks built on a hill. A burned out Vauxhall had sagged on to its brake drum in the street outside; the basement area was full of broken furniture - chipboard, Formica, … Continue reading Hill Park
'He passed a few yards to one side of them, and stumbled over a heap of something which he did not observe, as it was black like the level ground. It emitted a metallic sound, and looking he saw that he had kicked his foot against a great heap of money. The coins were black … Continue reading Utterly Extinct
'London about me gazed at me spectrally. The windows in the white houses were like the eye sockets of skulls. About me my imagination found a thousand noiseless enemies moving. Terror seized me, a horror of my temerity. In front of me the road became pitchy black as though it was tarred, and I saw … Continue reading Dead London
‘...I can’t conceive a greater loneliness in a desert at midnight than there is there at midday. It is like a city of the dead; the streets are glaring and desolate, and as you pass it suddenly strikes you that this too is a part of London.’ The Inmost Light, Arthur Machen
'Humour and horror are never so far apart, and shaking with laughter often looked like shaking with fear.' I first read John Sladek around the age of fifteen, when I picked up Tik-Tok from the science fiction section of the local library. For a teenager used to the ordered universe of Isaac Asimov, reading this … Continue reading John Sladek and Black Aura
I’d like to say that I discovered Robinson for myself, but as usual someone else had to show me the way. I seem to require jumpstarts like this to overcome the indolence, which seems to be my natural state. Alarmingly, as I grow older, I seem more in the grip of this laziness: a paralysis … Continue reading My Copy Of Robinson
'The writer's task is to invent reality.' J.G. Ballard. On a recent trip to Heathrow, I travelled along the Westway. It's been a few years since I headed out on that road, not since a friend of mine passed his driving test and we made a specific trip out west with Low by David Bowie … Continue reading Terminal Realism: Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Zadie Smith
'first a man and then a street' - Iain Sinclair Influences are tricky things, running like pathways of mercury through a writer's life. In part, to name a literary influence is to limit yourself, to take a place on the second step behind some greater figure. Sometimes, though, the opposite is true, and by naming … Continue reading London Smoke: Iain Sinclair
Absence Club 