PURE MANIA BY STEWART HOME

A WARNING TO TEA-SWILLING SCUM! DEEP ECOLOGISTS ARE OUT TO KILL ANYONE THEY CATCH DOWNING A CUPPA! NO CAFF IS SAFE!

"Tracy swung her bat against a table, sending crockery flying. Christine laid into the counter. Terrified customers were showered with glass as a display case disintegrated. Chickenfeed let fly with his fists. There was the sickening crunch of splintering bone and a prole slumped backwards spitting out gouts of blood and the occasional piece of broken tooth. Muffled moans lost themselves amid frantic chanting from the caff. "Vegans! Vegans! We are the New Breed!"

Pure Mania is set in an almost fictional anarcho-punk milieu around the squats and council estates of East London. This trashy adventure story takes the form of a blatantly falsified tour of eighties youth trends. It's a pastiche of the fiction published by New English Library during the 1970's. It's a fearless exploration of the sexual underground. It's the best read since NEL published Richard Allen's Skinhead twenty years ago.

STEWART HOME was born in South London in 1962. He is author of The Assault On Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press & Unpopular Books, London 1988), editor of Smile (The International Magazine of Multiple Origins) and an organiser of, and contributor to, the International Festivals of Plagiarism. Pure Mania ISBN 0 7486 6035 6 Polygon Books, 22 George Square, Edinburgh.

Lurid paperback original - Polymorphous Perversity at its very worst!

Wicked: Journalist Ian Blake has been one of the most persistent critics of Stewart Home's fiction. These are his judgements of the short stories which paved the way for Pure Mania.

Sick: Home's Anarchist reads more like notes from a psychiatrist's case book than a conventional work of fiction. His vision of sex as Will To Power is clearly the product of a disturbed mind. I was left wondering how often the author acts out this parade of sick fantasies.

Evil: In Pusher, Home seems to be striving to achieve some kind of ultimate catharsis through disgust and violence. The main character's need to express his total dominion over other people by humiliating, fucking and killing, has welled over into total mania. I dislike pornography of this type. I feel instinctively that any such linking of sex and violence is WRONG.

Morbid: Straight, is less violent that Pusher, but still not to my liking. Too many bad vibrations, man! I'm a member of the Love Generation, a libertarian. I believe in love, peace and grooviness, not this endless procession of fucking for its own sake.

Noxious: I'm afraid I don't like Home's Class War fiction. This latest effort is a plod through familiar territory: buggery, psychopathic violence, quack political theorising and childish sexual terminology. Hardly the stuff of which deathless literature is made.

Immoral: It's hard for me to comment on Frenzy Of The Flesh without insulting Home personally. I find his fiction utterly repulsive. Stories like Frenzy contain no redeeming features whatsoever. There's nothing uplifting or enlightening about them. For the most part they're crude, repetitive and ultimately quite unimaginative essays in sex, violence and anal sadism. Rather than broadening the reader's consciousness, this actually narrows it down to a single limited focus. I find this fiction highly distasteful.

Decadent: I don't understand why Home writes in such an extreme style. I certainly think it's a mistake to assume that anything offensive to bourgeois sensibilities must automatically be valid per se. What exactly has Home proved? Nothing at all as far as I can see, except that there'll always be a market for prurient subject matter.

DON'T TAKE IAN BLAKE'S WORD FOR IT, READ PURE MANIA AND DECIDE FOR YOURSELF. HOME MAKES DE SADE LOOK CONSERVATIVE!

Text of flyer produced by Home to promote his first novel Pure Mania.

Trivia
The cover for the abridged audio CD version of my novel Pure Mania features a fabulous painting of me by Julia King. I prefer the CD cover to the book cover. I provided the publisher Polygon with dummy art work of how I thought the book should look, and their designer simply incorporated it into the cover without reworking what was only intended to be a rough. If you can find a copy of this novel take a close look at the small book reproduced in the middle of the cover and you'll see the art work is very ragged (in particular the peace symbol). My idea was to present the first edition of Pure Mania as if it was already a reprint of an established (anti)-'classic'. I think the concept was strong but the execution was sloppy, since the illustration is clearly a rough rather than a properly finished piece of art work. Publishing contracts rarely give writers final control over the design of their books, and in this instance I didn't get to see the art work until after the book was printed. I did however produce a load of my own promotional material including leaflets, stickers and badges that I was very happy with.

It should be stressed that I have no criticism of my literary editors at Polygon (Peter Kravitz and Jenny Turner) both of whom were absolutely fabulous and extremely supportive. In fact, around the time I sold Pure Mania to this publisher, Polygon was bought out by Edinburgh University Press whose readers were horrified by my book when they read the manuscript. Edinburgh University Press wanted Pure Mania withdrawn from publication. Peter Kravitz - who was held in high esteem as a literary editor in Scotland for being the first person to publish James Kelman and other important writers - insisted the book should come out. There was much delay but Kravitz eventually got his way. He backed me to the hilt and gave me the kind of support it is rare to receive from an editor. But while I would have been happy to do further books with him, the powers that be prevailed in preventing Polygon publishing anything else by me.

Pure Mania (Original Edition) available from Leamington Books

Pure Mania (Original Edition) available from Waterstones

Extracts from reviews of Pure Mania

Page on Pure Mania audiobook on CD

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