PUBLICATIONS | duncanbbarlow

THE BOOKS

These are the book objects you may buy.

A Dog Between Us

ISBN 978-0999115275

duncan b. barlow delivers tender shocks and the profundity of mercy in this poignant, delicate novel of loss and love. A Dog Between Us holds the reader between what can be said and what is unspeakable in our most vital relationships. This is an unforgettable novel of beauty and delirium.

"Early on, the narrator of Duncan Barlow's moving A Dog Between Us offers a rule to live by: never state the important things. Lucky for us readers, this is a rule broken on every single page of this beautiful novel, a book haunted by the details of dying and grief, by the ways in which every once-hidden mote of a lost life's minutiae can, once revealed, be made to shine, to glow, give back fresh heat and new light."

—Matt Bell, author of Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

"Duncan Barlow traces the sharpened edge of his flawless language across the living flesh of story in A Dog Between Us, and every page bleeds raw, human feeling. Connection, companionship, compassion, the nature of living itself is excised from the inevitability of death, held up to the harsh light, and examined. All love ends, we find, all of us are flawed, and each of us will return to earth, but there is beauty, and tenderness."

—Sarah Gerard, Author of Binary Star and Sunshine State

A Dog Between Us is a loving and moving novel of heartbreaking loss that is also beautifully written—and it is through this beauty that Duncan Barlow provides the reader with some great comfort too.

‚—Michael Kimball, author of Us and Big Ray

In A Dog Between Us, we are asked, “What words outline a human life?” If we could read the lines cast around our edges – our janky and shining, beautiful and hell-filled edges – what might we divine? Duncan Barlow’s compelling novel gives us a hint: it has something to do with generosity and fever; that moment when the shadows of the words that outline a life turn into a cloud of blackbirds. They break open your heart upon their sudden departure from the field where you believed so long you were standing alone.

— Selah Saterstrom, author of Slab and Ideal Suggestions

BUY IT

The City, Awake

ISBN 978-0-9984339-0-5

Barlow’s metaphysical noir The City, Awake is a novel of chemically induced amnesia, doppelgängers, fanatics, and killers. Saul, a man without a history, awakes in a hotel room with a note in his pocket. Hunting for answers, he must survive rival assassins, a millionaire with an axe to grind, a shape-shifting femme fatal, a silent hit man, and a psychotic who is only looking for an exit. Barlow evokes a vast mid-century modernist cityscape in prose that is by turns hard-boiled, then unexpectedly psychedelic and delicate. With temporal and spatial distortions reminiscent of A. E. van Vogt’s The World of Null-A, the novel that inspired Godard’s Alphaville, this is a vivid investigation of identity, scientific speculation, and Biblical Apocrypha. The City, Awake is a mirror maze of dark streets and darker secrets.”

—James Reich, author of I, Lucifer, Mistah Kurtz, and Bombshell

Labyrinthine, lyrical, and provocative, The City Awake is part philosophical mystery, part dream-like meditation on what it means to be human, all wrapped up into a beguiling postmodern puzzle. Buttressed by Barlow’s luminous prose, The City Awake takes us on an astonishing journey through the darkened bars and hidden alleyways of an expertly-constructed, claustrophobic cityscape where hitmen are sometimes helpless, where femme fatales are seldom what they seem, and where grit and the angelic mingle on every page—a gorgeous surprise.

—McCormick Templeman, author of The Glass Casket, The Little Woods, and Slasher Girls and Monster Boys

At times, duncan b. barlow's The City, Awake evokes the kind of atmospheric suspense I associate with the great noir writer David Goodis. At others, I thought of another David Ohle—the weird, visionary author of Motorman. barlow's remarkable accomplishment here is in welding together disparate genre elements to create a fast-paced literary thriller that depicts an authentically absurd and violent world, while offering hope through resistance and hardboiled compassion.

—Christian Tebordo, author of Toughlahoma, The Awful Possibilities, and We Go Liquid.

BUY IT

Of Flesh and Fur

ISBN 978-0-9978996-1-0

An accountant seeks to adjust the imbalance in his life by acquiring a child through a special agency. The child is not what he'd hoped it would be. and his life is thrown further out of balance in this unique minibook about loneliness, hunger, and consequence.

Of Flesh and Fur is an ancient fable that comes from the not too distant future. Its fevered coyotes worry the bones of fathers who don't have sons, of those who are abandoned and abandon in turn. There's only hunger in these pages, fantasies of manliness that make thin feed. Barlow's spare prose spares us nothing. Read or be eaten.

— Joanna Ruocco, author of Dan, Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych, and Man's Companions

Part post-modern creation myth, part eerie feral parable, duncan b. barlow’s Of Flesh and Fur is a viscerally stunning and unnerving novelette rendered in corkscrew-tight lines that silver-spiral their way deep into the raw meat of the reader’s psyche. In terse, hallucinatory, meditative chapters in which an accountant attempts to care for a blood-hungry baby cloned from his own genetic material, the story meditates upon fatherhood, melancholia, loneliness, and monstrosity with deft language and razor-sharp imagery. This primal howl of a story is disturbingly tender in all the best possible ways.

— Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Dandarians and On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year

BUY IT

Super Cell Anemia

ISBN-978-1933929163

In Barlow's Cincinnati-gone-strange, a germ-obsessed electrified man finds himself at the mercy of a mutant cat man, an odd doctor, misguided policemen, and (perhaps worst of all) the terrors of dating. Unrelentingly bizarre and mysterious, unsettling in all the right ways, Super Cell Anemia is a strange and powerful debut."

—Brian Evenson, Author of The Open Curtain, The Warren, A Collapse of Horses

Prepare yourself, good reader, for you are about to have the great fortune of meeting Gilles, dreamer of dark and beautiful dreams, spinner of strange syntax, copper biter, spark shooter, cat chaser, tunnel explorer, vigilant neighbor and, most importantly, hero of this knockout novel. Go ahead, try it, see for yourself (the guy, like the book, is high-voltage) -- shake his hand...

—Laird Hunt, author of The Evening Road, Neverhome, Kind One, andRay of the Star

BUY IT

The House, The Haunts, The Manner of all Things

ISBN 978-0692127452

A lyrical book that slithers and haunts, The House, the Haunts, the Manner of all Things is a story of an abandoned house that is haunted by the many lives that exist in and around it.

A collaboration between artist, thaniel ion lee, and writer, duncan b. barlow, The House, the Haunts, the Manner of all Things is an assemblage of art and vignettes that reaches beyond the limitations of the physical and examines the wonder and horror of those metaphysical things that surround us.

BUY IT