And yes, you can order a copy of Skinship right now. Also, please investigate some of the other excellent literature published by Anti-Oedipus Press.

This fantastic advance review is extensive and does contain spoilers, but there are warnings ahead of time. It is published via Agranoff’s Postcards from a Dying World site, a unique and impressive collection of science fiction reviews and research.

Agranoff’s latest novel The Last Night to Kill Nazis is published by Clash Books.

I could easily see Skinship placed in an old spinner rack next to Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron or Michael Moorcock’s Behold The Man. It reads and feels vintage in its brief length and pulpy premise but deftly carries a contemporary story of economic and ecological perils that we teeter precariously toward in the here and now. That tone is only where the analgesic haze of hauntological nostalgia begins. 

In Skinship, Reich doesn’t give his characters comfort in a nostalgic existence, he bridles them with it. Like their mandate to preserve and protect the legacy of humanity, it has become just another burden on their seemingly endless voyage. The Earth may have gone away but the past continues to haunt on. 

Like much of the best speculative fiction, Skinship juggles a lot of interesting ideas: the end of the world and our legacy in the universe, inventive body horror, innovative technologies, backdrops that are alien but also eerily familiar at the same time, all wrapped up in a pastiche of intrigue and mystery. James Reich handles them all masterfully, all while maintaining a melancholy that feels lived in and crafting characters of great depth and complexity. There are no wasted words, no nagging exposition, and no stereotypes to do the heavy lifting. There are no easy outs in the way Reich brandishes his language and the story always keeps you guessing what will unfold next.

Order a copy of Skinship today.

In The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, the urban sub-chaos softly closes with the image of the Arthurian Fisher King, sitting upon the shore, waiting for his chosen successor, wondering “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” In his slim yet cinematically plot-driven novel, The Moth for the Star, James Reich sits atop a similarly bereft world, and when he sets about destroying his lands, you will feel it viscerally, and not see the masterful ending coming.

From The Waste Land to Reich’s first page, in the way he tells us that Charles Varnas is “quite simply, a dark-haired man in a pale suit who had been on a long voyage,” we sit with the protagonist on a sand dune in Egypt in 1925 with the gentleness of Antoine de St. Exupery’s Le Petit Prince. But we are not to linger in this peaceful imagery for long, for on the same first page, the mood on the North African sand swings sharply from The Little Prince to the darkness of Camus’s L’Étranger. We are now with a man who has just murdered someone, still in the panting breaths of super-oxygenated clarity. Or perhaps we are witnessing his incomplete memory of the encounter. It’s hard to tell. READ MORE…

Purchase a copy of The Moth for the Star from Amazon, or from your local independent bookstore. 

This is the second time I’ve interviewed James Reich, and it is good to catch up with him after the publication of his newest novel, The Moth for the Star, released in late 2023 from 7.13 Books. This haunting and masterful novel takes the reader right into the heart of “dark Modernism,” a territory very familiar to Reich as his 2016 work from Anti-Oedipus Press, Mistah Kurtz, was staged as a prequel to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The Moth for the Star is a mystery spanning the 1920s and ’30s, across geographies of New York City, Venice, and Cairo, while the protagonists, Varnas and Campbell, are locked in a metaphysical struggle of guilt and deliverance. Reich’s magical prose twists, tricks, and lures the reader into a world that is at once terrifying and oh so seductive.

Jordan A. Rothacker: Your new novel was published by 7.13 Books. As our audience might know, you yourself are a publisher and run Stalking Horse Press, a wonderful small press that has done some really great books. And so my question is: why not just publish yourself? This is your third novel since you started Stalking Horse, so it’s obviously not a random situation. There are several notable presses who publish their own staff.

James Reich: The critical distance is important, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have people who want to publish my work. I just haven’t had to, except that I chose to have Stalking Horse publish my limited-edition poetry collection, The Holly King. That was more a question of time and controlling the print run—and it was of a moment, something almost commemorative that didn’t need to be tied up in submissions for years. Traditional, “big house” publishing is self-immolating, purging itself. So, self-publishing is going to be the dominant mode at some point, but it will be horribly consolidated through Amazon. By then AI will have utterly destroyed culture, and then we’ll be hanging at the rim of extinction. So, there’s that. . . READ MORE…

Bearing the final remnants of humanity and its genetic archive, the last Skinship to leave a dying, distant-future Earth closes in on the Dragonhead Nebula and the prospect planet that offers resurrection. With Applewhite, the First Navigator, apparently in the process of psychic collapse, a conspiracy emerges to murder him before he can compromise the mission or destroy the ship. Resisting this conspiracy is Monamy, a nonhuman Archivist who alone understands the nature of Applewhite’s breakdown. Inside the uncanny ship, chilling violence and grotesque forms break out. Meanwhile, 1,500 years after the abandonment of the planet, the last man on Earth struggles to survive and, somehow, escape.

Cinematic and intimate, James Reich’s latest novel evokes a yearning for the future evolving into panic, and the contradictions of nostalgia for forgotten things. Like Silent Running and The Man Who Fell to Earth before it, Skinship penetrates the loneliness of an ecological crisis.

The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he “lost his mind” in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work — the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues — present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, tended to distort his theory. The psychosis attached to Reich by his detractors was the culmination of decades of scapegoating by psychoanalysts, Nazis, communists, and conservatives. But Reich’s environmental and Cold War preoccupations and his slow-burning fascination with UFO phenomena were not signs of a madness incipient since his break with Sigmund Freud. They anticipated and reflected much in the American psyche.

Defining the presence of a “cinematic self” in the misunderstood analyst once considered an heir to Freud, Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers rejects orthodox portrayals of Reich’s final years as merely pathological. Combining original analysis and evidence from the Wilhelm Reich Archive, James Reich uncovers the fatal moments in the psychologist’s uncanny identification with the “spaceman,” and the myth of a scientist lost to his own grandiosity and paranoia. Taking seriously the influence of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, and other pop cultural narratives on Reich, this “psychoanalytic detective story” concerns existential traps, conscious and unconscious collaborations and betrayals by disciples, and unidentified flying object-relations. Reich’s is an atomic-age passion narrative. Vitally, Reich’s story could be ours. The author is not related to his subject.

Science fiction failed to predict the advent of the digital relation. But the speculations of psy-fi thinkers once projected and expelled as psychotic can benefit today from the new normalcy of conspiracy theorizing on the Internet. In this setting of misrecognition and renewal, James Reich reads closely the ins and outs of “armoring” (or resistance) within the reception of Wilhelm Reich’s oeuvre.

~ Laurence A. Rickels

Signed copies are available here.
Or buy from punctum books, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

In 2017, I read the novel Patricide, by D. Foy. It’s a brutal and challenging book, full of ungodly sorrow and heartbreak. It’s the kind of book you can’t read before bed because it’ll make sleep impossible. But it’s also a beautiful and tender piece of work. I was curious who would publish such a troubling and unwieldy tome in our current era of idling conformity. The answer is James Reich, the founder and editor of Stalking Horse Press.

In addition to running a publishing house, James is many other things: Englishman, vegan, novelist, essayist, journalist, punk rocker, and ecopsychologist. Shortly after reading Patricide, I learned that James lives in Santa Fe, NM, just an hour’s drive from where I grew up. Now, whenever I’m home, I make the trip out to see him, and we drink martinis and talk books. James is one of the most erudite people I’ve ever met, a man who’s penned a psychoanalytic monograph on the misunderstood psychologist Wilhelm Reich (no relation). You need further proof of his genius? James had the good sense to publish my latest, Pure Cosmos Club. Now, James has his own new novel, The Moth for the Star, coming out on September 12th, from 7.13 Books. It’s a metaphysical murder mystery set in depression-era New York City. I read the book in its entirety earlier this week over a redeye transatlantic flight. In fact, I’m still struggling with jet lag, but I’m eager to discuss the book with James, so here we go…

You can read the whole interview at CrimeReads.

It’s hard to find the right words to discuss James Reich’s new novel The Moth for the Star. Is it a haunting tale of excess and murder in Depression-era New York City? A bizarre story of metaphysical warfare? A psychological study of generational trauma and repression? Arguably, it’s all of the above — along with some astronomy thrown into the mix. I spoke with Reich about his new novel’s genesis and the thematic concerns at its heart.

The interview can be found RIGHT HERE.

“On the eve of Hallowe’en, 1980, Dick Cavett’s television guests included Stephen King, George Romero, and Peter Straub. Watching it now, King is the most voluble, playing the open-shirted raconteur, stage right, closer to the audience than the others in several senses. He is alert to the chance to promote Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, released in May, and to tag team with Romero to tease their forthcoming horror movie anthology Creepshow (1982). Straub, in something like an accountant’s uniform, looks like the straight man, but he is also quick and generous. These masters of their genre were born during, or in King’s case, shortly after World War II. They have Atomic Age anxieties, but an ease with television.

Yet, there is a fourth guest, one that Cavett has to draw out. It is as if he has shrugged himself from the spotlights, is somewhat camera-shy. Perhaps it is because he is not a horror writer in anything like the sense that the others are. This interloper is Ira Levin, born in 1927, twenty years before the youngest, Stephen King. And of the four, it is Levin who claims to have had the most orthodox, the least neurotic and least uncanny childhood. But is this so?”

James Reich’s latest novel The Moth for the Star is available now.

“I’ve been reading The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli. I’m quite taken with the poems from The Nightingale of the Catholic Church, with lines like “the light rots the sky.” Last night, I finished Oded Galor’s The Journey of Humanity during an appropriately dramatic thunderstorm. Among others I’ve enjoyed lately: James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work and Jason McBride’s Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker, which I loved. I’m interested in writers who plough a lonely furrow…”

“In addition to my work as a novelist, my field is ecopsychology. Ecopsychology is concerned with the repression of what biologist E. O. Wilson termed biophilia, or our innate affinity with our biosphere, with nature. I work with specific attention to the formations of psyche/place, the repression of this relationship with(in) nature, and its irruptions into consciousness in literature and culture in general. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a spectacular example of such repression and its dynamics. Alienation from nature, extinction of species, loss of biosphere, and the mourning of biophilia leaves all of its characters pathological. It is the absence of biophilia that betrays an android. The abjection of nature and its uncanny turn or return present an existential crisis.

In an ecopsychological analysis, it is not quite ‘alone’ that Meursault kills the Arab in Albert Camus’ L’Étranger. The borrowed revolver is fired in conspiracy with the cosmic landscape of the Algerian beach, at the insistence of the sun…”

“At once a gripping metaphysical mystery of Depression-era New York and a tender ode to our dying future, James Reich’s The Moth for the Star is by turns horrifying and poignant, coldly thrilling and richly evocative. Charles Varnas is a murderer who cannot recall his victim. His cool, androgynous conspirator Campbell may hold the secret. Haunted and dissolute, they struggle to come to terms with the psychic weight of their crime. With a control of language and rhythm few can match, Reich transports his readers from the streets of Cairo to the canals of Venice, from the heights of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building to the shadow of the Sphinx. The Moth for the Star is a dark, sprawling romance, riddled with paranormal drama, a singular work destined to remain with you long after reading.”

The book is available from bookstores everywhere, and online in paperback and ebook formats.

“Under these conditions, attempts to “grasp reality” result in neon fistfuls of neurosis, and AI is here to make everything worse. “Reality,” if that means freedom from falsification, is something like an underground subculture at this point. We have made falsification our reality.”

Read the full interview here.

Disturbing, distorted recollections build to a devastating reveal…an atmospheric treatise on memory.

– Publishers Weekly

Read the full review here.

Read More at SPIN