Anywhere Out of the World

From the prodigious imagination of cult writer Alan Bilton, author of The Known and Unknown Sea and The Sleepwalkers' Ball, comes a new collection of strange and unsettling short stories, poised midway between horror and comedy, the deeply mysterious and the utterly absurd. Fall through trapdoors and explore secret passages between the everyday and the fantastical, enter a labyrinth whose secrets lead deeper and deeper into the unknown.

In Paris a baffled postman searches for a house that isn't there, while in Venice a young couple on their wedding night lose each other falling in and out of time. Closer to home, dogs and people and pills are missing whilst the fleas seem to get everywhere. As for the Pool on Wiene Street .... well, it's probably wiser not to dip one's toes...

At every step, the curious, the lost, and the unwary stumble through an opening to another world - a world unlike any other in contemporary fiction.

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"As uncanny as Psycho and as funny as a Monty Python sketch, Anywhere out of the World is an antidote to our conservative literary culture and essential reading for anyone still interested in the possibilities of literature" - Novelist and short story writer DD Johnstone

"A man is sucked back into the nightmare past of his school's grubby swimming pool... a bridge built by day is dismantled overnight... at the edge of town uncertain territory threatens... under the feet of animals and history all is reduced to mud and entropy." - Novelist, poet and short story writer Jo Mazelis

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Alan Bilton is the author of two novels, The Known and Unknown Sea (2014), variously compared to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the 1902 movie, A Trip to the Moon, and Dante's Inferno, and The Sleepwalkers' Ball (2009) which one critic described as "Franz Kafka meets Mary Poppins". As a writer, he is obviously a hard man to pin down. He is also the author of books on Silent Film Comedy, Contemporary Fiction, and America in the 1920s. He teaches Creative Writing, Contemporary Literature, and Film at Swansea University in Wales.