EQUUS PRESS (2025)

04/11/2025

👉🏻IN MEMORIAM: PHILLIP O'NEIL (1965—2025)👈🏻

We are deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of Phillip O’Neil, author of MENTAL SHRAPNEL (2020), a singular literary voice of uncompromising intelligence, wit, and poetic ferocity.

Phillip’s work was always driven by a restless curiosity and a refusal of easy solace — his was a writing alive to chaos, fracture, and fragile beauty.

Those of us who had the privilege to work with him knew his generosity of spirit, his sardonic humour, and his commitment to the craft of language as resistance and revelation.

At the time of his death, Phillip was working on a new manuscript, PAINTING EYES ON CHAOS — a haunting and urgent continuation of his lifelong project to find coherence in fragmentation. Equus Press are committed to work with his collaborators and hope to bring this final work into print in the near future.

We are planning a celebratory literary gathering in his honour later this autumn, bringing together readers, friends, and fellow writers to remember, read, and celebrate his words. Details to follow soon.

Phillip’s loss is immeasurable, but so is the reach of his voice. His work, as ever, remains the truest memorial.

🕯Rest in peace, Phillip.🕯

—Equus Press Team

31/10/2025

We are OPEN! The micro book fair at this year’s PMF Prague Microfestival has something to offer everyone: apart from Equus titles, there’s Litteraria Pragensia Books, Alienist Books, VLAK Magazine: Contemporary Poetics & the Arts, and also books from our fellow travellers: 11/11, Inside the Castle, Sweat Drenched Press, Erratum, Corona/Samizdat, and more! This weekend only at Hybernská!

23/10/2025

Two new Equus titles by Ansgar Alen & Michael Rowland, hot from the press, lying in wait for their launch at PMF Prague Microfestival!

20/10/2025

Ansgar Allen’s Jonathan Martin ready to strike (a match) again—in just 10 days at this year’s PMF Prague Microfestival!

10/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

30. Ansgar Allen, JONATHAN MARTIN (2025)

JONATHAN MARTIN (forthcoming 1 Nov 2025) presents itself less as a “life novel” than as a necromantic reanimation of biography as ruin, disjunction, and haunted fragment. “On 27 May 1838, Jonathan Martin lay down and died … That evening, another lunatic would take his place, and the room in which he lived would be occupied by another man’s thoughts.”

This opening gesture already signals a necromodernist logic of succession, recurrence, and the absorption of subjectivity into haunted space. Allen does not begin with origin or ascent; he begins with death, as implosion rather than birth, insisting that a life as biography is always parasitic upon its own ending.
The novel is structured in fragments — archival scraps, trial documents, self-published pamphlet inserts, delirious registers — weaving together dream, ecclesiastical fury, and claustrophobic psychosis. Allen describes the book as “an act of negation … it tells us what literature is by telling us what it is not … it does not start with Jonathan’s birth … mentions it as an aside.” This refusal of teleology, this negative theology of biography, is quintessentially necromodern: identity survives (if it survives) not by coherence but by decomposition, margin, and interruption.

Within the Equus necromodernist canon, Jonathan Martin marks a bold pivot: it is no longer city-archive or glitch event, but biographical necropolis. The life of Jonathan—prophet, arsonist, inmate—is neither fully recoverable nor fully imagined: Allen treats historical source as spectral matter, medium to be excavated rather than exhumed. He rewrites the conventions of historical fiction, pushing biography toward ruin, exposing the hollowness of coherence and claiming the haunted residue of a life lived on the margins of reason and order.

To be launched at this year's PMF Prague Microfestival on Nov 1.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/jonathan-martin/

09/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

29. Louis Armand, A TOMB IN H-SECTION (2025)

A Tomb in H-Section inhabits the architecture of death itself. Set in and underneath the Josefov ghetto, the novel literalises necromodernism by making its ruins the stage for both spectacle and burial. Its proscenium is hauntological: the ghetto becomes a constructed set of memory, horror, and insurance cataloguing. The text orchestrates a grotesque pageant in which history recirculates as theatre — the past is not overwritten, but performed ad infinitum.

The novel invests deeply in systems of registration, inventory, and archiving. The subterranean labyrinths and Processing Plant beneath the detached fragment of Golemgrad are not only infrastructural sites but necro-archives—accounts of bodies, wires, crevices, shadows, and data. “Bet you didn’t know there’s a detachable piece of Ol’ Golemgrad smackbang in Hamburg Bay … that’s where the Processing Plant is … G.O.D. in his countinghouse … keeping the ledgers in good order” becomes a revelation that ruin is itself a logbook. The body lies wired on a slab, awaiting its transformation: here death is not the end but a coded interface.

Ghost-creatures, bubble-people, dissolving sunspots, rodent animism — the novel’s spectral cast dramatizes the collapse of human into trace, living into memory. “As Němec watched … bubble-people dissolved to sunspots … drifting & dissolving, dissolving & drifting” becomes not literary ornament but necromodern kinetics — where dissolution is the primary mode of existence. In A Tomb in H-Section, Armand doesn’t simply catalogue ruins; he choreographs them. The novel resurrects the co**se of literature not by negating its decay, but by staging it, choreographing its collapse into a recurring, haunted archive.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/a-tomb-in-h-section/

08/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

28. Louis Armand, THE COMBINATIONS (2016; 4th ed. 2024)

In The Combinations, Armand stages Prague not as backdrop but as a ruinous crucible of recursive texts. The novel’s chessboard structure (8 octaves, 64 chapters, 888 pages) literalizes necromodern time: each move is haunted by prior moves, every chapter a recursive echo in the city’s palimpsestic archive. The world is a combinatorial engine where the past is never past but always reactivated. As a reviewer notes with characteristic slyness: “Perhaps … when you stare long enough a crack in the wall is just a mirror.” That mirror reflects not identity but the spectral overlay of textual history—one crack among many in a city that is its own necropolis of memory.

Armand’s prose perpetually collapses the distinction between the animate and inanimate. Prague’s streets, buildings, monuments, even chessboard symbols become haunted by their own inscriptions. The novel often treats celluloid, silhouette, and ruin as interchangeable media of decay: “The city’s thousand-and-one fascinating tales” are retold not to reconstruct history but to scatter it. In this mode, reading becomes excavation: the text is not destroyed by its own excess—it is resurrected through it.
Within Equus Press’s necromodernist poetics, The Combinations is foundational: a city-archive that’s both labyrinth and tomb, where narrative is a ghostly combinatorial protocol. Nothing is transparent; every gesture is layered with spectral weight. It resets the terms by which we think of future, history, and text—not as linear progress, but as recursive survival through ruins.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/the-combinations-4th-corrected-edition/

07/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

27. Louis Armand, ANIZAR (2024)

ANIZAR unfolds as one of the clearest late articulations of Equus Press’s necromodernist poetics — a mode defined by recursion, glitch, and historical compost. The novel opens in a sun-bleached Alentejo, where “history, too, may be a dream, but we are not the dreamer.” It stages existence as theatre: a crumbling proscenium in which thought, language, and flesh perform their own decrepitude.

Armand’s protagonist, Albufarkas — “last of a long line of deadletters that turn up after the postal system’s been abolished” — becomes a necromodernist archetype: a revenant of obsolete systems, half-alive among the ruins of meaning. A key passage encapsulates this poetics of exhausted recursion:

“You die & the image of something dies w/ you. From now on just a settling of dust, the sifting of pixel-decay, slow data-rot, mildew on the motherboard… skeletons gradually unfleshed on the holodeck.”

Here, Armand fuses the medieval and the digital, the Gothic and the algorithmic: human decay expressed through the lexicon of obsolescent computation. The result is a syntax of entropic consciousness, where self and system decay at the same rate — a linguistic compost heap of “entropy and effluent.” Albufarkas’ dialogue with his alter ego, Antifarkas, literalises the necromodernist split between self and shadow, thought and its automated echo.

ANIZAR extends the poetics of Vampyr/Glitchhead and A Tomb in H-Section into a Southern European allegory: an archaeological fever-dream of empire, simulation, and entropy. As the narrator muses, “We live – oh we say we live, but heaven help us! – in a tide of vexatious effluent… we’re in the toiletcleaner, it’s drinking us!” This grotesque humour — both scatological and metaphysical — marks Armand’s writing as a literature of aftermath, where history survives only as data noise, waste, and parody.

In the necromodernist constellation, ANIZAR is the post-Cartesian counter-novel: a book conscious of its own decay, of “the room you could imagine walking into in a novel without a plot.” It reads like a transcript from civilization’s memory leak — one that insists, perversely, on continuing to write.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/anizar/

06/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

26. Louis Armand, VAMPYR/GLITCHHEAD (2023)

“The contagion has passed beyond the mere increase of an illness & become the illness. Its vector is that of History itself.”
Vampyr / Glitchhead emerges as a fulcrum in the Equus Press project: here, necromodernist poetics are made manifest in the collision between vampiric recursion and linguistic collapse. In Vampyr, Armand turns the novel into a parasitic architecture: its monsters are not external invaders but the clichés, images, and media detritus that haunt the text itself. The vampyr is less a creature of myth than a figure of inscription: culture vampirising itself, recycling its own remains under the sign of heartbreak, capital, and the spectacle of decay. The contagion is linguistic, structural — "the contagion has passed beyond the mere increase of an illness & become the illness" — turning history, images, and narrative into vectors of infection.

Then Glitchhead takes over the machinery of infection and embeds it in the interface: a convulsive, disintegrated prose that turns narrative into seizures, content into glitch, hope into code-virus. Here the novel becomes a diagnosis: “The end of writing is the end of history,” yet it does not end — it hiccups, loops, fractures, chaotically persists. Glitch is not failure to be overcome, but the condition of survival itself in a literaturescape that no longer has room for renewal or redemptive teleology.

In the Equus constellation of necromodern authors — Louis Armand, Mike Corrao, Ansgar Allen — Vampyr / Glitchhead stands as a decisive gesture: literature refusing closure, refusing transcendence, persisting only through decomposition and recursive reanimation.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/vampyr-glitchhead/

03/10/2025

EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE

25. R.G. Vasicek & Zak Ferguson, 404_ERROR: MEMOIR OF A NOBODY (2022)

404_ERROR: MEMOIR OF A NOBODY bills itself as an “anti-memoir,” a compact, glitch-inflected experiment in identity, error, and technological consciousness. The narrative follows Darius[z], a figure caught between two overlapping realities: one of the “meatspace” (the urban, corporeal world) and one of wetware, the digital substrate, where his selfhood unspools. The text collapses the boundary between internal and external, memory and data, rendering subjectivity as something always mediated by machinery, malfunction, and code.

What makes 404_ERROR a fascinating literary experiment is how it merges comedic disjunction, horror, and meta-commentary with the architecture of error. The novel treats the 404 error not just as a digital glitch but as a metaphoric self, a presence that haunts every access point, every reflection, every system breakdown. According to a reviewer, it “shifts between comedy and horror, commentary and meta-commentary, wetware and meatspace,” pushing the reader to sense the instability underlying our presumed “realities.” The book is also advertised as machine-made, a “pocket machine that requires no batteries,” signalling its ambition to become both content and medium.

In the Equus Press constellation, 404_ERROR aligns with glitch aesthetics: texts that do not seek stability but live in error, in fragmentation, and in the collapse of the archival toehold. It is anti-memoir not because it negates memory, but because it refuses the consolations of continuous selfhood. Memory is not linear; biography is not coherent; identity is threaded through ruptures, resets, and digital ghosts. In so doing, 404_ERROR dissolves the boundary between subject and machine, between archive and malfunction, offering a luminous, unsettling reflection on what it means to be “nobody” in a world built on signals, failures, and phantom codes.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/404_error-memoir-of-a-nobody/

02/10/2025

24. Harold Jaffe, PERFORMANCES FOR THE END OF TIME (2022)

A fragmented, performative collection of texts, PERFORMANCES FOR THE END OF TIME pivots around endings — existential, cultural, personal — and stages them as both elegy and indictment. The volume comprises a series of short “performances” (some repeated, variably reworked) culminating in a meta-dramatic Faust & Mephisto piece. Jaffe frames these texts as “performances of the heart-mind,” oscillating between poetic prose, quasi-dramatic voice, and cryptic manifestos.

The work’s experiment lies in its delicate balance of repetition and variation: titles recur (e.g. “Cut,” “Justice,” “Gloryhole,” “Shroud”) yet each iteration shifts inflection, tone, and implication. Through this echo-chamber strategy, Jaffe probes how meaning is unstable, how language is haunted by its own residues, and how performance can unbind the conventional constraints of narrative temporality. The final dramatic piece does more than conclude: it reorientates, turning the collection’s elegiac tone into a prophetic coda that implicates humankind itself, suggesting that if we are to survive, we must become “other than human.”

PERFORMANCES FOR THE END OF TIME is a paradigmatic example of Equus Press poetics: a text that doesn’t simply lament endings but makes the endings audible, revisible, and performative. Rather than presenting doom as external, Jaffe’s work internalises it: the collapse is already in us, in language, in memory. By refusing teleology and embracing repetition, variation, and rhetorical rupture,PERFORMANCES insists that endings are not final but ongoing: that we live in the residue, the echo, the performance that does not quite finish.

For more information & ordering details, please visit:
https://equuspress.wordpress.com/performances-for-the-end-of-time/

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