💊 BLACK PILLS is OUT NOW! /
BLACK PILLS is a collection of genre-bending short fiction exploring the unmitigated sh*tshow that is our present reality.
“Garth’s work is not literary, and yet it is. He hides his considerable emotional intelligence under a bushel of belchingly funny, low brow humour and sickening concepts. I find myself throwing up and eating it up at the same time, which I put down to his talent for making me laugh while sliding a shiv-like human theme between my ribs, which is not so much a flex as a hex” – from Queensland Literary Award winner Steve MinOn’s foreword.
BLACK PILLS features seven heroic doses of uncut gonzo fiction, each 110% guaranteed to astonish and confound:
💊 THE ISSUE OF THE FERAL PIG DOWN AT COFFIN CREEK
💊 HUGO GARRETT’S EXEMPLARY MOWING TECHNIQUE (Winner, short fiction, Ronald Hugh Morrieson Literary Award)
💊 THE QUADRATIC ABDUCTIONS OF PRIQUE JEJUNE
💊 THE INSATIABLE S*XUAL WITCHES OF WRIGGLER’S BEND
💊 THE HORIZONTAL BALLERINA
💊 RENTAL HELL!
💊 RENNIE ‘N ‘RELLE SMASH SOME NAZIS: A ROMANCE
Early praise for Black Pills
“An abject/object lesson in schlock and awe, Jones is the pulp ocker lit cowboy the world needs right now. In Black Pills, he brings an electrifying fantastical twist to the bogan gothic, where Antipodean vernacular shines at its authentic best”
– Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, 1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018
“Garth Jones drags us into the uncanny vortex of the terminally online, overloading our smooth brains with homicidal gore, suburban perversities, and socio-political absurdity. He holds us captive like the best of barstool storytellers, pushing our faces down in the oozing muck of our new reality. Black Pills is my favorite dystopic action-packed B-movie that's never been put to film...yet” – Jillian Luft, Scumbag Summer
“An exciting and accomplished avant-garde writer who rips up the rules and produces genre-bending, provocative, action-packed pulp-fiction” – Poppy Gee, Vanishing Falls
“Oozes class, is bathed in cool, and sneers at you - daring you to open it and let yourself in. It’s Garth’s best work yet” – Dave Musson, Once More Around The Sun
“If you want to show reluctant readers that sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll sometimes come in prose form... show them this book” – Michael Botur, Glass Barbie
“It’s vulgar and excessive, but also erudite and clearly informed by an extensive and eclectic stock of creative influences” – Dr Lara Cain Gray, The Grown-Up’s Guide to Picture Books
“Witty and clever… lucid, restrained and always appropriate” – David Hill, OAM, Seeya Simon
“Garth Jones isn’t pulling punches, he’s landing every bloody strike. Black Pills is a collection of seven relentless stories that blur the line between the mundane and the extreme, delivered in raw, rage-fueled prose. Each tale drags you through the mud, leaving you hobbled like the antagonists who stumble through Jones’ brutal, unflinching worlds. This is fiction that draws blood and breaks bones—you won’t walk away unscathed. Buckle up and take your lashes.” – William M. Brandon III, Eternity: The Long and Short of It, The Exile The Matriarch & The Flood, Welcome to Spring Street, and SILENCE & Selene. AGENTOFDISCORD.COM
Dave’s Book Club: BLACK PILLS /
I Have That On Vinyl: Scarred for Life /
It’s, what, 1994? 1995?
You’re sixteen, anyway, on your regular post-school record store mission.
More accurately, it’s a RECORDS AND TAPES situation, though the CD is the ascendant form of recorded media. The shop’s owner, G.B., hasn’t had the coin to update the signage since he opened up in the mid ‘80s, though, and said records and tapes lurk, sullen and unloved, in the second hand racks and remainders bins.
You live in a tiny mining town in the surreally remote deserts of far western New South Wales, Australia. You haven’t seen it yet, but later in life you’ll refer to it as “you know, where Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 Australian New Wave classic Wake in Fright was shot” as shorthand when locating your point of origin in conversation.
Which is shorthand in itself for a place of tough blokes caked in lead and zinc, a pub for every hundred people, a place so perplexingly regional, outside of time, that it’s often referred to as The Walled City…
Letterboxd /
So I buckled and finally signed up to Letterboxd.
What a beacon of social media joy in an otherwise blasted landscape of online horror and abject despair.
Plus, what a corker of an opportunity to archive a bunch of my old film musings. So, presented here are some faves from my years writing for Hopscotch Friday, Crosslight and a couple of other joints.
Sadly, all my ancient Livejournal bangers remain lost, even to the Archive.
Nonetheless, have at it:
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
• Thor: Ragnarok
• The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?
• Spider-Man: Homecoming
• Baby Driver
• T2: Trainspotting
• Macbeth
• Blade Runner 2049
• Gods of Egypt
• Into The Woods
• Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
• Underworld: Blood Wars
• Bad Moms
• The Girl on the Train
• Dirty Grandpa
• Mother!
• Sausage Party
• Step Up All In
• Kingsman: The Secret Service
• For No Good Reason
• Ant-Man
• Deadpool
• Jupiter Ascending
• Ghostbusters (2016)
• Ex Machina
• Chappie
• Avengers: Age of Ultron
• Warcraft
• The Huntsman: Winter’s War
• The Night Before
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Spectre
• Trainwreck
• The Last Witch Hunter
• The H8ful Eight
• Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Flicks, we love them (don’t we folks?)!
Best of 2024 mixtape /
PREVIEW: The Issue of the Feral Pig Down at Coffin Creek /
Protest poster in West End, Meanjin.
Day Two.
3.04am
IT was ol’ Mangled Jizzy that found those kids, the very first ones, y’know.
Young Donk Cowie’d parked his old man’s RAM – bloody ridiculous vehicle for a dentist – down by the flood marker off Crooked Stream Lane. Jizz told us it looked like the silly bugger’d been trying to get into young Shelsta Gabbatt’s knickers when they’d been taken.
By that I mean he found her knickers, soiled, and a half unrolled French Letter, if you catch my meaning.
The ‘paper, well, the ‘paper’s Facey page, The Coffin Creek Investigator, didn’t really get much into the details, barring that the cops were “treating the situation as suspicious”, “appealing to the public for information” that “parking in a flood zone is hazardous” and to “please welcome investigating officer Constable Ray Fistwell to The Creek”.
That sort of D-grader city journo bullshit.
Ol’ Jizzy may have been as mad as three cut snakes in a Whirlpool, but he’d also been a pretty handy snapper in the day.
He had The Eye, didn’t miss a bloody thing, much to our occasional chagrin.
That means it pissed us off, kid.
Anyway, we’d been shouting Jizz a round or ten when he’d spilled his guts on all the spilt guts.
“Looked like a feral pig what done it, lads. Pulled them kids out the cab before poor ole Donk had a poke, let alone a sniff of his fingers. Not right. Blood and shit and hair and all sorts everywhere. No bodies but. What squealer does that? Drags two kids off and… disappears? ”
Well, none of us had had a fucken clue, and the bastard 4G internet was out again, so we – we being town quack Doc Liversedge, me missus Narelle and Jimbo Paddock… yes, the Mayor (don’t get too excited, kid, that was 10% of Coffin Creek’s population there at the bar) – decided to leave the mystery to the no-doubt exemplary deductive abilities of the new town copper, Fistwell.
For now.
7.15am
Wasn’t long before them deductin’ skills were back in demand, neither.
You’re loca – you’ve heard of Snake Marks, right? Nope?
Bloody hell, seriously, you kids – Snake, actual Christian name lost to the vapours of Creek lore, was Mayor ‘round here well before Jimbo’s time (not to mention me and ‘Relle’s).
This was back in the eighties, when state government spooks were scuttling around the valley, rattling gates.
You know, natural gas and all that? It was a dodgy business then and it still is, kid.
Anyway, I read up on Snake before ‘Relle and I decided to shift out here from the Goldie – his steampunk reimagining of Che’s life sealed the deal, t’be honest.
Yep, Snake was a capital ‘c’ Communist, and that drove the East Coast establishment mental. He’d really put it up ‘em when he was elected to state parliament, but Snake was also a capital ‘p’ Pisshead that all ended real quick, with broken limbs and a few less than exemplary headlines to boot. Disgraced anywhere with a population over 500, Snake moved back out to the Creek, bought the pub and spent the next thirty-odd years cranking out revolutionary tracts.
It was a life lived like a deadset bloody legend, a real town luminary, until about a week back, when I found one’ve Comrade Snake’s size-13 cowboy boots on my morning run. The blood on it was black, the other one gone.
Snake’s hip flask was thirty yards up the track, en route to his camper, bone dry.
The 4G was barely 3G that morning, but I got a sketchy line through to Constable Fistwell, who took his sweet bloody time getting there.
Valé Snake and all that…
Read the entire story in BLACK PILLS: 7 TALES TO ASTONISH & CONFOUND, out now!
Big Squid/ Pass the Amyl: Wake In Fright /
This latest edition of Pass The Amyl begins in media res, with the US Election hot take factory working overtime.
I think I call JD Vance a Christo-fascist in the first sixty seconds.
Then, we delve into the marginally less terrifying (almost) lost classic Wake In Fright (1971), directed by Weekend at Bernie’s Ted Kotcheff.
It’s a chunky 🦑 , chockers with insights into why you should squeegee your third eye before playing roulette, the very worst way to drive to Adelaide, and precisely what it was like growing up in Bundanyabba… I mean to say, Broken Hill.
Swipe for the debut of the pod-glasses, and be sure to head over to Hammo’s Patreon and sign up to get access to the full video of our chat.
Listen here!