The Phantasmogenetic Centre - B. Kearney

The Phantasmogenetic Centre by B. Kearney / 121-page paperback, 5 x 8 inches, published in 2026 by Hobo Borealis / ISBN 9798881717728

***

“Those who have not learned to give form and shape to their ideas while on earth have to pursue a more painful and laborious process after their death, and exercise an influence more far-reaching an they themselves ever dreamed of.”

This ghost-ridden pornographic antibildungsroman was carefully assembled no more than two lines at a time from hundreds of public domain books digitized by Project Gutenberg.

Mosaic fragments of fiction, philosophy, psychology, erotica, biography, theology, poetry, mysticism and instructional textsw form a broadly coherent narrative connecting the nightmares of the early 20th century to those of the present day.

Drawn to one another by their fear of women, three sexually overwrought young men of Edwardian England cast in their lot with a mysterious professor, heir to a South African diamond mine, whose underground laboratory houses an electronic brain powered by the residual thought-energy of putrefying corpses.

Disillusioned first by boarding-school orgies and then by industrialized necromancy, the three friends resolve to enter politics with a daring proposal to banish women and children to a selective breeding facility on the moon. Routed by suffragettes, they are obliged to seek whatever remains of their fortune in the limb-strewn trenches of an unspecified war, where death waits as the penultimate disappointment.

An outlying milestone in experimental fiction, misandrist satire and artisanal plagiarism, The Phantasmogenetic Centre is a timely, cruel repurposing of the untimely words of dead and largely forgotten authors.