“ I am the story. Don’t ask me if I am true” .

The latest book by Richard James Allen, his first novel, as distinct from poetry – blurs truth, time and reality. Allen is a contemporary actor poet, filmmaker and dancer He has been artistic director of the Poets Union Inc. and was founding director of the Australian Poetry Festival.With Karen Pearlman he was co-director of That Was Fast in New York and Tasdance and now The Physical TV Company, one work of which is featured in Dancehouse’s Dance Lens series, currently screening.

Allen has published twelve books, poetry, short fiction and performance texts.

MORE LIES is a small, rather thin book, divided into thirty three short chapters and is set in New York. Is it all a dream ? Or ? 

From the first page we are breathlessly catapulted into the story – the anonymous narrator is trapped and being held hostage at gun point in his  unit, and is being forced to type to hide the plots and shenanigans of a glamorous femme fatale (Stricklandson) and her brother (Peters), a ‘small time thug with big ambitions’. 

The novel blends the sardonis, excessively flamboyant, far fetched and possibly improbable. In some ways it is like a film noir or hard boiled detective crime novel where the narrator is sitting beside us wanting to nudge us, the reader, aside and add bits.

It is a fluid, shape shifting tale about assassination attempts, murder (there is a Dickensian twist as one of the narrator’s neighbours who is murdered is called Marly), betrayal, lost gold, passion,  identity theft and change and passion.

Just when you think you know what will happen everything changes yet again and we are furnished with yet more alternative versions of the story. 

We are taken through several swivelling,  alternative,  somersaulting versions of the story,  some possibly lies, some perhaps a figment of the imagination – can the reader decide? The ‘confession’  towards the end feels true, even though it can’t possibly  be. 

Poems are interwoven with the prose, at times.

The narrator changes from being a writer forced to produce work to save his life, to astonishing us with his imagination, but eventually getting to the crux of the predicament, the Scheherazade like storytelling, which is the only thing keeping the narrator alive.  Or is it?!

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ISBN: 9781922332646