Book review: Only The Lowly, by b. catling

I first came across Brian Catling’s work in Iain Sinclair’s wonderful anthology, Conductors Of Chaos, with a remarkable poem called “The Stumbling Block, Its Index”. I later found out that he was also a sculptor, performance artist and a professor of fine art at Oxford. Then he published a trilogy of novels – The Vorrh, The Erstwhile and The Cloven – which to my mind rank alongside Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast or Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris books as one of the most daring works of fantasy. I say this as a compliment: few writers ever give me such bad dreams as Catling. The last time I remember being so stupendously discombobulated was reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.