Tom Bland

Camp Fear Tom Bland

Tom Bland's inimitable first collection and verse novel is luxuriously subversive: both inviting the reader to explore the dark corners of the human psyche, and challenging the boundaries of contemporary poetics, fusing poetry with satire, surrealism and psychoanalysis. Shockingly funny, tragically humanistic, its characters are melancholic, hedonistic, scarred, deeply touching. Camp Fear explores ritual, gnosis, the cult of celebrity, the commodification of insight; calling upon Freud, Artaud and Acker; 4chan and Lana Del Rey. If the id, ego and superego met at a fetish club, it would look something like this.