My friend Tony White asked me to contribute to a publication series he had started, called Piece of Paper Press, a DIY imprint that is still going today. Each book is made from a single sheet of A4 paper, cut and folded in a simple way, produced as a photocopied edition. Some of the first books were by writers, others by artists; some were texts, others comprised sequences of drawings or diagrams. The idea appealed to me and I wrote a blunt, comical narrative called ‘About Lisa’. One tiny chapter per page. The sense of humour was very dark and a lot of the drive in the narrative came from stretching the world of the story really thin whilst at the same time creating a destructive friction between the characters and the world they inhabited. At the time I was reading One Thousand and One Nights, William Burroughs, Russell Hoban, Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, Alan Moore and Raw comics. In the background were Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard, Jenny Holzer, M. John Harrison, Amos Tutuola, Charles Dickens, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Philip K Dick and a million other things. I was listening to The Fall, who I’d followed since the early days of the band in the late 1970s and whose lyricist and singer Mark E Smith was probably the biggest single influence or clue for me in terms of what I wanted to write at that time, and how I wanted to write it. The great thing about the Piece of Paper Press invitation was how its formal framework and restrictions forced my writing to become more economical. I remember telling people that it felt like taking the world, tone and language of my (unpublished) novel Helen © and boiling it down to the essence. ‘About Lisa’ and the other stories that followed it, which would eventually become the Endland Stories collection, arose directly from that process of reduction. I plundered the novel for landscape, language, gags and atmospheres, hanging everything on sharp, compacted little narratives – postcards from hell.

Years before I’d done an interview with William Gibson for Performance Magazine. Gibson said that the world of his book Neuromancer was only one molecule thick – not a careful or reasonable piece of researched world-building, something more fragile, more playful – and that (in effect) any reality sensed in it by the reader was just a temporary effect, a momentary production in the language. I liked that idea. It made sense to me in terms of other stuff that I respected as writing. In Endland Stories, I was trying to play with how thin the world could be and how dense it could be at the same time, how disposable I could make that world and the characters populating it, while still somehow keeping an engagement with the reader. It meant creating characters and narratives in the ruins of a larger world, whose shape, purpose and extent could only be guessed at. This seemed to me a productive tension. The stories came pretty fast, one after another. Elaine Palmer at Pulp Books included ‘German Fokker’ in an anthology on pop culture, titled Allnighter, and soon afterwards agreed to do the whole collection as a book. After Endland Stories came out in 1999, I wrote a few more stories in pretty much the same world, landscape and language (‘Taxi Driver’ for the 1999 Sceptre anthology Britpulp! New Fast and Furious Stories from the Literary Underground and rather later ‘Cellar Story’, published in the San Francisco magazine Fourteen Hills), but beyond that my fiction writing post-Endland Stories took off in quite other directions.