63,892 hours passed. She cleaned the counter, turned the TV back to the Head Injury Marathon where Spatula was whacking his face repeatedly into a plate glass window, jeered on by the minor celebrity crowd.

Light flickered in the ‘night’ outside once more. The shadows moved erratically beyond the Diner, hanging from the trees and the buildings in all directions then shifting then stopping, moving and then, now, not moving again.

A Note about Endland

A Note about Endland

This book brings together two sets of stories about Endland. The first set was written in the 1990s and published as a collection called Endland Stories: Or Bad Lives in 1999 by the now extinct Pulp Books. The stories comprising the second set – mutant cousins of the first – have been accumulating since that time, expanding and reinventing the precarious landscape of Endland.

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In the 1980s, I had written a novel called Helen © & her Daughters. The book was borderline incoherent; an unstable story communicated in a tone that was brutal and cartoon-like at the same time. It was set in a world that was Thatcher-era North of England (i.e. selected lowlights of what I could see out of the window) mixed with all manner of other things and places, times and landscapes – some real, others invented. The language was also rough, cut-up, hybridised, slang. I was writing a lot of stuff for performance with the Sheffield-based group Forced Entertainment at the same time and working on various short fiction and film ideas, as well as random projects and bits of other writing.