Camp Fear / Tom Bland

Polari First Book Prize 2022 Longlist

‘Queer micro-carnival, ritual dance, circus ring of elastic sanity.’ Kirsten Irving

‘A fearless trip to the depths of the human psyche.’ Golnoosh Nour

‘This book got me totally hooked.’ Johannes Göransson

‘The best thing Tom Cruise has been in for a very long while…’ Matthew Caley

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.

PAPERBACK    ISBN: 978-1-913268-20-6    PUBLISHED: 31ST OCTOBER 2021