TEN YEARS IN THE MAKING.

 

MONUMENT MAKER: COMING JUNE 2021

 

MONUMENT MAKER is an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe.

Straddling genres while fully embracing none of them, it is a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through to future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a disfigured soldier. Interacting with Keenan’s earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE, MONUMENT MAKER represents the apex of Keenan’s project to create books that contain uncanny life and feel like living organisms. It is a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monument.

 

The first 500 to pre-order from one of the selected stores below will receive an exclusive chapbook: FULL LENGTH MIRROR.

 

A facsimile edition of the book within the book, MONUMENT MAKER’s FULL LENGTH MIRROR is Pierre Melville’s enigmatic account of architecture, religion, and romance, and the document of a single summer Melville spent with his lover, Hildegard von Strophe, touring the religious architecture of the Ile de France. Translated by the author (DK) it becomes a kind of palimpsest for his own summer romance, the memory of which, now that he is dying, has driven him to a kind of eroticised religious mania. Featuring photographs from across the Ile de France alongside Melville’s enigmatic foreword in full, FULL LENGTH MIRROR is strictly limited to 500 copies and only available if you pre-order MONUMENT MAKER from the following stores:

 

Rough Trade | Monorail | Drift | Piccadilly | Resident | Norman