Set in late-1960s Los Angeles, Charlie Says retells an apocryphal story: that cult leader Charles Manson auditioned for the pop TV show The Monkees. In this novel, he gets the part.
Davenport’s work often moves between ‘low’ and high’ literatures – converting porn, missing person adverts, war journalism into poetry. He has recently edited the poetry/text art anthology THE DARK WOULD (Richard Long, Tacita Dean, Ron Silliman, Jenny Holzer et al). Charlie Says adopts the skin of a pulp thriller while eroding the content.
The book spills from its traditional boundaries to include material hidden on the internet and a forthcoming twitter feed.
Davenport: “The Manson/Monkees mashup resonated with me – the juxtaposition of an idea of innocence with extreme violence. I started reading around the subject, watching documentaries about Manson and the late 1960s in West Coast America. The wildness of Manson’s speech caught my ear, the biblical cadence and his traces of hillbilly. One night I started writing him and the voice came clean and clear, like a whisper down a phone line. I called him Charlie X and let him loose to play in the Los Angeles of my imagination, the place I used to escape to via TV. Ironically, the more I wrote the more LA was inflected with Belfast, the place I grew up near. It is always burning and graffitied, prowled by young soldiers and by skinny old men, the shop signs are hand-painted and the Coca Cola ads are from the 1950s and everywhere is unease. This is the world that Charlie recounts and it’s where he hunts, looking for opportunities and weakness.”
Author Biography
Philip Davenport has worked as a poet, journalist, copywriter and dishwasher. His first book Imaginary Missing People was published by experimental UK publisher Writers’ Forum in 1999. His short story collection All About Evil was The Big Issue magazine Book of the Week.Charlie Says is his debut novel. He has recently edited THE DARK WOULD language art anthology (2013).Transmission Print
A British small press that promotes and develops work by writers who dismantle the humdrum, often by embracing outsider viewpoints and language. Charlie Says continues this project: the novel breaks language and narrative conventions whilst holding to an overarching story shape. Davenport plays with the idea that the psychopath, like the private detective in previous eras, has become the shaman or seer through whose sensibilities we re-see our own world. This is a dark fable set in the Hollywood sunlight, alternately violent, sweet, comedic. For more information, author interviews, and full list of titles, go to our website http://www.transmissionprint.com
A British small press that promotes and develops work by writers who dismantle the humdrum, often by embracing outsider viewpoints and language. Charlie Says continues this project: the novel breaks language and narrative conventions whilst holding to an overarching story shape. Davenport plays with the idea that the psychopath, like the private detective in previous eras, has become the shaman or seer through whose sensibilities we re-see our own world. This is a dark fable set in the Hollywood sunlight, alternately violent, sweet, comedic. For more information, author interviews, and full list of titles, go to our website http://www.transmissionprint.com
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