Output details

Ornithology

These submitted stories first appeared in genre publications, a literary magazine and a limited-edition art book, and form part of a collection-in-progress, Ornithology, in which Royle investigates the uncanny connections between birds and human psychology. His research into the uncanny (particuarly the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar) went beyond Freud into Nicholas Royle’s The Uncanny (unavoidable given the uncanny coincidence of author’s names) and Ra Page’s anthology The New Uncanny (to which he contributed a short story, The Dummy). He researched Lacan’s theory of the Gaze and Laura Mulvey’s work on Male Gaze for The Lure, in which a falconer’s lure mirrors the use to which a blind man is put to draw the narrator into a trap. He researched blindness and Usher syndrome for The Blue Notebooks; set (and written) in Manchester Central Library. The story uses taxonomy to reflect the narrator’s interest in bird species. Research into library literature (Borges, Ligotti, O’Brien) led to his tentative reappraisal of Agatha Christie as a postmodernist, once he had discovered her playful inclusion of her own name in a list of autographs of crime writers collected by a character in The Body in the Library. In Murder, Royle uses the collective noun for crows to imply a murder that may or may not be committed; like rooks or crows, characters behave with intelligence, indifference and brutality. The stories’ settings range from northwest England and rural Ireland to France, but the same essential research feeds into all of them. Royle will complete the collection before offering it to his current publisher, Jonathan Cape, his recent move there from the smaller Serpent’s Tail a sign of his rising profile.