More Lies – Review

A wonderfully warped journey into one man’s unravelling psyche, and a joyous celebration of the necessity of story.
– James Bradley, author of Ghost Species

A phantasmagoric, avant-garde story set in a lost New York, Richard James Allen’s More Lies both entertains and provokes as it reveals a world where ‘truth is never enough/Or it’s unlikeable.’ Allen deploys a madcap couple, Stricklandson and Peters, to conduct us through a world of threat and potential which ends up being spooky in many senses of the word. A fluid narrative forward motion and a sense of the fundamental mystery of it all have never been so closely intertwined.
– Nicholas Birns, New York University

Enjoyed More Lies in one hit – like swallowing a tab spiked with speed – with Raymond Chandler’s spook dealing and watching from the corner.
– Rae Desmond Jones, author of The End of the Line

For me, there is always an exciting air of anticipation whenever I learn that Richard James Allen has committed his vivid and articulate imagination to ‘paper’ (or I guess it could be some smart device as well). More Lies is Allen’s latest venture in literary writing, having written several anthologies of poetry prior to this work. He has an exquisite talent for throwing us right into the heart of the action but without necessarily explaining the context at the outset. Rather, Allen respects the intelligence and sensitivity of the reader to work at discerning where they are, what is at stake and whose voice is framing each scene. And that would be highly appropriate for a novel that apparently positions itself playfully walking a tightrope between comic thriller and literary wit. 

More Lies employs various conceits in its particular manifestation of the central character-narrated story. However, the delight of this novel is that it doesn’t become constrained by convention. Allen constantly surprises and delights us with his stream of consciousness explosions that compel us to savour almost every sentence for its unique combination of flavours. Each concise chapter offers itself as a distinct course within a degustation menu of desire, intrigue, absurdity, philosophical musings, memory and melancholy. 

Like an orchestral concerto, as one moves through each chapter, various recurring ‘voices’ and ‘motifs’ emerge that may trigger meaning-making to attempt to contain the experience of reading (and imagining). There are significant stylistic breaks from chapter to chapter as the narrative shifts between being ‘in the story’ and various commentaries or musings about life beyond and outside of the narrative.

I especially enjoyed the occasional typographical play with italics and the page layout of texts (a visual device Allen has used across several of his poetry anthologies) in different chapters – for example, in chapter 21, entitled The Homeless, until I turned to the next page, I felt the very layout of the words worked in parallel with the theme of the chapter, as a symbolic representation of the inevitable powerlessness of so-called ‘pawns’ of society who have no home, no secure place of power – but maybe that’s just in my imagination too, and not verifiable, as this is the overarching challenge of More Lies.

More Lies is a playful, engaging and potentially confronting exploration of our desire for truth, our familiarity with lying and selective memory, and our need for the apparent continuity of trust. At the heart of this book, there is a kind of self-righteousness about needing to know everyone else’s ‘truth’ while maintaining the legitimacy of one’s own right to lie that is put under interrogation by Allen. He deliciously wins us over and then flips all that we might assume in our place of privileged knowledge as we sit outside the narrative. Is he lying to us, or is it we who lie to ourselves by selectively choosing what to make sense of and forgetting what doesn’t ‘fit’ our assumptions of how things ‘just are’? More Lives is a very special and singular meal – but take your time to savour and digest it.

The book was published by IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) is an independent publisher headquartered in Brisbane, Australia.  We publish across four imprints: Interactive Press, Glass  House Books and the Digital Publishing Centre. We are especially dedicated to publishing titles that address the pressing social issues of our day. Our titles are available in physical editions as well as the key eBook formats.  Some of our distributors include Ingram International,  Gazelle Books UK and Wheelers (ANZ).