Back in print after a long hiatus, Quentin S. Crisp's third collection of fiction, Rule Dementia , sees the author start to experiment with the form and content of the macabre tale. 'The Haunted Bicycle' is his first attempt to use Japanese I-novel techniques with supernatural subject matter and tales such as 'The Waiting' and 'Unimaginable Joys' are a fusion of cosmic vision and the fey, shoe-gazing miserablism of Generation X. Throughout, the collection forms a symbolic, whimsical bestiary of the modern soul as brimming with unexpected, irreducible and oddly specific imagery as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Informed by a surreal, apocalyptic paranoia, yet rooted in child-like imagination and sheltered in the lee of unschooled mysticism, these early tales together make up a playful scrapbook of despair and hope at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.