A Talk with Victor Rees
Conducted by John Kenny, July 2025
Victor Rees is a writer, performer, and academic based in London. His PhD focuses on the work of Brian Catling, exploring his oeuvre through the prism of the Weird, the Visionary, the mystic and the grotesque. His short stories and scholarly articles have been published by Textual Practice, Swedenborg House, Albion Village Press, Child Be Strange, and The Friends of Arthur Machen. Rees also performs as part of the group keys cut, a living almanac whose practice merges storytelling, live music, puppetry, and shadow-play. Along with Iain Sinclair, Victor Rees is the co-editor of A Mystery of Remnant.
John Kenny: How did this book come about? It appears A Mystery of Remnant is the only collection of Brian Catling’s shorter prose.
Victor Rees: This book is the result of a few different forces colliding together in the great spirit of synchronicity—one of these was my decision to move to London in 2022 to start a PhD on Catling’s work, which unwittingly coincided with the exact day Catling died. In the months and years that followed I was fortunate to meet many of the writers, artists, and performers in Catling’s circle, including Iain Sinclair. Iain and I have collaborated on various projects since our first meeting—this book, A Mystery of Remnant, is the culmination of these efforts so far.
Catling is best known for his novels, especially the Vorrh trilogy (2012-18)—he is not really considered a short story writer, even though he wrote works of short prose throughout his life. Some of these might be considered examples of lyrical prose-poetry that owe a debt to Baudelaire or the Comte de Lautréamont, while others are more straight-forward ghostly tales—though with Catling nothing is ever totally straight-forward. These texts were published in magazines, chapbooks and pamphlets, or else were discovered posthumously on his laptop. When read one after the other they exuded such a marvellous, weird vibrancy that they begged to be brought together.
I should say that Catling did release a prior collection back in 2019 called Only the Lowly—the book is effectively a fractured novella, a series of interlinked tales about a couple called Bertie and Cara who live in a post-apocalyptic seaside town partially populated by freakish animal-human hybrids. We decided not to include any of these stories in A Mystery of Remnant, since they work better when read as a grotesque cycle—we have instead foregrounded Catling’s tales of ghosts and memories, of mystical and visionary epiphany.
JK: It’s an awful shame you didn’t get the chance to meet Brian. I wonder if exploring Catling’s life and work via Iain Sinclair and other people who knew him resonates to a certain extent with Catling’s own interest in absences, which seems to be a major theme in this new collection?
VR: It was certainly a strange context within which to be researching his work! A couple of days after he died I reread his final novel, Hollow (2021). One of the characters is a monk investigating the work of Hieronymus Bosch, believing that his paintings might have spawned the monstrous creatures that inhabit the sixteenth-century Flemish landscape where the action is set. The monk is intent on meeting with Bosch, but quickly learns that the artist has been dead for many years:
The abbot’s announcement that Bosch had died years ago, far from taking the wind out of Benedict’s sail, had sharpened his resolve to find an answer, a conclusion. So much better for a scholar never to meet the subject of his investigations rather than ask him what things mean or how they came into being. That would be the ultimate act of empirical misdirection.
I’ve taken these words as something of a personal mantra for my research, and they’ve also come to inspire the selection of texts in this collection. I’ve become increasingly drawn to Catling’s relationship to mysteries, secrets, occluded forms of knowledge, the ineffable gaps that pockmark our seemingly rational world. I write in my introduction (to A Mystery of Remnant) that a ghost might be seen as an absence defined by its presence, or else a presence defined by its absence. Sometimes these Catlingesque ghosts might take the form of a dog-headed saint, a cricket-headed flea, a talking mongoose with humanoid hands—at other times they emerge in the stories through the presence of William Blake, Emanuel Swedenborg or Edgar Allan Poe, all members of the author’s personal pantheon. It doesn’t take much for a human being, as in the case of Bosch or Catling himself, to take on a ghostly dimension.
JK: In selecting the contents for this collection that concept of an absence defined by its presence, or else a presence defined by its absence comes across as central to the book. Are there other themes that emerged for you as you and Iain were putting it together? Or do you think the wide variety of Catling’s obsessions/interests form a Catlingesque cosmology of sorts?
VR: That notion of a Catling cosmology is a very good way of putting it. Something that’s so striking about his work, having studied its progression from the early ’60s to the 2020s, is how incredibly early in his career he latched onto what would become his key artistic motifs. His practice moved from sculpture to poetry, then to performance, painting, film-making, and finally to the writing of novels—but even though the mediums changed, the key obsessions remained the same: ghosts, weapons, angels, cyclopses, eyes, dysfluency, deformity, orphans, Ripperology . . .
These are the main orbiting planets of the Catling cosmos. With regards to this collection, something that becomes notable is just how many artists (both real and fictional) appear within the stories, be they painters, writers, translators, or craftsmen. One of the joys of Catling’s fiction is the way he draws on historical figures and weaves them into the quasi-surreal fabric of his prose. He is fascinated by the various manifestations of artistic craft, by visionaries who are able to access glimpses of strange new worlds and share them with the rest of us. His writing effectively becomes a record of his personal palate, a curated Wunderkammer of the artists he felt a kinship with.
JK: Yes, several of the stories feature real people: Lars Hertevig (“Heart of the Forest”), Emanuel Swedenborg (“April 6th 1744”), the presence or absence of William Blake (“Lambeth Tenant”). Who would you say were Catling’s primary influences or inspirations for his writing and art?
VR: The two competing forces are Blake and Edgar Allan Poe, whose presence is also felt in the collection through the story “Further Facts in the Case of M. Valdermar”, a sequel/remix of Poe’s famous 1845 tale of mesmerism and life extended beyond the point of death. These two figures might be viewed as opposite poles of influence on his work. On the one hand we have Catling’s highbrow mystic/visionary concern, filtered through his Blakean creation of a syncretic belief system that draws on Biblical imagery, Kabbalah and Sufi mysticism. Catling’s relationship to theology is a complex matter—he wasn’t religious in any ordinary sense, though in his role as a sculptor he did produce processional crosses for both St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square and Dorchester Abbey in Oxfordshire. And then on the flipside we have the slightly more sensational influence of Poe, that embodiment of grotesque decadence, of monstrosity and horror, lurid crimes and sadistic punishments. So much of Catling’s prose feels like an attempt to weave these two strands together—or maybe to wrangle them into submission, as if they were two distinct yet equally volatile species he was trying to cross-breed.
JK: Places share equally important with people in Catling’s fiction: “Written Rooms and Pencilled Crimes”, “House”, the amazing, and real, diorama in “A Pendon Parva Ghost”. His fascination seems to be with the liminal, with boundaries or thresholds.
VR: The notion of space is also essential. Dorchester in particular played a key role in his later writings, appearing as a setting for “A Pendon Parva Ghost” as well as “A Mystery of Remnant”, which lends our collection its title—Dorchester also served as the main location for his novella Munky, published by Swan River Press in 2020. But there are other spaces, buildings, islands of importance, too many to mention here. One that I’d like to draw attention to is the Museo della Specola in Florence, which features in “Written Rooms and Pencilled Crimes”. This remarkable anatomical museum helps forge a link between his work and that of his close friend Eleanor Crook, Britain’s foremost anatomical waxwork artist and the genius behind our book’s cover. Catling’s work as a performance artist was very much built around feeling resonances of the particular space in which he worked, tapping into a site’s history and soul, channelling its ghosts. If a space happened to be already populated by long-dead human specimens or chattering spirits, then so much the better.
JK: There’s certainly something of the psychogeographic to much of Catling’s work, sharing commonalities with work by Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and some of Will Self’s fiction. And yet it’s also utterly unique. Do you think this might have anything to do with the fact that he jumped from one medium to the other and often amalgamated media—poetry, art, sculpture, performance? It’s like he had a questing mind that could never quite still itself.
VR: Something that should be mentioned is the fact that Catling never liked talking about process, at least not in the interviews conducted over the last ten years of his life. He took what might seem like quite a passive role for an author, referring to his books as having written themselves, as though a kind of channelling had taken place in which he was simply there to mediate words that flowed through him into his laptop. In a way, this approach might resembles Surrealist automatism as described by André Breton—though Breton is clear that automatic writing emerges from deep within the author’s relaxed subconscious, whereas Catling instead suggests the possibility that these words and voices may have reached him from someplace else.
So on the one hand we have an author who clearly shares commonalities with the work of Sinclair and Ackroyd (especially in his emphasis on London Victoriana and the occult)—but we also have a figure whose process is much less intellectualised, who struggled to talk about how he put the books together in the first place, who seemed as surprised as anyone when the novels and stories emerged. He had no idea that The Vorrh would be as expansive as it ended up being, or that it would spawn two sequels—he was even working on a fourth book before he died. Perhaps this ties in with the questing energy you mentioned. There’s a relentless imaginative force operating in the background, an engine he couldn’t fully control or understand.
JK: And watching the documentary about him, The Cast Squid of a Lost Character, it looks like he took a similar approach to his teaching work at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. I suspect he didn’t like to be considered a teacher as such, more a guider of talent. I was struck by his teaching philosophy of “no prisoners/no disciples”.
VR: My understanding is that Catling took his teaching very seriously—though as you say, his approach differed from the typical framing of pedagogy as an act of instruction. He repeatedly referred to his role as being a kind of “reflector” for his students. They would come to him and present their ideas for an artwork or performance, and he would act as “a reflective mirror”, to quote from the Cast Squid documentary: “I ask the student a question, and then they hit the reflective mirror, and what I do is I change the concavity of the reflective mirror, so the idea comes out between us.” The aim of this process was that, in the wake of a tutorial, “they come away thinking about [the idea], not about me. And sometimes not about them.”
Something I write about in my thesis on Catling is his fascination with Gnosticism, which is defined in certain traditions as a quest for knowledge driven by instinct. This seems to echo one of the first things that drew me to The Vorrh when I was a teenager—I remember feeling that this book was trying to teach me something, but I didn’t know what. I’m still not entirely sure if I’ve answered that question, but I’ve come more to terms with Catling’s interest in the notion of a journey, of a creative quest, rather than an epiphanic endpoint—even though his characters do sometimes reach epiphany, on the rare occasion when they aren’t subsumed by a Lovecraftian sense of madness or despair.
JK: Catling seems to have had an epiphanic moment himself in one of my favourite pieces in the new collection, “X Certify”, an essay about the affect watching The Revenge of Frankenstein had on him. The decline of his uncle, though, looks to have played an equally important part in his decision to create “workable lies and constructible dreams”.
VR: Absolutely—it reminds me of another moment of epiphany he talked about in interviews, this being the time he was rewatching a tape of a performance he’d made and saw that his face had been accidentally reflected in a pane of glass, so that it appeared as though he had one eye in the centre of his head. This sudden vision was the main impulse that led him to become so fascinated with the figure of the cyclops, which went on to reappear throughout his performances, video installations, paintings, and novels. I’m tempted to see this story as a literalisation of the mirror metaphor discussed above, whereby Catling received a sudden flash of inspiration from an image, rather than being taught to pursue the motif by someone else. He could never quite explain the cyclops obsession—it simply called out to him, and he felt compelled to explore it.
This account, as with his essay on The Revenge of Frankenstein, foregrounds the dawning of artistic inspiration, but also notably ties this impulse to an emphasis on deformity. There is a very strong focus on ugliness and grotesquery in his work, on physical deformity as it is mediated through art (horror movie make-up, death masks, the uncanny valley) rather than as a lived experience. I would place Catling’s work in a tradition of thinkers who believe there is an aspect of divinity in the grotesque, that monstrosity is adjacent to the divine—it’s for this reason that the Vorrh trilogy ends with Ishmael the cyclops becoming the prophet of a new age, albeit one that doesn’t appear to include humans in his grand plan.
JK: In pulling together A Mystery of Remnant, you and Iain have certainly managed to present a diverse range of Catling’s interests and forms in prose: short stories, the essay “X Certify”, a play, “Ugler i Mosen”, a poem, “Large Ghost”—and the shorter more fragmentary pieces, “The Shift”, “Earwig”, “The Blot” are remarkably complete in terms of the thoughts he was exploring.
VR: I’m especially thrilled by the inclusion of “Uger i Mosen” (a short, spectral love story between a woman and a bog body) and the extract from his film Vanished!, a collaboration with Tony Grisoni about a family that was haunted by the ghost of a mongoose in the 1930s. Those two are my favourite texts in the collection, I find myself continually returning to them and reading passages aloud. Since Catling’s practice has always been interdisciplinary it felt important that our selection showcased his restless movement between prose, poetry, performance and film. I feel especially drawn to those pieces of his that are difficult to pin down, that resist easy categorisation.
Because of this, it feels important that the book be accompanied by a sequence of responses to Catling that take a diverse range of forms. My introduction approaches his oeuvre from a slightly academic angle, but it’s hopefully balanced out by the more moving, elliptical foreword written by Catling’s son Jack, himself a remarkable performer and poet. Then we have a meditative memory-piece by Iain Sinclair in the conclusion, as well as three new texts (poems? prose poems?) by Alan Moore responding to photographs of Catling as a younger man. This collage of reactions was never part of our original plan, but as the book came together it felt absolutely appropriate—both the man and his work are too slippery to be contained within any single write-up or retrospective. You need to be able to see him from different angles at once, like shards of a broken mirror.
JK: Finally, to what extent do you think Catling’s work has impacted or influenced your own work as a writer and performer?
VR: A very difficult question to answer! Some of the influence is obviously overt—I recently published a booklet through Three Impostors press entitled Haunting the Ghost, which is about my arrival into London on the day Catling died, and the subsequent clustering of coincidences/visions that surrounded me during my first year in the city. It’s an odd text, one that clearly felt like it had to be written. It was a kind of exorcism that needed to be put out into the world to rid myself of a strange feeling of being haunted (or being the one doing the haunting).
I try not to let Catling’s distinctive prose style affect my writing—attempting to copy that would only result in bland pastiche. But I will say that he has undoubtedly been an enormous influence on how I view the importance of the imagination. My imagination is very different to his, my pantheon of influences and tutelary guides is different, the motifs that obsess us are not the same—but Catling exemplifies a certain relentless bravery in his approach, a dogged need to explore and create which I cannot help but be inspired by. Alan Moore told me that Catling “had the bravery that poets have”, which is something I think about a lot. He didn’t care whether or not his work would be appreciated in his lifetime, he simply wrote what he felt he had to. He assumed The Vorrh would end up being a forgotten surrealist project that might be rediscovered decades after he died, never guessing it would end up in the fantasy section of every high-street bookshop during his lifetime. Whether or not you like his work, it is undoubtedly the product of a forceful, singular imagination, a creative engine that is true to itself. Perhaps building a similarly honest relationship with our own creative engine is the one thing that those of us who write and make art should truly aspire to do—after that, all else will follow.
Buy A Mystery of Remnant and Other Absences
TJJ: There seems to be an enigmatic linguistic ritual behind the narrative of Munky that is reminiscent of the oeuvre of Raymond Roussel, a writer who has been a character in other work of yours. And your literary poetics has its roots in innovative and playful poetry. How does experimenting with language feed your fiction practice?
BC: Blake is another Khidr, he won’t go away. It’s not his visionary approach that fascinates me. It’s his down-to-earth need to get things on paper. For me he is not a frocked dreamer wafting about and talking to angels. He is a grafter, a working man, whose small factory was crowded with other beings while he daily had to make crappy prints for other artists. His own work sandwiched between his bread-and-butter labour without ever becoming infected or diluted. For me that is a much weirder picture than the hippy poster of him. Gawd knows about his work in the art of the twenty-first century . . . I never understand or care to place art in those restriction. All my tenses are continually jumbled. A constant joy to my editors.