A review of The Twisted Times of Bella Basura

By Bella Basura

The hand-crafted self-published Twisted Times novel is an eleven chaptered excursion through a series of physically, chemically and psychickally altered states, filtered through the subjective and distorted lens of the narrator - Bella Basura. The author herself describes it as "A stream of somebody else's consciousness".

In the novel Bella's single-minded pursuit of one drug or another provides an arbitrary but compulsive narrative drive. Like a piece of straw blown on a storm of her own devising, she is propelled through a vortex of increasingly bizarre and repetitive encounters. Amongst some of the curious entities she meets are: Frankie Fucked-Up, The Marquessa, The Princessa Pestilence, Dolly Deviant, the irrepressible Doc. Gordon Tripp and Jesus Good-One - a naked shoeshine boy.

The central themes of the story could be summed up as Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll, written from the view point of an aging space cadet trying to make sense of her shattered memory.

In order to recreate the mental processes of Bella I have chosen to suture my original writing with Cut-ups, detournement, and pure plagiarism. I have used phrases sentences and words from a wide range of sources: William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Guy Debord, Lewis Carroll, Edith Piaf, Thomas De Quincey, Milton, James Herbert, Aleister Crowley, also travel books, biography, rock'n'roll lyrics and ephemera.

Like Bella's quest, the text is not an easy passage, and the narrative turns on itself, returning full circle to the beginning, with the sickening inevitability of a dragon chasing its own tail.

Bella Basura