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Simon King-Spooner

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Simon King-Spooner

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Peterkin

Tayport's Auld Kirk

Red House

Strong Language

Other Writing

Reviews:

Barbara Lennox, author of The Trystan Trilogy:

Red House is an evocation of the 70s, specifically the long hot summer of ’76, its framework an ultimately doomed philosophical experiment fuelled by drugs, drink and sex, in which the characters get caught up.

As someone who remembers the 70s, I was impressed by the loving attention to detail – the minutiae of platform shoes, patterned shirts, the particular brands of drink, dusty concrete, tired canal boats and, of course, the music, The title of the book, Red House refers to a Hendrix track of the same name, a track described in immersive detail over several pages in a stream of consciousness entirely in keeping with the music. Over to the guitar, which turns a bend to a downhill straight and rears and paws the air and hammers down, careering in its energy and anger …

Such striking imagery is to be found throughout the novel. There is not a single cliché. Every passage of description uses images that are new, bold, striking and right, achieving what all good description should do – make the reader see something in an entirely new way. The sky is never merely blue, or even azure or cerulean. It is mazarine. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of swifts, those iconic symbols of summers of the past. They’re arial Bebop, they fly like a Coltrane solo, all over the barlines, all over the chords ...

The characters are equally finely drawn and three-dimensional. They aren’t cyphers who spout 20th century attitudes, but are firmly rooted in their own time. They are contrary and contrasting, and fight and make up, argue and discuss, throw tantrums and spout inanities as they stumble their way to some sort of understanding of their world. They are very real people who you want to strangle, shake, despair over, weep with, people who live long in the imagination. Some of them lose their way. Others find themselves, in carefully balanced character arcs both positive and negative.

The theme of the novel is subtle and multi-layered. Is it about philosophy, the science of observation, the redemptive power of love, the failures of academia? All of these things or none? I suspect each reader will tease out their own theme and that every reading will reveal new meanings.

Red House is a novel to savour, to read slowly and think about long after the last page has been turned, a novel to read more than once since every reading will tease out new themes, new understandings, and new appreciations of the sheer skill of the author. A literary tour de force.

Angus Macmillan, author of The Ways of Salt (collected poems), and Between the Echoes (memoir):

Red House is a multi-layered narrative, tracking the collisions between a smug, self-satisfied academia and a radical research project proposed by the cynical and mocking philosopher, Damon Snyder, all underpinned by turbulent personal relationships and drug-fuelled proclivities - his own and those of friends and colleagues caught in his wake. King-Spooner's prose is rich in its observations of his characters' behaviour and foibles, and is lit up by rhapsodic, poetic passages, freed from the fetters of everyday mundanities, whether putting Hendrix's guitar artistry into words, or evoking progressions into, and out of, enhanced states of mind. Enjoy the ride!

Ray Fancher, author of Pioneers of Psychology and The Intelligence Men:

II really enjoyed and admired the book. Parts of it will continue to resonate with me for a long time.

It took me some time in the first half to get to “know" the characters as well as their environment and lingo, but in the second half I followed them with great interest. As a whole, I see Red House as a monumental effort, combining interesting characters within an evocatively detailed depiction of mid-70s academic, music and drug culture.

The book expanded my musical appreciation with [Hendrix’s] Red House, and later with [Toots and the Maytals’] 54-46.

I was also interested to get some sense of what acid trips were like. In the spring of 1962, when I was finishing at Wesleyan and preparing for Harvard, the Leary/Alpert studies were just beginning to be publicized. My mentor Dave Berlew was a recent Harvard PhD, and he travelled back to Cambridge and attended a psilocybin session where he experienced beautiful visual sensations while listening to Stravinsky’s Firebird suite. This sounded pretty cool to me and so when I was accepted at Harvard I thought it would be interesting for me to try the drugs too. It was not too be, though, because I got there the Department had laid down the law about conditions under which students should be administered the substances. When I asked my advisor Dick Alpert about trying then, a kind of weird expression came over his face and he said that now, he would only introduce a student to the experience in a private setting with him alone, and with a high dose of the drug. before This was not the kind of friendly group setting I had been expecting, and it made me uneasy and my then-fiancée Lynn even uneasier. So I held back, and at the end of term both Alpert and Leary were summarily fired. And so in the end I wound up working with the striaghtest-of-the-straight Gordon Allport and Robert White. I always had a secret fear, though, that in missing out on psychedelics I might be missing “the greatest thing since Freud.” From what I later learned, though, about the later careers of Leary and Alpert (in his subsequent guise as Ram Dass), I have not regretted the decision too much.

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