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What the Farmer Told the Bard, a Novel of Erotic Panpsychism

In “this rich, dense, playful novel of philosophical, historical, and metaphysical inquiry … lovers, actors, and Pagan gods face the consequences of a new invention that reveals the polarity of sex uniting all the universe’s particles and upends all post-Pagan theology. The material is fascinating, but the novel offers a series of erotic setpieces, extended monologues, comic colloquies, and even extended comic erotic colloquies…
“The novel’s chief attraction is Cornell du Houx’s witty, daring, allusive prose. The accounts of action, chiefly sex, are lyric and inventive … as characters explain the Slipstream or the metaphysics of sexual connection, or discuss the figure of ‘the Running Christ.’ Imaginative vigor pulses through descriptive scenes in which characters encounter gods and Shakespeare’s fairies…
“There are few philosophical erotic novels about reborn Christs, Shakespearean fairies, crop circles, Sir Lancelot, and the history of religious sacrifice — this book certainly brings fresh and unique material to the table … daring ideas and memorable prose.”

—The BookLife Prize by Publishers Weekly

Includes 25 illustrations of Shakespeare monument runes.

With the mystery of Pagan runes in a monument to the Bard

Third edition, May 21, 2023

Available in local bookstores in many countries and online, including,

Bookshop.org

Amazon.com

Barnes and Noble

What’s it about?

It’s a world where we build an armor of credit. We wear it like an invisible suit of linked coinage and rise in society as cybertypes, sacrificing our souls by increments of increasingly effortless everyday actions, marshaled by watching ourselves in an evermore heroic narrative, in bespoke episodes of an ultimately empty feedback loop — the Orpheus Chronicles. As our authentic soul energies are sucked away, the planetary weather systems slide towards chaos.

A computer scientist has developed a sexual truth-seeking path-finder that sniffs out past lives. He is singled out by his own invention and cultivated by a power elite to be the Return of the Christ. To sacrifice him would reboot world religion and introduce extraterrestrial powers to supplant democracy.

Runes encoded in a monument to Shakespeare come to life. Gods from the Bard’s comedies inspire polyamorous love to find a way for the powers of nature to rebalance the world in time. Will one last day be enough?

Contents

Illustrations

Prologue

  1. The Love Triangle
  2. The Pebble
  3. Screen-Watchers
  4. The DOG
  5. The Cybertype
  6. Sun and Moon
  7. Temple Dancin’
  8. The Hall of Symmetries
  9. Indian Summer
  10. Down Home
  11. Culture Shock
  12. Love’s Logic
  13. Backstage
  14. Tales of The Running Christ
  15. Indecision
  16. Under Starlight
  17. The Green Man
  18. Epilogue