Two weeks before its official launch at Prague Microfestival, Equus are very proud to announce the arrival of proof copies of Phillip O'Neil's PAINTING EYES ON CHAOS, his final and most ambitious opus magnum. Set in the interzones of war & peace, O’Neil’s hauntological prose/poem of psychic doom & resurrection casts an eye beyond the mortality of authorship & its discontents, towards the unsaid & the unsayable. Painting Eyes on Chaos is a counterpart to Mental Shrapnel. Painting Eyes on Chaos is a sprawling, hallucinatory investigation into grief, memory, madness and the treacherous workings of language. Beginning with the mysterious death of Jazz, whose spectral presence haunts a fractured constellation of siblings, lovers, detectives and psychiatric patients, the novel spirals through the streets of Prague, the Arctic wilderness, war zones and the labyrinths of the unconscious. At its centre lies an encrypted microdrive, a missing truth and an investigation whose boundaries between witness and accomplice, victim and perpetrator, dream and reality become increasingly unstable. Combining detective fiction, epistolary confession, philosophical speculation, grotesque comedy and lyrical experimentation, O’Neil constructs a polyphonic narrative in which identities multiply, memories mutate and the dead refuse to stay buried. By turns savage, tender, hilarious and harrowing, Painting Eyes on Chaos brings the linguistic inventiveness and uncompromising psychological intensity of Mental Shrapnel to their fullest expression: a posthumous masterpiece of contemporary experimental fiction that asks what it means to bear witness when even the self has become a mystery. “To ‘paint eyes upon chaos’ is not to domesticate it but to allow it to return our gaze. It is to acknowledge that chaos already observes us: that memory, grief and language possess a life independent of our attempts to master them.”—@DavidVichnar “There is a melancholy aura of solitude inside each chapter’s core, punctuated by puns, pranks and irreverent O’Neilian pisstakes. Curious, colourful characters vie for pole position in a glorious, ghastly circus of frank, bucolic storytelling. Short stories, poetry, monologues, letters and dream sequences combine to produce a beautiful kaleidoscope of a tale – a ripping yarn.”—Michael Rowland For ordering details and more information, please visit equuspress.wordpress.com/pai…