What to read after More Lies?

More Lies is a highly referential comedy thriller about a writer being held hostage in their own apartment and forced to type to hide the manoeuvres of a femme fatale, holding a pearl handled gun, and her brother, a small-time thug with big time ambitions. This wild tale about assassination, lost gold, betrayal, passion and identity theft engages the reader in the many layers of the author’s witty but deceptive journey. Through a series of lies, backflips and alternative versions of the tale, the author moves from being a trapped hack, forced to prostitute themselves, to dazzling the world with the acrobatics of their imagination, to the heart of the matter: storytelling is all that is keeping them alive.

A wonderfully warped journey into one man’s unravelling psyche, and a joyous celebration of the necessity of story.

– James Bradley, author of Ghost Species

Richard James Allen takes the world of Raymond Chandler – the mysterious murder, the femme fatale, the world-weary observer – and turns it on its head. We end up with a funny, provocative novel that shakes up how we think about reality.

– Anton Enus, SBS

More Lies is a metafictional romp. It is also an engaging and funny tale, full of twists and narrational acrobatics. And, though its narrator is as slippery as a Lehman Brothers banker, there is something almost believable about it.

– Matthew Campora, Head of Screen Studies, Australian Film Television & Radio School

A phantasmagoric, avant-garde story set in a lost New York, Richard James Allen’s More Lies both entertains and provokes as it reveals a world where ‘truth is never enough/Or it’s unlikeable.’ Allen deploys a madcap couple, Stricklandson and Peters, to conduct us through a world of threat and potential which ends up being spooky in many senses of the word. A fluid narrative forward motion and a sense of the fundamental mystery of it all have never been so closely intertwined.

– Nicholas Birns, New York University

Enjoyed More Lies in one hit – like swallowing a tab spiked with speed – with Raymond Chandler’s spook dealing and watching from the corner.

– Rae Desmond Jones, author of The End of the Line