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AlembicAuthor: Timothy d'Arch Smith British Literature Series October 1992 226 pages, 6 x 9 cloth, 1-56478-009-0 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $15.96—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
Alembic is an unsettling novel about madness and alchemy, epistemology and rock and roll, magic and perversion. Thomas Graves, a young antiquarian, works for ALEMBIC, a British government office investigating the contemporary applications of the secrets of alchemy. The strange world of alchemy, however, is as eerie as the rock and roll world of Thomas's friend Nicholas Spark, leader of a Led Zeppelin-like band called Celestial Praylin. Moving between these worlds, colorfully conveyed in d'Arch Smith's sonorous prose—at times elegant, at times comic—Thomas Graves feels his grip on reality constantly imperiled; his attraction to the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of his colleagues complicates his existence further. A dramatic turn of events brings all of his fears and fancies out in the open, suggesting finally that the world is as mad as Thomas thought himself to be.
Set largely in the early 1980s, Alembic ends in the early years of the twenty-first century as alchemy engineers a new world order, concluding a novel of great originality and ill-boding.
About the Author
| Timothy d'Arch Smith is an antiquarian book dealer and writer. He has written on the Uranian poets and rock music, among much else. |  |
Praise
"I found Alembic charged with fire. Timothy d'Arch Smith writes a prose that seems activated by lightning, full of passion and power. Who, in the minimalist age of the dim bulb, won't give thanks?"—Alexander Theroux"D'Arch Smith's anfractuous, often beautiful prose is seductive, whether in deadpan description of improbable events or in the gradual, hallucinatory revelation of the truly unnatural."—Publishers Weekly
"Alembic . . . reads like a brilliant, mannered dark fantasy while consisting almost entirely of 'mainstream' (non-supernatural) events, before culminating in a chapter-length Epilogue that turns it into an alchemical amalgam of horror and [science fiction]. All this in convoluted, sometimes Proustian, prose, spiced with delicious wit. . . . [I]t all boils down to something like sheer force of personality. Reading this book is like spending a few hours with a splendid, eccentric 'raconteur.' Listen patiently, and you will be richly rewarded."—LOCUS
"[T]his rather classy brand of pulp is as stylistically convoluted as Henry James and much too good for the Booker Prize shortlist. It's wild yet dignified—just like the author. [Alembic is] a guilty pleasure for the oddballs to drool over."—Penthouse