ORCS!!!

‘David Ashford’s book takes us into a realisation that these beings called Orcs might be a symptom of how history has been taken away from us, in other words that it can’t be written except with the aid of imaginary beings of this type: ‘written history pathogens . . . Time is a ghost.’ Ashford’s prose, which is also poetry, is a probe into the particular (human) energies that animate these non-humans and in the process radically interferes with the language of Tolkien’s nasty anti-modernism, getting help from Blake, Benjamin and others. Of course Orcs are mainstream popular, given their presence in gaming and film. Ashford exposes their link with the entropy of England. Enjoyable and necessary work.’ – William Rowe