This two-part novel is set in Hiroshima, half a century after the fact.
Sam Edwine is being stalked through Hiroshima by "hit-missionaries" from a certain well-established American pseudo-religion, whose patriarchs suspect him of being the author of a blasphemous book, and have declared a western-style fatwa on his head.
"A merciless humor and tireless passion for words not seen since the King James Bible drive Bradley's work at bullet-train speed through unmapped areas of linguistic elasticity and imagination. Readers once begun will find their concentration hostaged from all other diversions until they reach the last page."
-- David Wood, author of A Definitive Study of Sylvia Plath's Imagery
"Your years in China should stand you in good stead. That vast land is still terra incognita as far as the eye of fiction is concerned... Your title is offputting."
--John Updike, author of Cunts
Written after several years of exile in the People's Republic of China, Black Class Cur is set in that country on the eve of the latest Tiananmen Square Massacre.
The main characters are a former Red Guard still trying to fight the Cultural Revolution in a remote rural area, and his younger brother who gets fatally involved in the student demonstrations. They come up against an American "foreign expert" who represents everything they despise.
The latter's preoccupation is locating a baby to adopt, with or without the help of a variegated gang of Palestinians, Liberians, Pakistanis and other third-world "medical exchange students," who must spend their waking hours slaving in the municipal abortion mill.
Black Class Cur was nominated for the Editor's Book Award.
Read all about Tom Bradley's teenage gig performing Mozart and Debussy grotesquely on the harp at a geothermal spa, deep in the savage Utah desert. The place is run by a coven of polygamist Kali-worshipping tantric orgiasts who sell fake Crowleyana to rock star Jimmy Page.
"You will either love this slim psycho-memoir-prose-poem-mind-trip or you will hate it. I can't imagine any reader falling in the middle. This is evocative, provocative, balls-out writing, and in all the love and hate to come, I want to cast the weight of one overwhelmingly normal, middle-aged literary warhorse on the love side." --Joni Rodgers, author of Bald in the Land of Big Hair
"One of the hallmarks of [Tom Bradley's] work is a mania that reads as ecstasy. My Hands Were Clean is a joy to read because the author and narrator seem caught up in a mad enthusiasm, an insatiable glee, an absolute pleasure in the written word. The final pages reinforce this impression, tying [Bradley's] decision to write, while being paid to do otherwise, into [his] narrative style.... The plot, based as it is in LSD, is connected to--perhaps even derived from--that maniacal ecstasy. It's not an expose on how Mormon sex cults are dangerous; it's a novel, of undetermined factuality, on how Mormon sex cults are hilarious." --Jonathan Penton, author of Standards of Sadiddy
The Bomb Baby was in Hiroshima, in utero, at the moment of the glamorous detonation. As a result of prenatal exposure to gamma rays, he is tiny and mentally deficient, but his physical vigor is unimpaired.
Living on a makeshift raft on the river that runs through town, he only comes ashore to disrupt high-tone weddings at Hiroshima Cathedral. It’s a hobby for him. He disappears soon after spoiling a Yakuza wedding.
This doesn’t sit well with the leading lights of the expatriate community, who have adopted the bomb baby as a mascot. They dispatch Sam Edwine, a reluctant and inefficient American slob, to search "Boom Town's" sordid and musty places, of which there is a wide assortment...
New edition of BOMB BABY, with a deluxe special added bonus: the feature-length screenplay version! Now you can help Sam Edwine scour Hiroshima's wide variety of dark, musty places in haute cinematique style.
Enigmatic Ink
"The real point of reading Bradley, aside from his illumination of the ridiculous and grotesque world around us, is the rolling cadence of his pitch-perfect writing. We prize competent prose here at Danse Macabre, but we absolutely adore Bradley’s work, the strong, steady voice guiding us with spot-on verbiage and heady switchbacks to revelations by turns disgusting, divine, and gut-bustingly hilarious." --James Kendley, Danse Macabre
"Tom Bradley is one of the most misunderstood and ill-appreciated master-writers on the planet... This spectacular literary Lucifer, star of the East, talks like Hume might be imagined to have spoken to the comely Grisettes of pre-Revolutionary Paris (Well, here we are, young ladies! Here we are!)..." --Jesse Glass, author of The Lost Poet
Bizarro Pulp Press
Chris Kelso, the charismatic Caledonian, has collaborated with Tom Bradley in writing this book. Cover art and interior illustrations are by the astonishing Nick Patterson!
Depicted here is Sheila the She-God, who presides over London's formerly semi-fashionable Goneril Square. Inspired by the Cathars and the Bogomils, the Chabad-Lubavitcher Hasidim and the Mohel Rabbis, the Borborites and the Manichaeans, the Vajrayana Buddhists and the ecclesiastical branch of Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis, not to mention
the Carpocratians and sundry otherSpermo-Gnostic sects, Sheila's transgendered clergy hunt down and sacrifice--not humans, but human bodily fluids. Splooge plus catamenia are harvested and wafted aloft, burnt-offering-wise, to our She-God in the smog.
Perverse and profane, Kelso and Bradley make it rain, sluicing the godly and fluids (bodily) down the drain. --John Skipp, author of The Last Goddam Hollywood Movie
The Drill Press
R. V. Cassill called Acting Alone "a vast maelstrom spun from an imagination of superlative dimensions." Stanley Elkin found this novel to have "an incredible energy level."
The book they are describing opens at a cow college in Kansas, proceeds to holiday doings in Kiev, Nebraska, home of a disturbed young marine recently released by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, then spirals toward Cheyenne Mountain, home of NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command) and the convent of the Servant Sisters of Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration. There a dangerous plot spun by a renegade Mormon threatens to upset the protagonist's plans for material and marital well-being.
Now available in this second edition, featuring new cover art by Nick Patterson.
Dynatox Ministries
Tom Bradley gets the bright idea of persuading a peyote-crazed Vietnam vet to show his memoirs to a National Book-winner. Vertebrae are karate-kicked, a seminar room is demolished and set on fire, and a gaggle of Creative Writing MFA candidates are terrorized to the point of urinary incontinence.
"...With a knack for combining colorful argot and a learned style full of historical and philosophical references, [Bradley] weaves it all into scenes of low buffoonery and deep subtext. What results is a bizarre point of view, full of odd insights... "A famous unnamed writer (E.L. Doctorow, I have it on good authority) comes to Bradley's university (downwind from a nuclear hot zone) and conducts a writer's workshop... hilariously described, with snide reference to the 'reptilian appeal' of best sellers, grant recipients who 'hold forth for holding forth's own sake,' and poets 'exuding earnest inarticulateness.' On one level this essay-as-slapstick exposes the pretensions of contemporary writing, while on another level the story climaxes with the Vietnam vet setting fire to the place and being removed by campus police. After that, Bradley writes, 'The English Department never treated me the same.'" --nthposition Magazine
"The real point of reading Bradley, aside from his illumination of the ridiculous and grotesque world around us, is the rolling cadence of his pitch-perfect writing." --Danse Macabre
Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink
"Herein lies the danger of the practice... If the mesmerist is corrupt of heart, foul of mind, and diseased of soul, the vital fluid which he projects will be tainted..."
When Philip K. Dick found himself suddenly transported to New Testament Syria, he must have run into his namesake, Philip the Deacon. VITAL FLUID reverses the time flow, and brings the first Philip to the twenty-first century, along with his transmigrationally entangled nemesis, Simon Magus.
They've returned as rival hypnotists, staging an increasingly bizarre series of shows across America, mesmerizing teenagers in an Indian reservation, a Mormon polygamist's military academy and a Columbine-like high school.
This wizard war climaxes at an East L.A. ghetto community center full the Department of Homeland Security must be called in.
On the way, Philip and Simon make a reincarnational pit stop in nineteenth-century Europe. They are embodied in another pair of wonder-workers, actual historical figures from the glory days of mesmerism, who entranced lions for Queen Victoria and rendered altar boys malleable for Pope Pius IX.
Second Edition with Bonus Screenplay Version
Black Rainbows Press
Vital Fluid is inspired by the uncanny performances and fascinating life of John-Ivan Palmer, the top stage hypnotist in America today, who says--
"Vital Fluid is a masterpiece. There are no words to describe the eerie dream this book is to me."
Damnation and Salvation in the American Food Services Industry!
Spencer Sproul is a would-be serial-killing bus boy. But he can't manage to murder, injure, or even scare anybody. It's not for lack of trying. He sublimates on the job and becomes a rising star of the family restaurant business.
Spencer learns that a family restaurant can be an instrument of torture, too. If the food, music, decor and waitress uniforms are "ratcheted up" to just the right levels, the place can grate subliminally on people's nerves, and stimulate their masochistic tendencies. Customers come flocking, as to a Hannibal the Cannibal movie.
The Better Business Bureau takes notice. But, before Spencer can take his seat of honor at the Merchant of the Month Award Banquet, he must bumble his way past a pederastic restaurant critic, a trash-talking sex worker, a cellulite-worshiping convenience store clerk, and a police force filled with homophobes, overeducated commies and greedy homicide detectives.
