THE EATER OF DARKNESS

Considered by many to be one of the most unique, avant-garde works published by the Lost Generation, and hailed as the first Dada novel published by an American, The Eater of Darkness has been out of print for more than 50 years. This new edition, with a fresh introduction and contemporary material, pays homage to the groundbreaking life and career of Robert Coates.

THE EATER OF DARKNESS was first published in Paris in 1926. The publisher was Contact Editions and it was Gertrude Stein who pushed hard to get it published. It was billed as a genre-busting collision of science fiction, murder mystery, and Dada and/or Surrealism. It also used innovative typography and layout and artful arrangements of paragraphs and text and it's said that Coates was truly far ahead of his time with using notes/columns/commentary scattered in the conventional writing. He did this so that he'd simultaneously interrupt the linearity of standard predictable writing and deconstruct the way of presenting books.

THE EATER OF DARKNESS was released in the US by Macaulay in 1929 and then republished by Capricorn Press, an imprint of Putnam, in 1959, with an introduction by the author. FYI, Coates felt it necessary to update some of the more obscure references from the original for the 1959 edition.

It fell out of print for decades, though in 2012 it reappeared briefly and unattractively in an edition by a fringe company called Olympia Press, who just scanned pages of the original and it was a mess. That press, and that edition, thankfully disappeared.

Often compared to Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, The Eater of Darkness is an acclaimed crime novel and a study in surrealist fiction; an experimentation of style, structure, and syntax; and an innovative, avant-garde concoction from an author who wrote years ahead of his time. Characters disappear and reappear; events spiral in a disorienting, antirealistic fashion; and genres collide in an unpredictable, dreamlike conclusion.

Robert Myron Coates (1897-1973) was well-known in his day, and well-connected. He had a lengthy relationship with The New Yorker, as a contributor and as an art critic from 1937 to 1967. He wrote other novels and short stories that did alright but are all out of print.
Robert Myron Coates was art critic for the New Yorker for more than 40 years. He coined the term "abstract expressionism" in reference to the works of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. He wrote this first novel while living in Paris in the 1920s, brushing shoulders with literary giants like Malcolm Cowley, Ford Maddox Ford, and Ernest Hemingway.

Mathilde Roza, who writes the introduction in this City Point Press edition of THE EATER OF DARKNESS, is a Dutch academic. She wrote a biography of Coates in 2011 called Following Strangers: The Life and Literary Works of Robert M. Coates, published by University of South Carolina Press. Also, the introduction that Coates wrote to the 1959 edition is included in this new one.