Beastly Transparencies

A provocative literary portrait of Anthony Comstock’s six-decade war on vice, alongside twenty stories probing class, obsession, morality and the price of trying to live a “good” life.

Beastly Transparencies explores class and obsession across both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The title novella dramatizes the life of noted anti-vice campaigner Anthony Comstock. Charting his grand work against the explosion of pornography, prostitution and underground gambling starting in the 1860s – from circulating smut libraries to obscene early film, illicit rubber articles intercepted in the mail to numbers games and religious cons backed by violence – ‘Beastly Transparencies’ tracks Comstock and his New York Society for the Prevention of Vice through a six-decade crusade against sin. The twenty accompanying stories move between northern England and the north east of America, following divergent paths but exploring similar themes: what motivates the heart, and what the head? Which forces shape the moral beings we become? How – and at whose unseen hand – do we slide up or down the slippery pole of virtue? Beastly Transparencies takes as its starting point a question shared with Sillitoe: in the endless grind of life, love and commerce, what does it really mean to win?