Gerry Reith's best writing was marked by mordant wit and controlled experimentation, but the cumulative gravamen of his protean literary and epistolary endeavors was to interrogate and celebrate the prospect of freedom in a universe governed by venal agendas and brute entropy.

 

Neutron Gun Reloaded: A Gerry Reith Reader, 

Nine-Banded Books, 2020.

On April 7 1984, in the small city of Sheridan Wyoming, Gerard Bennet Reith died at his writing desk of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. He was 25.

While the details of Reith’s suicide remain hazy and subject to apocryphal embellishment, the work he produced during his apogee as a writer for a raft of underground publications left an indelible impression in the minds of those who discovered it. Consorting at the bleeding edges of what has since been described as the “marginals milieu” of the pre-Internet era, Reith traded arts and letters with a motley coterie of avant garde outsiders whose only alliance distilled to a spirit of freewheeling creative rebellion.

Athwart and among these misfits who inhabited and cultivated the mail-order demimonde that preceded Anonymous and the chans and cryptocurrencies and 3D-printed gun schematics and incel manifestos and myriad manifestations of digital mischief that would later complicate the Spectacle, Gerry Reith produced essays and criticism, poetry and prosody, broadsides and collages, but most notably allegories and metafictions. And his work invariably stood out. Reith’s best writing was marked by mordant wit and controlled experimentation, but the cumulative gravamen of his protean literary and epistolary endeavors was to interrogate and celebrate the prospect of freedom in a universe governed by venal agendas and brute entropy.

Neutron Gun Reloaded: A Gerry Reith Reader is the first collection of Gerry Reith’s writings to be published in more than three decades. In addition to reprinting the core texts signed for the 1985 Neither/Nor Press edition of Neutron Gun, this volume presents a broad selection of Reith’s lesser-known writings culled from long-defunct small circulation publications. Featuring a new foreword by Reith’s former publisher Denis McBee as well as an introduction by Nine-Banded Books publisher Chip Smith and a bibliography of Reith’s extant writings compiled by Bob Black, this is the definitive introduction to the largely forgotten work of a writer who lived and died before his time.

The short life and extraordinary work of revolutionary writer Gerry Reith explored.

Picture Sheridan Wyoming. Your first impression.

Start with Big Horn peaks set against vast horizons. A crystal-blue firmament, or if you prefer, the star-dusted canopy of night. Nested within the lazy sprawl of cattle ranches and postcard vistas, the town itself offers such rudiments of civilization – a grocery outlet, some barbecue restaurants, dim-lit taverns, shops showcasing western memorabilia – that suffice to satisfy the needs of a small population as well as the slow stream of tourists, many (not all) of whom will look forward to Rodeo Week and attendant festivities. Local charm, local colour. You know.

Daylight now. Nod hello to passersby as you stroll down Main Street. They are a friendly lot and their eyes won’t be fixed on the screens of mobile devices because the year, I neglected to mention, is 1984. This is important; go ahead and revise Your Own Personal Sheridan accordingly. The automobiles should be backdated and decorated at your discretion with legible signifiers. Maybe some Reagan/Bush bumper stickers? That Starbucks will have to go. Otherwise, not much will have changed.

Continuing on your mind’s eye ramble, you come to a community bulletin board outside the small, nondescript Post Office. Look at those flyers. All in all, it’s a familiar collage. Tourist that you are, you first notice the ones that advertise local farm and ranch services. It’s mildly exotic, yes? But there are others that might be found in any American city or town. Lost pets. Babysitting services. Guitar lessons. Et cetera. Do you find this comforting?

Look closer.

Displayed among the random patchwork of community ephemera, there are… oddities. Being a punk sophisticate from the future, you may recognize the hand of a subversive poster artist, Xerox as medium.

“TRUTH IS LIES” shouts one banner that lassos your attention.

Another asks: “WHO IS GERRY REITH?”

 High weirdness resides in the fine print. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

How, you might rather wonder, in the heart of Cold War Reagan country, might the locals have received such provocative broadsides, such cryptic expressions of obliquely dissident satire that, for a time, blotted their dogpatch town-centre pastiche? Were they mystified? Amused? Bemused? Were they—some of them —given to a moment’s reflection?

More likely, they took it in stride. Some kid’s idea of a joke.

Still, you wonder. Perhaps your borrowed understanding of the Markov Chain comes to mind. A state change in the system. A disruption. You fix on the idea of a white current rippling through a multi-hued sensory order, a neural rift that bleeds between minds and forward through time, disturbing equilibria.

It is best, for now, not to dwell in such idle speculation. For present purposes, there is more to see.

Mosey your way into the lobby of the Post Office proper and imagine what voices might have carried on a particular day—let’s say April 23rd, a Monday, and my fourteenth birthday—as you sidle up to the counter where one postal clerk can be overheard chatting up another.

You don’t catch all of it, but certain words ring clear. Something about a backlog of weird mail for that lanky dude who until recently arrived like clockwork. And perhaps another clerk calls in answer:

You mean Gerry, right?

Something is amiss.     read more here