Nicholson, Geoff
Entry updated 23 March 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1953-2025) UK author most of whose work, often involving street-wise gonzo explorations of psyches and geographies, lies along the water margins of Fantastika; a tale like Bleeding London (1997), for instance, reads as though his unpacking of the fantasticated London at its heart represented a literal gazeteer: but, like most psychogeographies (see Iain Sinclair), it penetrates deeper than literal truth. The City Under the Skin (2014) re-enacts a similar Cartography Sublime, though in another, unnamed City. Much closer to sf, Flesh Guitar (1998) depicts, with an engaging semblance of verisimilitude, a phallus-shaped guitar which may be an Alien in disguise, or perhaps simply a Monster. Nicholson's variously expressed life-long obsession with the Volkswagen Beetle is perhaps most manifest in Still Life with Volkswagens (1994), a very loose-slung narrative in which Beetles begin to explode everywhere, and Gravity's Volkswagen (2009), an explicit homage to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) set mostly in a gonzo version of California and (in an imagined Volkswagen novel embedded in the text) a version of post-Disaster London that evokes J G Ballard. Nicholson's career, which was scattershot, almost certainly warrants more sustained study. [JC]
Geoffrey Joseph Nicholson
born Sheffield, Yorkshire: 4 March 1953
died Colchester, Suffolk: 18 January 2025
works (highly selected)
- Still Life with Volkswagens (London: Quartet Books, 1994) [hb/Namara]
- Bleeding London (London: Victor Gollancz, 1997) [pb/Gary Day-Ellison]
- Flesh Guitar (New York: The Overlook Press, 1998) [hb/]
- Gravity's Volkswagen (York, Yorkshire: Harbour Books, 2009) [pb/]
- The City Under the Skin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) [hb/]
links
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