Ray Franz is currently conducting research for his debut novel A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens.
This is the culmination of a collaborative artistic research project The Place of Shade, conducted in partnership with visual artist and photographer Anthony Charles Morton - The Nordic Journal for Artistic Research - The University of the Arts Stockholm - Kulturdirektoratet Arts and Culture Norway - Bergen Kommune - The Norske Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond.
Selected Short Fiction
The Initial Short Stories in his collection 'Myopia' have featured in ‘New Contrast Literary Magazine’ ‘Kinda Weird Magazine’, and ‘A Thousand Word Photos’ respectively. Click the links below to read stories from Ray Franz's short story collection 'Myopia'.
A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens
It is 1999 in Durban, South Africa. Nelson Mandela has rescinded the presidency, the TRC has concluded, the South African Arms Deal has been approved, and all the while, the threat of Y2K looms imminently.
"A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens" follows the misadventures of Vincent Dibble, an occidental eschatologist and part-time apocalypse hunter employed by South Africa’s Y2K Bureau.
A mysterious fax from the head of Durban’s Occult Related Crimes Unit seems to imply that a shadowy group of black metal enthusiasts, operating out of the derelict Union Whaling Station, are in action to expedite the Y2K Millennium Bug, plotting what they consider to be the cumulative crime of the 20th Century – the end of the world itself.
His hand forced, Dibble finds himself reunited with his old omnium gatherum of haggard barflies, audacious accountants, nascent crooks, surreptitious whalermen, and gambolling cops, all trying to arrest the apocalypse amid a landscape where reality blurs with fiction, mirroring the surreal uncertainties of a nation in transition.
The narrative, less concerned with 'the' end of the world than 'an' end of the word, unfolds against the backdrop of Durban's peculiarities where inhabitants grow increasingly weirder by the day. Setting off on a picaresque journey in search of answers, Dibble grapples with the fact that he’s neither quite at home where he's from nor where he's ended up.
