“My own material existence I am reasonably assured of. I can imagine my friend at the other end of the line. But between us two there is an airy nowhere, inhabited by voices and nothing else[…]The vocal inhabitants of this strange region have an amazing vanishing quality[…] And sometimes…you hear the confused murmur of a hundred voices. You catch more expressions from private conversations than your nerves can transmit to the central office of your brain; and if you are imaginative, you may undergo, as I have, a feeling as if you had a hundred astral bodies that were guiltily listening at as many keyholes.”
“A Reporters Visit to the Boston Telephone Exchange”
Scientific American 1887, 106
joe[a]strangeregion.co.uk
THE NETHERHOLE MARTYR
written by Good Friends for a Lifetime
edition of 200
129 x 198mm, 116pp
cover design by Joe Vaughan
isbn 9781739784027
2025
thirteen pounds
The year is 1320 in the stinking town of Netherhole.
A young nun feels the hand of God clutch her guts, an
ambitious Earl issues a dangerous decree, and a ghost
rises from the river.
Doctors, priests and rumours descend and Netherhole’s
fortunes are changed forever.
The Netherhole Martyr is a play recounting a year in the
fortunes of the people of Netherhole, a Yorkshire town in the grip of religious fervour after a young novitiate enacts a
painful communion with the divine through her
constipated bowels.
This surreal and macabre play, written in shades of Donne and Swift, is fully illustrated by Sigrid Koerner and Hannah Mansell.