Duncan Barlow

Duncan Barlow moves between fiction, publishing, teaching, and music, and those overlapping practices inform the fractured atmosphere of his novels. He teaches fiction writing and horror literature for the University of South Dakota, serves as publisher at Astrophil Press, and manages the South Dakota Review. Before academia, he toured with punk and indie bands and released more than twenty-five records. The City, Awake is a metaphysical noir published by Stalking Horse Press. Its city is shaped by chemically induced amnesia, doubles, fanatics, and violence, creating a mystery in which stable identity is never guaranteed. Barlow’s prose treats forgetting not merely as a plot device but as a pressure on how characters recognize themselves and one another. The novel sits beside A Dog Between Us and Of Flesh and Fur within fiction concerned with loss, horror, and unstable perception. Its noir machinery provides momentum, while the repeated uncertainty over memory and duplication gives the story its more unsettling philosophical dimension.