Sounds Familiar or The Beast of Artek

A Gothic Novel by Zinovy Zinik. Limited edition on fine Munken paper with 11 full page illustrations and cover painting by Lukáš Malina, renowned Czech artist and member of Weird Scene circle. Sim Golos, a Russian expat in London and amateur sound engineer, is obsessed with recording all kinds of bizarre noises he comes across in the din and clatter of daily life - as if in search of some mysterious sound he lost in childhood. In a local gym, he forms a group of eccentric London friends: a female taxidermist artist who works as a gym instructor, two bodybuilders - who own the gym - and an unemployed handyman with his barmaid girlfriend. Over the course of this Gothic thriller, it becomes clear that Sim's abused Soviet childhood and the lives of the other characters are intricately linked to Artek, an international Young Pioneer camp in Crimea where an army of instructors and Party propagandists used to brainwash children into believing in a Communist Paradise on earth. Meanwhile, a dubious British businessman Archibald Wren, appointed as Sim’s guardian, manipulates the lives and minds of Sim and his London friends.