Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
More Lies
Audiobook
By Richard James Allen
Narrated by Richard James Allen and Jadzea Allen
Interactive Digital
July 2025, ISBN: 9781922830975, $25aud
I reviewed the print version of More Lies in 2021 when this book, which has had many lives and gestations including as a theatrical monologue presented by the 2000 Sydney Writers Festival, first came out in paperback. I was astonished then as I am now how ambitious this novel is. The book is many things: a somewhat noir thriller that opens with a writer held at pearly gunpoint by two would-be assassins – a beautiful woman and her brother, a sexy if unreliably narrated murder mystery, a self-reflexive post-modern commentary on the nature of the novel, and a comical meditation on the whole notion of what a narrative is. The book is also a deeply philosophical and somewhat unsettling meditation on the nature of truth and lies, language and the conjunction between words and identity. However you enjoy More Lies, there are big questions here that directly engage the reader.
Because I also enjoy listening to audio, a medium that is able to fit in spaces where books might not, for example, while driving, I was delighted to hear that More Lies has just been released in an audio version. The audiobook, narrated by Allen himself, utilises his terrific acting ability in order to draw out some of those themes. The narration is by turns wry, ironic, even slapstick at times, but always engaging. Allen is joined later in the narration by actress Jadzea Allen and the transition between voices is handled perfectly. In fact the whole production of this book is excellent, with very natural shifts between chapters, and smooth transitions as the narrative changes scene, focus, and tone.
At times it feels very much like we are inside someone else’s dream: “Better wake up, enough dreaming.” Other times, the audio leans more heavily into the philosophical elements of the book, carefully enunciating some of the bigger questions about the way we are all creating multiple narratives about ourselves: “Don’t you know by now that there is no story?” or about the role of art and storytelling: “What is storytelling but a voice against death?” Allen employs vocal effects, accents, and a range of tonal shifts as the narration begins to fracture, creating a whole layer of non-semantical meaning. The audio version is even more Lynchian than the book.
While it may be hard to pin down the nature of More Lies as it unpicks genre and indeed the whole artifice that makes up fiction (or even our lives), the book remains engaging from the first word to the last, and listening to it on audio is an entirely new pleasure.
The More Lies audiobook will have a World Premiere at the Flicker’s Rhode Island International Film Festival in early August and immediately after that will feature at the HollyShorts Film Festival in Los Angeles.
More Lies is available in all formats from Interactive Publications. https://ipoz.biz/product/more-lies/ You can listen to the audiobook trailer here.