Ragtag Giggagon

Springing ahead from the 1920s (found elsewhere on this blog), here is an excerpt from An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan set in the Second World War. Continued from here . “You are CornJulio,” Bern-ard shot back in a cod Native American accent. “You need tepee for my bungee spongiform encephalitis! Welcome to die." Everyone roared laughing except for Cornjulio, who didn’t take to the word-theft of tepee for purposes of cultural misappropriation as a kind of joke. The Good Doctor withdrew a surgical glove from the breast pocket of his laboratory coat. It slowly emerged, fingers first, before the whole thing jettisoned itself across Barrel-Chested Bern-ard’s face with a snap. A red mark on the cheek flared into existence with the blink of an eye and another eye, both of them Bernie’s, and a veritable shocked silence filled the entire ward, in part because many of the patients were too unwell to say anything at all at all in the first place. You could still cross s...

Springing ahead from the 1920s (found elsewhere on this blog), here is an excerpt from An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan set in the Second World War. Well, there I was now, in Compostenela del Salamanca Half Catalytic Army Hospital for the Bewildered, sharing a bed with {[(Frank O’Connor)] due to the shortage of trolleys in the medical health industry. We had been fled across the Pyrenees on a pair of rectum stretchers (sit-down-only type harnesses) after sustaining massive injuries. I don’t recall how I had been wounded myself, but before my concussion, I had watched {[(Frank O’Connor)] wander across the plains of no-man’s-land into a stockpile of German bracket mines; in the process of recovery, it would take some time and a number of operations before he would be fully compost lemsip, but he had had two sets of brackets removed already, and was in the process of getting his short and curlies taken off. The meals were the standard fare - Meeting Two Veg, as they sa...

Lynn Lamb has just published the second book in her Opus of the Dead series, Dissonance of the Dead . The sequel to Lullaby of the Dead , the latest novel features characters from that universe as they journey beyond the haunted house they’ve been occupying – some of them for centuries. They have much to learn about modern ways of living. Tell us a little about some of the characters in the series. We’re continuing on with a few of the characters from the previous book. Landry Sinclair, the narrator of the series, has grown a lot since the beginning of Lullaby of the Dead . She has emerged as being much more conscious of her personal foibles in her dead state than she was when she was alive. We also have Topanga, her love interest, who is important as the mentor of the group. Now he is trying to grow the gifts of those who have left Nashton House and help them find their true selves. He is very much still the instructor. He knows how the world works outside the milieu o...

An interview I did for Mary Woldering's blog . What made you want to be a writer? As a child of maybe 6, I drew comic strips til I realised that my art wasn't up to scratch. I have been writing since then. I wrote what would be today deemed fan fiction of tv programs, but back then I didn't have a name for it. I started writing my own stuff a few years later. When is the release of your next novel? Name genre or if it’s part of a series. If your book is part of a series tell the readers about the others that are out for sale. How did you come up with the idea for the book or series, especially the title? The Quantum Eavesdropper Vol. 1. It’s science fiction and it and volume 2 are 180,000 words long. It should be released Summer 2019. A year after losing his wife, a man gets trapped on the lip of a black hole. It’s 2095, but he finds that he can communicate at this point in time with individuals back on Earth at any point in the past from the birth of telecommun...

A gambling theme permeates many of the poems in JD Estrada’s  Roulette of Rhymes . Card games, the eponymous roulette, and fortune-readings of various kinds feature. There’s a beautiful description of soy sauce being read beneath sushi; other pieces employ card and dice metaphors to describe life. But there’s a diversity to the poems too which suggests that, as Forrest Gump says, you never know what you’re gonna get. I was first introduced to JD Estrada by his fellow poet and author  Katya Mills . From a subjective perspective, their poetry can be, very occasionally, stylistically similar. Personally, all credit where it’s due, I feel that where I may have lauded Katya for creativity, I might have found fault in JD’s work. Why is that? I started into his novel Only Human. I have been reading it for probably two years on-and-off. It has a Gilliamesque lunacy to it, and some wonderfully creative universe building in a very promising series that explores the human conditio...

Lauren and Jessica are the ex-wife and wife of a cad who becomes a cadaver in what appears to be an accidental death. With Brian’s dealings a shade or two murkier than most people realised, it could be murder. The pair are thrust into the heroics of this novel when business colleagues from the criminal underworlds of gambling and arms-dealing come looking for money, missing since Brian’s death. The novel is very plot-driven and a different beast to previous work by the author. It’s probably the most commercial novel to date from this scribe too, whose work (often in the horror genre, but this one is more mainstream thriller) has a literary quality. Informative when it comes to the law and money laundering elements, this book’s also pacey and exciting. Well worth a read. Get it  here .

MILD SPOILER ALERT Jeffrey Wright, a black Brit, plays American CIA agent Felix Leiter opposite Daniel Craig’s Bond. Here, Martin Freeman, a white Brit, plays a CIA agent opposite Chadwick Boseman. The photo-positive – because you turn the colour up – nods to Bond continue in a casino sequence. The entire movie subverts that franchise’s purported misogyny. The strength of the female characters is awesome, and there isn’t a bad performance among them. Angela Bassett as a matriarch is a presence of stability. Danai Gurira leads the Dora Milaje, a group of women comprising the royal guard, in a role where she places civic responsibility over the personal. There’s a cultural richness to the Africa-set film that the continent itself shares, and it’s a movie aimed at everyone, and speaks to everyone. It pokes fun at racism in numerous ways. It shows how vested interests might win out temporarily – illustrating it in a hilarious fashion – but ultimately, humanity is all on the...