Sock Puppet's Summer Fiction Wish List

Not Another Beach Book Bitch?

"The Newsmonger's Niece" by Greenham Swallow (Beddly Hadd, 35p)

Swallow This?

Set deep in the bogs of Westminster, Swallow's latest chirp follows corn merchant Deryck Luckless' search for the ideal incestual tryst. A bevvy of impotent back-benchers, a blind Police Commissioner and four generations of Thames boatpeople aside, Luckless' co-creations are all coarse-wittled, folksy folk, modelled in gnarled driftwood and daubed with yellow ocre and burnt umber. The plot, a potted palmtree Airfix would have been proud of, is sinewy, withered, ashen, cracked and shrink-wrapped in woad. The page numbering is (deliberately?) mixed-up and in several places the reader is asked to rip out perforated sheets and deposit them in an eco-friendly bag (provided). Finally one is left with a strong, mawkish feeling of Arglwydd Mawr!


"Packing It In" by Felipe Rope (Little Brown Jug, £19.95)

The Wrath of Rope

From a belated attempt at fixing (sic) crack cocaine to reminiscences of stuffing envelopes with JFK election bumf, Rope's latest novel is all of three hundred words long. Nevertheless, impatient readers should be prepared for some spectacular yawns. Each word has been meticulously cross-checked against a sub-set of Chinese ideograms, Mayan Codices and the Coney Island telephone directory. Rope, whom The New Yorker reports to be reaching the end of his namesake, has recently given several interviews longer than many of his books. However the torn and frayed doppleganger wafting in the wake of this his final publication is effectively a roaring silence.

"The Brother-In-Law of God" by Sallyman Mumbrush (Shiksa & Goy, 30 shillings)

Blasphemy or Blasted Phoney?

As the old efnic saying will have it, "The goodwife's ambulance is her husband's wheelbarrow" this is a tale told by an Iscariot, a three-times denier of holy writ, a Mammoth of Mammom of Moron. The trouble with this kind of faith-based suspension of disbelief is how you are often left with the feeling that barefaced heresy is itself an inverse form of worship. Meanwhile, to preview the plot: a goat goes missing from the family yard leading to a year long fleece-hunt during which the brother-in-law of God - for whom read, Patriarchal Kid - empties the coffers of many good shekles after bad, till bankrupcy do kick him up the turnip plot. I won't reveal exactly how Mumbrush manipulates the old deus ex-machina device into salving the Prod... except to say s/he does so with all the blots and howlers we have come to expect from his/er quill. Not to be read in public lavatories. Beach ban in operation on the Isle of Man.

"Poignard Pick-Me-Up" by Trucksie Lasse (Madman House, Free-On-Demand)

Linda van Rundstedt is still in bed

Loosely based on the sex-romps of pop groupie and songstress Linda van Runstedt, this quasi-autobiography of life on the road during the early 1970s is about as erotic as a museum dedicated to the Victorian chair leg. Having said that, if nifty turnings turn you on, you may well get your rocks off to Trucksie Lasse's latest horn pipe. As lacking in wholesome graphic sex scenes as "Shifty Fades to Grey", it seems doomed to become a classic. Recommended as a flagrant train-read. Also available in OO gauge.

"Funny Bone Cholera" by Millicent Handle (Lunatic Press, £9.95)

Live Dead!

A history novel or a novel history? Tower of force or tour de farce? Simultaneously set in three different locations of the time-space continuum, this book needs to be nibbled at by the reader like a triple decker jam sandwich garnished with raw onion, horseradish and mandrake root. And having shaken the hand that holds it, the novel then emits a dense cloud of purple smoke which engulfs the wings of the deepest armchair. Whence, as if history itself were become history, it then asks us to believe a new strain of cholera bacillus is the reincarnation of a twelfth century coptic monk come to revenge his people on a uncaring god. Ms Handle's antidisestablishmentarianism is renowned. No doubt this latest book will have many tacky prizes renamed in her honour.

Sock it to ya!