The two books share more with each other than the same publisher. They are both about the eruption of the extraordinary in the lives of apparently ordinary people and in ordinary places — and about peoples’ struggle to break away from what is expected of them. The settings include exotic locales such as Norwich, Reading and Lichfield; Moscow, Bangkok and the American Midwest.

In ‘Moon Beaver’ we meet Benny Henderson of Norwich. He works for the Company, an all-embracing corporation with a digit in every pot. He is engaged to marry Louise. His life is set on course. He loves Louise, he believes, but things are beginning to bother him. The routine, the predictability — and always the Company.

Benny is in the bath watching his erection break the surface when Moon Beaver turns up in his bathroom. She introduces herself and informs him that she is there to stay a few days. Under her influence, Benny quits his job and turns over his bank account to her. She leads him on a world tour that includes Moscow and Bournemouth. She will pick him and put him down, disappear and reappear and otherwise run his life.

To begin with, I really wanted to strangle the obnoxious and egotistical Moon Beaver. Who does she think she is? Benny, Benny where’s your backbone? Tell her to fuck off! It was all very irritating.

But things get interesting when Moon Beaver shows signs of vulnerability and confusion. She also claims she has the ability to manipulate time, and that she is immortal:“I’m just too important to fucking die.” She seems to be in a lot of places at once. Even Louise thinks there’s something very odd about her and does some research, plundering Native American myths for explanations or seeking them in anagrams and databases. Meanwhile, strange things continue to happen.

My initial lack of engagement was also dispelled by the quality of the writing. Well-observed comments made me laugh out loud, such as: “True love glistens like morning dew on a snail’s pale trail, naturally sticky and leading somewhere.” Hook builds a strange world within the initially familiar confines of Norwich. Company employees are forbidden to use public transport: “cars were indicative of the Corporate Lifestyle, while busses represented Communism and Cooperatives.” Only sleek minimalist artwork is allowed in the local galleries. Due to the rise in crime, the Company thoughtfully offers its own security personnel to sort it out. Louise’s own position at the Company is in doubt when her personal life is scrutinised in view of Benny’s disappearance.

But the grip of the Company extends far beyond Norwich as an overweight Midwestern chicken farmer named Lou fights the imminent takeover of his family business. He looks over his life and spares a thought for his liaison with the same Ms Beaver. Apparently Lou had more of a relationship than poor Benny managed with the mysterious Moon, and it was Lou who gave the marching orders. Meanwhile, the company takeover becomes inevitable, and he is forced to take drastic action.

In ‘The Terror From Beyond Middle England,’ 30-something Zara works as an office temp in Reading. She takes a holiday to flee the tedium —jumps on a train, finds a party to crash in Lichfield and ends up in bed with attractive and secretive scientist Alan. As with the Henry and Moon Beaver duo, their relationship proves to be intimate yet chaste — much to Zara’s frustration. But she and Alan end up living together, dealing with mysterious intruders, ghosts in balaclavas, dodgy relatives, anti-GM campaigners as well as the unexplained disappearances and appearances of white shirts. Again, the writing is very well-observed. And for all dithery fun to be had in this book, there is also a poignant sense of essentially lonely people trying to create better lives for themselves.

However, sometimes the proceedings get too slipshod and throwaway even for a farce. We have Zara in a car with two lesbian GM campaigners. A tractor pulls out. CUT. Now Zara is in a hospital bed. That’s it. As both a reader and writer I often find that exploring the ‘morning after’ can more interesting than the actual event, but Zara still ought to show some signs that something has happened to her. Then Zara is informed on the phone of some very surprising and funny romantic reshuffles. It would have been better to be shown some of this, instead of hearing it second-hand. Events happen much too quickly at a point where considerable comic depths were there for the plumbing.

In any case, I did find Zara a likeable and very engaging character who shows more gumption than Hook’s hapless Henry. For all her befuddled confusion, this temp from Reading ends up saving the world without really intending to…

‘Comic fantasy’ has long been established as a sub-genre, but we’re dealing with something very different here. As Elastic Press puts it, the books are published “at the edge of reality and fantasy”. They can’t be pinned down to a genre. You might say that these two books contribute to a rather quirky current of ‘comic slipstream,’ even though that elusive thing called slipstream hasn’t been noted for laugh-generating properties. In fact, those with long memories may remember when certain writers of slipstream had been tagged ‘miserabalists’. There isn’t any of that old miserablism here, though serious matters are touched upon with a light hand.

It’s ironic that it is a New York publisher that has taken on two books so steeped in a smaller-town English landscape and full of very English humour. However, you can get these books here from Elastic Press

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s published fiction includes stories in The Third Alternative, Visionary Tongue and Roadworks, plus a contribution to The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers and Deep Ten. She has reviewed books for TTA as well. She lives in South London with a venerable 16-year-old cat, and sometimes works as a freelance sub-editor on various magazines and websites. She has also been a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker, full-time doley and an editor of the late great Bad Attitude, a feminist mag ‘devoted to the overthrow of civilisation as we know it’. A graduate of the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, she has completed Noise Leads Me - a kind of anti-capitalist vampire novel set in Brixton ( looking for a forward-thinking publisher unfazed by genre boundaries!). Currently she is working on a second novel about a woman leader of the Adamites, a wild, anarchistic free-loving movement in 15th century Hussite Bohemia.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.