The Crow's Dinner is master novelist Jonathan Carroll's debut essay collection, and that is very good news. Because the job of a mechanic is grueling and exhausting, after a certain period all of them are retired and sent to different parts of the cosmos to live out their days as "civilians." Their memories are wiped clean and new identities are created for them that fit the places they go to live out their natural lives to the end.įor the first time all retired mechanics are being brought back to duty: Chaos has a new plan, and it's not looking good for mankind. All five were at one time "mechanics," a kind of cosmic repairman whose job is to keep order in the universe and clean up the messes made both by sentient beings and the utterly fearsome yet inevitable Chaos that periodically rolls through, wreaking mayhem wherever it touches down-a kind of infinitely powerful, merciless tornado.
When they wake the next day all of them know what has happened.
Some of these people know each other some don't. In Jonathan Carroll's surreal masterpiece, Bathing the Lion, five people who live in the same New England town go to sleep one night and all share the same hyper-realistic dream. Tennyson's drinking companion, Kipling's best friend, Robert Louis Stevenson's counsellor and guide - Cannonbridge's extraordinary life and career spanned a century, earning him a richly-deserved place in the English canon.īut as bibliophiles everywhere prepare to toast the bicentenary of the publication of Cannonbridge's most celebrated work, Judd's discovery will lead him on a breakneck chase across the English canon and countryside, to the realisation that the spectre of Matthew Cannonbridge, planted so seamlessly into the heart of the 19th Century, might not be so dead and buried after all. He was the only man of standing and renown to regularly visit Oscar Wilde in prison. He was sole ally, confidante and friend to the young Dickens as Charles laboured without respite in the blacking factory. Cannonbridge was there that night by Lake Geneva when conversation between Byron, Shelley and Mary Godwin turned to stories of horror and the supernatural.
The only problem is, he should never have existed and beleaguered, provincial, recently-divorced 21st Century don Toby Judd is the only person to realise something has gone wrong with history.Īll the world was Cannonbridge's and he possessed, seemingly, the ability to be everywhere at once. Something has gone wrong with history in this gripping novel about a lie planted among the greatest works of English fiction.įlamboyant, charismatic Matthew Cannonbridge was touched by genius, the most influential creative mind of the 19th century, a prolific novelist, accomplished playwright, the poet of his generation. A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.200 Significant SF Books by Women, 1984-2001.
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