One for 2021... 'The Stranger Times' - C.K. McDonnell (Bantam Press)

I was lucky enough to receive an advance proof of 'The Stranger Times', this week, and once I figure out when is an acceptable time to review it (the book itself won't be published until the middle of January next year), you'll definitely see something posted about it here. In the meantime though, there's no harm in giving you guys a little heads up, is there...?


There are dark forces at work in our world (and in Manchester in particular), so thank God The Stranger Times is on hand to report them . . .

A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), it is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable.

At least that's their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor . . . well, that job is a revolving door - and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who's got problems of her own.

When tragedy strikes in her first week on the job The Stranger Times is forced to do some serious investigating. What they discover leads to a shocking realisation: some of the stories they'd previously dismissed as nonsense are in fact terrifyingly real. Soon they come face-to-face with darker forces than they could ever have imagined.

That cover just says 'Robert Rankin' to me (you know, the covers that he drew himself; and what is Robert Rankin up to these days anyway...?) and so I'm really hoping that's a hint of the direction this book will take. It's been ages since I've read a book that made me laugh out loud so I've got my fingers crossed that 'The Stranger Times' has room for a bit of the absurd as well as the 'terrifyingly real'. I'll guess we'll see...

How about you guys? I know that all we have to go on, so far, is a blurb but based on that... Would you give 'The Stranger Times' a shot...?

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