A big thank you to everyone who turned out on Tuesday for a fun evening of book readings. Neil Williamson regaled the audience with excerpts from The Moon King, a novel set in a suspiciously Glaswegian fantasy world where the moon has been captured and tethered to the ground.
Douglas Thompson gave us the low-down on his historical novel, The Brahan Seer, about “Scotland’s Nostradamus” who was burned as a witch in the 17th century. Douglas also read from his surreal rhyming novel, The Rhymer, which brings the linguistic playfulness of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman into the twenty-first century.
Afterwards, an intriguing question-and-answer session produced discussions on where one can buy “Luck Monkeys”, the lesser-known genre of “slipstream”, the late great Horror writer Joel Lane, and Neil’s plans for a prequel to The Moon King (to be called Queen of Clouds, and featuring wooden people, sentient weather, and the dangers of meritocracy).
You heard it here first. The first rule of slipstream club is that you cannot talk about slipstream club…
