The International Cheese-Fries Review presents a quick roundup of the best of the worst new literature of 2019... so far.
(The 2018 edition seems to have got lost in the wash, bear with us as we attempt to wash out the pink tinge.)
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I opened the front door, for the second time in the five minutes since I had arrived to the house on Station Road, which wasn’t even mine, to find one of the Ilkeston Mobsters outside. I didn’t know him personally, but you could always tell from the shirts and the trainers which crowd you were dealing with. Check shirts and red converse meant Ilkeston. The West Hallam Boys wore stripes and old-school Adidas. All black usually meant you were dealing with the Stanley Massive.
“Yes?”
I hoped that I would be able to elicit an explanation before he pushed his way into the house wordlessly.
“Here for the music video”, came the sparing reply, and then: “It’s Dave.”
I hadn’t been told about any of this.
The House on Station Road, a badly conceived and worse-written crime novel about approximately twenty separate modern-day Derbyshire gangs who each behave as if they were trapped in a different decade.
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Well hello there. I bet you never thought you’d read a book that addresses you directly, Dr Doron Swade. But here I am. Not only am I speaking to you, just you, through these printed words, I also know everything there is to know about you. I know where you live, who your parents were, where you trained as a doctor and the name of the fellow junior doctor who was your first, great true love. A love the like of which you think you will never find again. Because yes, Doron, I know your thoughts too. And your dreams. And your deepest secrets. The ones you won’t even admit to yourself.
I see you, Dr. Swade, a manifesto addressed entirely to a fictional GP on the off-chance that someone with the same name and life story actually exists in the real world.
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The Bermuda Triangle was discovered in 1983 by none other than the renowned top hat merchant and TV psychic Edmund J. K. Shonal, who, during a transatlantic flight on his chi-powered wooden fold-up aeroplane, noted somewhat strange geometrical borders within the ocean waters which had hitherto never been observed by pilots. It is thought that it was due to his low flying altitude that Shonal was able to observe the three actual visible borders of what we now know as the Bermuda Triangle (named after the lucky Bermuda shorts that Shonal was wearing at the time). Noticing that these perfectly straight lines in the water were something of an oddity, self-proclaimed amateur scientist Shonal later returned to the area and began throwing various objects and small rodents into the sea within the borders of the triangle. Strangely enough, they were never to be seen again.
The Bermuda Triangle, an intricately detailed yet wholly incorrect account of everything there isn't to know about the infamous location.
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