The Plastic Priest

In previous works Nicole Cushing has provided spectacular visions of the Pit ("The Orchard of Hanging Trees", The Sadist's Bible) and blackly humorous accounts of depression and depersonalisation in Trumpsterland (A Sick Gray Laugh, Mothwoman). In this novella, psychological and religious themes are combined with deadpan panache in the story of the spiritual crisis afflicting an Episcopalian priest.

As a fifty-pushing female cleric in Owlingsville, a Midwestern small town "of median angst and arithmetically mean fortunes," the Reverend Heather Kaye Ford is off to an authentically unpromising start. Her never very enthusiastic congregation has been thinned by the pandemic and is leaking parishioners to the local megachurch; her vaguely liberal ways are viewed with indifference or suspicion in a town which has purged the bird of wisdom from its name by altering the pronunciation of the first syllable; and her vocation, while genuine enough as far as it goes, is not enough to sustain her against the maddening idiocy of the everyday. While the breaking of the magic wafer still inspires to some extent, Kaye is increasingly aware that she is really just another working stiff in a dead-end job, and that she stays in the job largely because leaving it would be too much trouble and would precipitate a humiliating parental I told you so.

When she tries to take just enough of the initiative by holding an informal prayer meeting in the park, the inevitable washout is accompanied by an ambiguous sign. The single other communicant claims several identities in turn, the last and most troubling of which serves to bring Kaye's crisis to a head. It remains unclear exactly to what extent the head in question is her own, especially as we never learn who is telling Kaye's story. The narrative mood is a fine third-person sardonic, but an I drops in a couple of times without deigning to declare itself further. Perhaps this voice belongs to an outside observer; perhaps it is Kaye's own demonstration of her new-found mystical detachment, which leads her at last to a state of being appropriate to the current reality.

The paperback edition from Cemetery Dance is nicely presented and properly copy-edited; although, appropriately enough, the last sentence of the author biography at the end says that The Plastic Priest is yet to be released.

Nefarious Ends

As befits a Christian, his grace the Archbishop of Canterbury has come out against the legalisation of assisted dying. He came out in the Rothermere Daily Stürmer, which should certainly put paid to any perception of his church as a social club for gay-baiters, blue-rinsers and myth-mongers; and as befits a Christian, he worried that any attempt to ease the pain and suffering which God has seen fit to inflict might place us on a slippery slope towards a duty to die, as in "every other place where it's been done." As befits a Christian, his grace did not deign to cite evidence, and was contradicted by the sponsor of the proposed legislation who, as befits a member of Team Starmer's parliamentary Labour Party, has huge amounts of respect for people who say things that aren't true. The bill has not yet been published, but there is still some doubt as to whether it will cover those who wish to end their suffering without being terminally ill; and, as befits a Christian, his grace will doubtless take comfort from that.

From the River to the South China Sea

Ethnic cleansing is all very well provided that it's done by the nice people; but even the most sensible and moderate of observers would be hard put to deny that it can still cause a bit of inconvenience here and there. Despite the continuing good health of the arms trade, concerns had begun to emerge that the current Israeli rampage might adversely affect the market in fossil fuels; fortunately, the Netanyahoo has now proffered his word as a gentleman and a humanitarian that the Righteous State has no plans to target petroleum as well as people. Nevertheless, oil prices continue to fall thanks to electric vehicles and an insidious reduction in demand from the Heathen Chinee, so that "in the absence of a major disruption" there will be a surplus on the market next year. Happily for the fossil fuel profiteers, there is as yet little indication that the Righteous State will be satisfied with a mere final solution to the Arab and Persian Untermenschen, and still less sign that it will so far compromise its sacred right of self-defence as to allow its borders to terminate anywhere west of Tibet.

Welfare Gone Mental

In the good old days, mental health conditions and neurodiversity and all that sort of thing were dealt with Britishly and on an individual level by working hard, playing by the rules and being economically active. Nowadays the freak or loony next door is whooping it up on benefits and getting more nice things than you are, and this is a Bad Thing. Such is the stuff of reasoned debate in the Conservative leadership contest, wherein the non-male, non-white candidate is straining to prove her ideological worth by endorsing a thirty-six page denunciation of the "economic advantages and protections" from which the neurodiverse are deriving such ruthless advantage. At least one Conservative from the hypocritical wing, who once wrote a report on how autistic people might more efficiently be chivvied into making money for the rich, has expressed concern at the essay's conflation of loonies with freaks, when in fact they fall into separate categories and require different modes of bullying to get the best results.

Special Means Special

Although Team Starmer has repeatedly proclaimed that it wishes to reset relations with the beastly Euro-wogs to the extent of toning down the rah-rah as much as Conservative policy will allow, it seems that not everyone on the Continent has yet appreciated the mainland's position in all its crystalline clarity. An Italian MEP recently elected to the unenviable position of chairing the EU-UK parliamentary partnership assembly has demanded, if you please, that the master race should limit its options by defining what it requires from the lesser breeds. This is of course a typical case of Brusso-Strasbourg insensitivity towards the need for His Majesty's Government to face all ways at once provided its own face turns right. Nevertheless, one or two green shoots of realism did make an appearance; notably the recognition that His Majesty's Government is "an unavoidable partner" in the matter of wog-bombing, and that therefore some sort of special relationship is called for. Whether the beastly Euro-wogs are ready to assume the position of favourite ally in such a relationship while Britain plays mini-Murca remains as yet unclear.

Il Barbaro di Siviglia

Some bits and pieces in Seville have been confirmed as the remains of a migrant whose lawless and immoral ways brought disaster to both the American people and his own. His arrival in the US sphere of influence resulted directly in a great replacement of native Americans by disease-bearing thieves and slave-drivers; while the folly of his accomplices visited upon his homeland the horrors of syphilis and the cancer of tobacco-smoking. In keeping with the insidious migrant habit, he seems to have littered the land he invaded with his own genetic material, even going so far as to demand that some corner of a Hispaniolan field should be forever foreign; and like many others who arrive in small boats to subvert and destroy the indigenous civilisation, his origins were as dubious as his ignorance was profound. Thus his legacy is, even to this day, regarded as something worth celebrating.

Wind Power

There was a time when the visitations of Hurricanes Milton and Helene upon the Christian state of Florida would have been considered symptoms of divine judgement: a reminder that the abortion laws are still too liberal, or that too many precautions are being taken against the Heathen Chinee hoax of climate change. Such days of moderation appear to be drawing to a close with the Trumpster campaign's appropriation and turbo-charging of British expert fatigue. As famously pointed out by the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, Britain's ruling class is fed up with economists who whine that cutting the country loose from its biggest trading partner might adversely affect trade, and with biologists who preach that gender may not be quite so binary as Genesis makes it look, and with civil servants who claim that spending less money on something and sacking all the people who provide it may occasionally be followed by a purely coincidental lack of that very same something. The acolytes of the head-tribble and its tangerine dangler have taken this dynamic intellectual trend to its logical next level by blaming the weather on meteorologists. Allegations range from the kind that would likely be palatable to the sensible moderates of Team Starmer (resources meant for the deserving folks diverted to beastly immigrants) to those with a distinctly Murcan spin (Big Guvmint controls the weather, so let's lynch us an emergency worker). Doubtless the greatest country in the world will soon once again be taking pride in having restrained the well-meaning excesses of its favourite ally.

Unparalleled Depravity

Theatre-goers in Stuttgart have been gagging for medical attention after witnessing a gory mutilation of a 1921 Hindemith opera. Despite warnings of content including sexual violence and loud noises, a number of patrons became unwell when the performance turned out to contain exactly those; although it remains as yet unclear how far the malady was merely corporeal. The creator of the piece has suggested that her intention is to explore parallels between the Catholic church and kink/BDSM subcultures; nevertheless, Austrian bishops have already criticised it as a disrespectful caricature of a cannibalistic ritual which is performed in fancy dress and fetishises the bodily piercing of a man reportedly conceived via non-consensual ghost sex.

All the Profits of Arabia

In keeping with the current status of British public office as a networking opportunity, a former Minister for Wog-Bombing has availed himself of the chance to invest in the neglected aspects of his life by filling his boots courtesy of Westminster's favourite Islamic fundamentalist head-choppers. The eminently forgettable Sir Ben Wallace, who prudently jumped the sinking ship of government last year, is now employed by the House of Saud, which will doubtless benefit from his expertise when further flattening Yemen or taking its customary no-nonsense attitude to womanly wokeness. Just in case he gets his enemies of human rights mixed up, Wallace is forbidden to lobby the British government or give advice on British miltary prowess for slightly longer than Fishy Rishi clung to office, on pain of receiving some very stern looks from the advisory committee on snout and trotter placement in post-political troughs.

Available Now

Visitations of the Muse are strange and unpredictable events; Stephen King, with characteristic delicacy, once compared the process to a gremlin evacuating its bowels on his head. I am usually able to complete at least one new book each year; but last year's belated release, for all its moral and philosophical bite, was a recycling of already-published material. This March I started something new, without the encumbrance of a plan; by the end of June I had about twenty thousand words, but was stuck as to what happened next.

Then I saw this on Twitter (X be xxxxed):

It's an extract from a book on William Blake, who either saw visions or had hallucinations, depending on whom you believe; and my personal gremlin went YEEEEE-HAH! and, to put it mildly, unloaded. Between 30 June and 16 August I wrote 27,696 words of first draft about a philosophy professor who sees crabs; and in keeping with the absurdity of the enterprise, on the morning when my print copy of the final version arrived a complete stranger sat near me on the tube and opened a copy of Adam Nicolson's Life Between the Tides to the beginning of the fourth chapter, which is titled Crabs. I haven't read Sartre except for his play The Flies, which I liked; but the coincidence would have appealed to Arthur Koestler, of whom I have read quite a bit and who didn't much like Sartre.

Anyway, not to clatter chitinously on, Seeing Crabs is now available in paperback and PDF ebook, and would make an ideal gift for that special crustacean-oriented someone in your life; and unlike Amazon I pay my taxes.