The Sprouts Of Wrath

The fourth part of the "Brentford Trilogy". Amazing, but true, Brentford Town Council has agreed to host the next Olympic Games. However, something sinister is afoot in Brentford, and it is up to the regulars of The Flying Swan to save the world as we know it.

Fantasy-roman.

Our teenage hero, having been thrown from Brighton Pier by the leader of The Canvey Island Mod Squad, narrowly escapes drowning thanks to the Perfect Master, Cosmic Dick and self-styled Logos of the Aeon (not to mention the reinventer of the Ocarina), Hugo Rune Himself. Our hero has lost his memory, and, in desperation, agrees to join The Lad Himself in the solving of twelve cases based upon The Brightonomicon, the new zodiac signs formed by the alignment of Brighton streets and discovered by Rune: carriageway constellations. And together they must find the Chronovision before it falls into the wrong hands and affords ultimate power to the would-be world dictator. And this being an adventure most exciting, they must find it before the sinister Count Otto Black, would-be World Dictator and all-round bad guy. Or the whole world will all go to pot.

The pickled Martian's tentacles are fraying at the ends and Professor Coffin's Most Meritorious Unnatural Attraction (the remains of the original alien autopsy, performed by Sir Frederick Treves at the London Hospital) is no longer drawing the crowds. It's 1895; nearly a decade since Mars invaded Earth, chronicled by H.G. Wells in THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. Wrecked Martian spaceships, back-engineered by Charles Babbage and Nikola Tesla, have carried the Queen's Own Electric Fusiliers to the red planet, and Mars is now part of the ever-expanding British Empire. The less-than-scrupulous sideshow proprietor likes Off-worlders' cash, so he needs a sensational new attraction. Word has reached him of the Japanese Devil Fish Girl; nothing quite like her has ever existed before. But Professor Coffin's quest to possess the ultimate showman's exhibit is about to cause considerable friction amongst the folk of other planets. Sufficient, in fact, to spark off Worlds War Two.

Magic, time travel and football: not exactly your everyday combination - but the fate of mankind hangs upon the result. Of course. There's big trouble in little Brentford. Property developers are planning to destroy the borough's beloved football ground and build executive homes on the site. Shock! Outrage! Horror! The lads of The Flying Swan, Brentford's most celebrated drinking house, take up the challenge. Surely with these stalwarts working for the cause, Brentford's football ground can be saved? Would it were so, but this is Brentford and ancient forces of evil are forever stirring in the borough: Old Testament terrors, Lovecraftian loathsomes and beasties from the bottomless pit. And if the team make it through to the final, it's going to be a match that no one will forget. What with the fate of mankind hanging upon the result. And everything.

It's all down to the butterfly His great-grandfather died at the Battle of Little Big Horn. He wasn't with Custer though. He was holding a sprout-bake in the field next door and went over to complain about the noise. His grandfather was a preacherman, who wore weighted shoes in the pulpit to avoid any embarrassing levitations during moments of extreme rapture. His father practised body-modification and once shinned up the inside of a drainpipe to win a bet with his mum. And then there was him. And he was the Chosen One. He had THE GIFT. You've heard of the Butterfly of Chaos Theory? The one that flaps its wings in the Andes and causes a thunderstorm in Penge? Well, he could do that. Shift a biro in his top pocket and cause the Tokyo Stock Exchange to rise twenty two points. Put a paperclip on his ear and make England win the World Cup. And with a gift like that, imagine what you could do. You could change this world into paradise. Or you could really screw up. BIG TIME!

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. We all know what suburbia is, indeed the majority of us live in it. Yet, despite this ubituity, with no formal definition of the contept, the suburbs have developed in our collective imagination through representations in popular culture, from Terry and June to Desparate Housewives. Rupa Huq examines how suburbia has been depicted in novels, cinema, popular music and on television, charting changing trends both in the suburbs and popular media consumption and production. She looks at the differences in defining suburbia in the US and UK and how characteristics associated with it have shifted in meaning and form.

A monster in human form intends to turn Earth into a Necrosphere, a planet totally devoid of life. And there's a lost city of gold and there's millions of zombies, as well as gratuitous sex and violence, beautiful but dangerous dames, a trail of corpses-- and, of course, a really spectacular rooftop showdown.