Rhys Hughes Surreal Novels

 In ‘Oddity O’Clock, Rhys Hughes invites you into a cheerfully off‑kilter world where measuring instruments wander the landscape on tiny legs, solving mysteries, dodging authority figures, and generally making a glorious muddle of things. Oddity O’Clock and the Knick Knack Irregulars may be made of gears and glass, but their adventures sparkle with warmth, whimsy, and the kind of surreal logic only Hughes can conjure.  Mixing the old tradition of the It Narrative with playful riffs on artificial intelligence and the secret inner lives of objects, Hughes delivers a tale that is bright, funny, and full of imaginative mischief. This novella brims with puns, paradoxes, and delightfully skewed perspectives — a joyful reminder that even the silliest stories can carry surprising depth. It’s Rhys Hughes at his most buoyant: inventive, curious, and irresistibly entertaining. 

“Hughes is the Spike Jones of fantastika.” —Paul di Filippo

 Welcome to The Living Library, also known as the Flesh and Blood Lending Facility. Here people do not check out books, but actual writers. You check them out, take them home for a few weeks, and then bring them back. If the writer is dead, you check out a sack of his remains.  Sounds reasonable, the sort of place anyone would want to work. And our narrator is fairly happy, until one day his routine is disrupted by Joey Rue, an Australian writer who has the impertinence to check himself out of the library and precipitate an adventure which takes him, and our narrator, across vast tracts of perilous land in search of the ‘Unfair Dinkum’.  And what is that?   You need to read the book to find that out, cobber. 

 The explorer who can turn his head into a trumpet if he tries really hard has crashed his balloon again, an accident that leads to him becoming the guest of a very strange household. He is introduced to the members of the tribe, including a living suit of armour, levitating skull, sentient reflection, and the woman or women in a state of quantum superposition he is fated to fall in love with.  In a world ruled by the flux of wordplay and ideas-association rather than ordinary cause and effect, he must adapt quickly to the demands of lateral logic or perish. He must learn to blow impossible fanfares with his own face to secure his future.