Don’t Worry About a Thing The meditator Dust is steered into community work by the Divinology Church, where like Dante in infernal circles he trawls people’s rubbish in aberrant and miserifying scenes. With sainted girlfriend Blue Wendy and ascetic Anna Rex, all underhinged by his Employer’s spidery cult, we trace a satire on Dust’s fabulations with the need to evolve, with the problem of who and how to be.

Chaos Lean the journalist claims he is terminally ill. ‘I spent a career conjuring stories for public consumption: now the parasites eat me’. The unruly girl Dora Jarr worms in. Her mission? To skewer corruption in ‘the business of nano-genetics.’ Trash novella, rant, love-lust letter, apologia – Lean’s diarybook seeks a balm of chaos under tyranny of order. Who can live without narratival dreams? ‘I’ll be tragic hero in my last whodunnit.’

The Labyrinth At the heart of a Labyrinth, incarcerated by a Beast, is the goddess-temptress Conscience. In a Stalinist prison Drilov the clerk pens prisoners’ confessions. The last, within a fundamentalist materialist machine where victim and perpetrator dance, is his own. In a brave future country, Dreeley the storyteller takes to the road with ‘Dionysus’ in search of an elusive woman. His goal? To deconstruct history and karma, snuff the beast of inconsequence, unravel the knot of death, surrender to immaterial sky.

Nicholas Frost