I was slightly surprised by this. There'd been quite a lot of people staying here when I first arrived, and I more or less assumed I'd gone unnoticed before today. After all, I was only one tent Well, I was only there temporary but I should think you'd need at least a hundred to make it worth while.' The work soon reaches beyond the campground, and the erstwhile vacationer becomes a fixture in the community. He assumes the milk run of a man named Deakin, who disappears under unfortunate circumstances; he is enmeshed in pub politics as an on-again, The narrator's odd mix of lethargy and willingness to go along with almost anything (and a certain eagerness to please) lead him ever deeper into a serf-life. A hard one to shelve, as it turns out. Gothic, but modern and quite light. Funny, but not in a humorous way. Weird, but not fantastic, eerie but without anything sinister.

had gone home, yet the idea of spending another day motorcycling didn't really appeal to me. The alternative, of course, was going for a walk. There were miles and miles of footpaths going off in every direction all inside as it drove away, and then walk up the concrete road towards the house. This time she took no notice of me at all. After she'd gone I went across to the gate to see if she'd left any footmarks on the green Nobody did, so after a few minutes spent gazing at the water I continued my journey along the shore. Finally, I arrived at the north end of the lake, passed through a kissing gate, and walked across a desertedAfter taking a shower I zipped up the tent and set off on my lakeside walk, going out through the main gateway, then across the public road to another gate leading into a second field. Until yesterday this I will try to read more by Mills. Engaging and insightful, showing me a perspective on human nature that illuminates the unfamiliar.** The arrival of Magnus Mills on the British literary scene is extraordinarily refreshing. He represents a genuinely avant garde voice who has breathed new life into the genre (if it can be called a genre) by flouting all expectations of what a novel can be about... Mills is genuinely unique, but if he is to be placed anywhere in the jigsaw of literary history, he will have to slot between Albert Camus and Enid Blyton. [He is] oneof the handful of British writers to work in a unique fictional universe. For this, Mills is to be treasured and revered. You cannot ask more of a book than for it to make the familiar seem fresh, strange and scary. In a modest, sneaky way, Mills pulls this off better than any other writer at work today. -- The Independent on Sunday, 19 September 1999 done was charge him a fiver and he'd most likely have let me off the rent anyway. After all, I was hardly taking up any space in his field. Still, it was too late to worry about that now, and to tell the truth I wasn't The owner of the campground, Mr. Parker has many chores to delegate. As summer wanes, it's time to spruce things up and make a few trivial repairs on the property. Perhaps the vacationing biker could delay his departure for a week or so and paint

in to do the job because he had nothing better to do. Nevertheless, I was surprised at the interest my presence seemed to arouse amongst passers-by. There must have been thousands of visitors to the area throughout the I've recorded everything under distinct headings so that I can remember all of this when the rest of the Book Club members get around to reading this. The headings are: The language in this book is simple, as is the narrative style. There are no long words, imaginative metaphors or made up verbs here. Everything is pitched towards the average reader. Having said that, the style is original in that there are no clichés employed. This is a slightly different world from that which we normally occupy and although it is described in normal words, they combine to produce something quite unique and extraordinary. Magnus Mills has a style all of his own. There's no poetry here. The dialogue does not employ colloquial words to make us think of people in a particular region. The style is rather neutral; deadpan even. Very subtle and understated. Yes.stone, using one of my tent poles to get a straight line. Then carefully I began filling it in. By the time I'd finished doing this the gate was touch dry. I stood looking at the new green square and wondered if I'd being outside in the sunshine was quite pleasant, I began to find all the fiddly corners and underneath bits rather tedious. I was just working along one of the diagonals when I heard a clinking noise coming along behind a brief spell of rain, but not until this morning did I realize I was the only visitor left. All that remained was an expanse of grass marked out in yellowing squares. The absence of other paying customers probably explained Mills has the skill to make his dialogue ring completely true and at the same time to freight the most apparently banal comment with surreal overtones. His transparent, elegant prose is deceptively simple and a pleasure to read.”

turning. As a result there was a lot of painting to do. I decided that the best way to go about it was to be methodical, so I would start with the hinges, then do the outer frame of the gate before working my way inwards. I read this book as part of a Book Club thing and that is why this review is such a departure for me. The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

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Not that I was bothered by all this. The vehicles that went by were few and far between, and their passing broke the monotony of the job. It was actually taking much longer than I'd expected, and although Mills' style, and his odd inventions -- the green paint ! the crown ! -- and the characters his narrator never quite gets a grip on all work together to make this a surprisingly dark and compelling tale. Mit bravourös gezügelter Rhetorik liefert Magnus Mills eine Farce auf die Easy-Rider-Romantik und alles, was an Freiheitsphantasien mit ihr einhergehen mag." - Ingeborg Harms, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

The message of this book seems to be that outsiders are tolerated up until a point, but have to earn the trust of the community into which they come by a process of trial and error. They are expected to deduce how they should act on the basis of how people treat them and react to the things that they do. This makes for a memorable message that may not be quite normal, but is feasible under certain circumstances, i.e. the ones in this novel. There is also the message that bosses are not to be trusted running through not just this book, but all those that I have read by this author (this one, Screwtop Thompson and Other Tales and The Restraint of Beasts). Carey Harrison in the San Francisco Chronicle commented, "It's not out of idle amusement that the sweetly fiendish author has named his book All Quiet on the Orient Express. This marriage of famous titles hides from view (yet points to) its dark, telling twin: Murder on the Western Front. Not since Kafka has an author lured his audience so innocently, so beguilingly, into hell." [2] and a motorbike. Some of the families who'd been around during the week had set up huge encampments that extended across large areas of the field, with countless children running in all directions. By comparison I'dthe brightness I chose a shower cubicle and turned the tap on. Oddly enough I discovered it was already fully open, but there was no water coming out. I tried the tap in the next cubicle and it was the same. I was just apparently unoccupied. The higher side of the yard was bounded by a dry wall, with a gateway through to another area of hard-standing where I could see a group of second-hand oil drums. This, presumably, was what Mr Parker