Got my hard copy of Kill Baby Hitler!
And you?
I think this is the best book of the series — I was forced into making it better because of the time-travel plot. My “system” has been to always move forward, writing myself into corners and blasting my way out of them, which gives the writing process a certain dynamism, which I always hope will osmose its way into the text. Time travel tends to dictate a certain care with continuity even as characters step outside regular continuity and impact events at unexpected inflection points. So I adopted far more of a back-and-fill approach, diving back into “finished” chapters to plant clues and easter eggs and non-sequential punchlines, which I was able to do without losing momentum because I was still moving relentlessly forward, just in more than one time period and chapter…
Graphics made by Danny Carr for THE NORTHLEACH HORROR\
So it went fairly smoothly, the delay in publication mainly being for (beautiful) cover art (by Danny Carr) and proofreading (by Fiona). The first novel hit a snag when I realised it was going to be too short so the action ends up slightly repetitious I fear, but hopefully still funny. The second book got slightly bogged down because, I think, I found “heroic fantasy” slightly harder to parody/traduce than I expected. The easiest stuff to do was Whitsuntide and McWheattie driving around looking for holes in the earth’s crust, which I enjoyed immensely. Small scenes tend to be funnier than huge ones, though all three books build to quite epic action which is, I trust and believe, still comically satisfying.
My favourite bit in the new book is the stuff taking place back in WWI, at a clinic for war veterans called The Bolventor Home for Destroyed Men. This is the particularly strange stuff — I have no idea where it came from.
Extract:
The next floor down was occupied with various small, private rooms, some evidently belonging to staff, others occupied by specimens of the maimed too disturbing to be seen by the general populace. It wasn’t so much that their injuries were horrific, though here were men missing every part of their anatomies, but that the treatments applied to them defied nature and reason. I had heard tell of rubber appliances used to plug yawning gaps in disfigured faces, but here were men with glass skulls, through which their brains rippled in green fluid, and others, deafened by war’s din, who were growing new ears, in repellent abundance, all over their bodies.
One poor victim had evidently been vaporised by a shell, losing everything, head, torso and limbs, and he paced his room as a mere shadow, sustained by machines that breathed, digested and thought for him.
Is this amusing? KIND OF? It may be a new thing — grim whimsy, or possibly ‘grimsy.’ If you are interested in experiencing the grimsical, and you’re afraid to try Lucy Clifford’s horrifying Victorian children’s stories (eg The New Mother, approach with caution), then Kill Baby Hitler! may be just the novel for you. Almost certainly the funniest infanticide-themed book of the last, oh, five years I’m sure. Anyway, Lucy Clifford is long dead and we can’t be sure she’ll really appreciate the new readers. I will!
HERE is the Amazon page for all three Whitsuntide Science Adventures and here’s the US one.
shadowplay 