Meat Puppet Cabaret

by Steve Beard

Meat Puppet Cabaret is a dark fantasy novel that restores the perverse sex, bad drugs and violent rock 'n' roll to contemporary folklore. It starts from a weird idea: what if Jack the Ripper were a demon summoned by the black magician John Dee to steal Princess Diana's baby Allegra from the scene of the car crash in Paris? What if Allegra were hidden in a children's home in East London, but then 14 years later escaped? The novel follows Allegra's adventures as she quests to discover her true identity in a nightmare alternate England. She encounters King Charles in orbital exile, Stalinist bioplasma engineer Natasha Supanova, the conspiratorial Osiris Club, drug alchemist Eddie Boy Krishna, ex-DJ and reality TV showman Mark 23 and gangland queens the Karma Twins along the way before finally confronting John Dee in his hideout beneath Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath. This is a novel that takes the legacy of H. P. Lovecraft and updates it for a mediamatic technopagan world.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Steve Beard is the author of various speculative novels and experimental fictions, including Meat Puppet Cabaret. He has been called “an uncannily accurate interpreter of Paul Virilio.”

Reviews

[Stewart Home · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steve Beard's new novel "Meat Pupper Cabaret" is genre listed as science fiction on the back but it is so much more than that. What Beard's done is take a lot of conspiracy theory and London mythology and put it through the blender of imaginative fiction. The result is the best new novel I've read in ages. Beard uses the ground work laid down by other writers as a spring board to bounce completely out of orbit. "Meat Puppet Cabaret" is in certain ways a remix; but through all its appropriations a unique and distinct voice booms out. The genesis of this material goes back a long way, but its been coming together in the form Steve takes it up in since the nineteen-nineties. A key reference point here is the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) and its work on the use of ancient ley lines by the occult establishment (including the British royal family amongst others) to secure the ongoing hegemony of the ruling class. But this is the LPA rewritten through the prism of William Burroughs and Michael Moorcock, with a dash of J. G. Ballard and H. P. Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. However, Beard is also hip to dance culture and the graphic stories of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, particulary "From Hell" and "The Invisibles"....

Read the full review here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/sex...

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was just weird. And, ya know, that's okay. The constant interference of film script or dramatic script, or whatever that was, was annoying. But I think the point of this book was to be annoying, so I guess it fits.

I don't know if "Meat Puppet..." quite reaches satire. There is a difference between satire and purposeful annoyance. There is really great science fiction that is satire (Vonnegut, Lafferty). But this contemporary movement toward the "bizarre" is not quite on par. It does make a reader scratch the head though. So Viva La Cabaret!

[Becca · Rating 4 out of 5]

not sure what to think. great ideas -- a little pretentious maybe. however, i think that a book which strays so far from conventional narrative, it should have more exciting language.