Lucinda Elliot’s Reviews > Shelf Life: The Book of Better Endings > Status Update

'From the gate came a loud crack and another fleeting blue wand-spark. It shot over Hitch's shoulder, struck the sleeping man under the chin and promptly transformed him into a giant bug. It had Finn's friends up and running in under a second.'
Poor old Gregor Samsa; so that was how it happened...

My favourite line so far: 'Hitch's face turned a colour most commonly associated with kitchen appliances.'

.

Finn joins Hitch and now Professor Locke in a chase across worlds. Horrors unfold: '"We've been lured into a work in progress; a tale left deliberately unfinished, designed to swallow us up like an insect in amber."
This is refreshingly original.

"Stay your hands," said Silas, his voice still strangely amplified. "End this motiveless malignity. You fret and squabble over meagre nothings."

"Motives and what?" said Jones. "What's 'e goin' on about?"
Two figures now stood in the doorway: one thin and pale, one fat and flushed - both looking as though they'd been selected from opposite ends of some peculiar line-up of the aesthetically-challenged.

Ha ha

"You know, I don't know if I can trust a word you say."
Hitch pulled a face. "The consensus on that would probably be no."

This continues to be vey entertaining.

This is a highly original take on the theme of a woman snatched from her dull, everyday life through some bizarre event. Most of the protagonists who un dergo that are soon happyl to escape - but Cathy Finn longs to return. It's funny; 'The slobbish 'Postman' who is set up to investigate sabotage in the dimensions (not to write a spoiler) outside New Tybet is, by his own admission, 'scarcely a man'.