Novels

There’s a new, mysterious flight of stairs outside 14-year-old Carol Tanner’s bedroom. It goes up and up and up, into the realms of sheer impossibility — just as stairs in a three-bedroomed semi-detached house on Willow Drive shouldn’t. And it’s not there all the time…

One day, Carol decides to escape up those stairs, leaving her difficult life in this world for just the sort of fantasy land she so loves to read about.

The trouble is, that land is dying. The Princess, who sings the sun to new life each day, has been kidnapped by the evil Necromancer, and all the heroes sent to rescue her have not come back. The days are getting darker. Can Carol, and her doleful young companion, the Dolorous Lord, do something to save this world when so many heroes have failed?

It’s 1984, and 13-year-old Tim is sitting on the school roof, waiting for the world to end.

Or at least for it to start making sense.

His life used to make sense. It was made up of two things: the exciting new world of home computers, and worries about nuclear war.

There were certainly no girls in it.

But then he met Penny, who’s into pop music, and somehow manages to be optimistic about life, despite having a very difficult mother. (Difficult, as in, she sometimes throws roof tiles at people.) For the first time since the death of his own mother three years ago, Tim starts to see a whole new possibility in life.

Then he loses Penny. So what else is there to do but climb onto the school roof and wait for the world to end?

In this searing, heartfelt, and mostly duplicitous book, insane author Edweard Deadwitt lays it all out: how to admit that you are a monster, and how to be the monster that you really, deep down, are.

Develop a plan for either taking over or destroying the world! Learn how best to employ a cloak or mask to accentuate your monstrousness! Find a use for that evil-looking wart you’ve been trying to sum up the courage to see the doctor about! Finally, you can stop trying, and just wallow in everything about yourself that makes you NOT fit in!