Assumptions and Carnations

A pagan community can be a friendly and welcoming organisation. The Fellowship of Cambridge Pagans was especially so. It accepted members from all walks of life and harboured believers in everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. This particular week it included a guru, a teacher, her sceptical husband, an ex-biker, a neurotic, a psychotic, and a man who had been dead as recently as that morning.

Since his resurrection, Enschol Bralcht had learnt how to walk, how to talk and how to keep his physical body from drifting off into small fragments of willpower and ectoplasm. He had, however, yet to master morality or basic ethics. If he had, he would not now be manipulating the pagans' beliefs and ideas, he would not be searching for the powerful themes and stories that lay in the landscape of Cambridge itself and he would not be planning a cold-hearted ritualistic murder.

Assumptions and Carnations is an unlikely amalgam of a book. It combines the psychogeography of Cambridge with a plot that encompasses both tragedy and comedy. Packed with the sort of dumb ideas that make perfect sense in the pub at closing time and the sort of misfit characters that are alarmingly familiar to anyone with friends and an unbiased mirror. You'll learn the secret of clean underwear, of quantum shopping, of why coffee machines produce undrinkable brown liquids and just possibly the hidden meaning of the universe.

If you're interested in truth beyond religion, if you're open to energies and spirits that have yet to be proved by base science, if you're paranoid that someone you know is an undead wraith come back to kill you, then you must read this book.