Spiders in the sun — E.M. Cadwaladr

The adventures of a young boy who is not Huck Finn. Also, a dystopian novel set in the imaginably near future, and exhibiting a roughly equal contempt for everyone's favorite utopian ideologies. Or, if that sounds a bit dense, how about a gentler, kinder sort of holocaust in which no one gets gassed and everyone gets free food and free therapy? A loving look at popular culture. A satire â€" cynical observations raised to a poignant art form. A book within a book â€" a personal history written by an ex-school teacher and self-appointed chronicler of the collapse of civilization (deceased grandfather to the aforementioned non-Huck-Finn boy) who turns out to be an astute observer of human nature. The old man is a crank, in other words. A story of global warming run amok. A novel, incidentally, with a far greater proportion of complete sentences than this description. The book contains a large number of deaths, but none of them are either mysterious or investigated by detectives with interesting quirks. If you are looking for a mystery you'll probably be happier looking elsewhere. There is only a miniscule amount of sex, neither enough to satisfy the prurient nor to offend anyone who doesn't actually like being offended. There isn't much gore to speak of either. There is a non-judeo-christian quasi-supernatural being, but he turns out to be just a misunderstood natural phenomenon. Nothing blasphemous enough to merit a fatwa. No vampires, zombies, etc. There are some very dangerous clowns. Even one lethal clown. If you have a phobia about clowns, I would recommend you buy an appropriate self-help book or some herbal sedatives as part of your order. Clowns loom large in the narrative, if usually distantly, and I would not want to be legally liable for provoking a state of panic in anyone who had been good enough to buy my book. Just to relieve any possible anxiety in advance, I am not a devotee of Stephen King and this is not a novel in his genre. Readers of the book have been choked up with emotion on occasion, but none that I know of have suffered so much as a nightmare, let alone any lasting psychological scars. Satire, really. Dark but harmless. Well… mostly harmless. No animals were harmed in the production of this book. A fictitious cat is gravely threatened in chapter six, but is saved by the grandfather of the non-Huck-Finn character. It is a book which works on several levels, though any reader who isn't too sleepy or intoxicated should be able to follow it without much trouble. No special glasses or language skills are required. There are hidden delights for the lexicographer in the first half of the book, but nothing to worry the one or two of you out there who might not be lexicographers. For reasons I cannot disclose, the book may be offensive in Canada. This is just a hunch â€" I've never tried reading it there myself.