The Insubstantial Pageant — Brian Stableford

"As above, so below."

This is the message Simon Cannick receives from his ailing mother, approaching her life's end, the first time he meets her. A mystical commonplace, or is there more to it?

While Simon connects with his newly discovered family--half-sister Marianne and her middle-aged delinquent daughter, Zoe--the portents gather. Strange manifestations might be messages from the abyssal neider . . . unless other entities are involved.

With plots afoot against his inheritance of the storied and centuried Murden estate in the briny Welsh coastal crook of Saint Madoc, will Simon find that the storm is up and all is on the hazard, or will he be navigating through an insubstantial pageant?

This, the second volume in Brian Stableford's eccentrically cosmic Morgan's Fork series, takes up where Spirits of the Vasty Deep left off, with a cast of idiosyncratic misfits doing their best to claim small victories in the midst of extramundane vastness and human absurdity.