Green Glowing Skull

After fleeing his dying parents and the drudgery of work in Dublin for the Manhattan of his imagination – a place of romance and opulence, dark old concert halls and mellow front parlours quieted by the hiss of the phonograph cylinder – Rickard Velily hopes to be reborn as an Irish tenor, and to one day be reunited with the love of his life.

At the very peculiar Cha Bum Kun Club, a masonic-style refuge for immigrants who can’t quite cut it in New York City, he meets Denny Kennedy-Logan and Clive Sullis, and a plan is enacted: to revive the art songs and ballads of another time for a hip young city in thrall to technology and money.

But that is without reckoning on meddlesome sprites, the phantoms of the past – and more malign forces who plot to subjugate the human race.

Gavin Corbett’s new novel Green Glowing Skull is a half-crazed brain-shunt of a trip around the dream world, the spirit world, the cyber world and a woozily recognisable real world. A darkly comic tale of mythologies, machines and the metaphysical swirl, it’s a decent third effort from Corbett that, with a fair wind and a bit of mercy shown towards it, and all other things being equal, will pick up some good reviews and find some kindly readers. Sure, all you can do is hope.