Product Description

The will-sapping tedium of life as a Walsall Reflector hack has given Dave "Ichabod" McVane a serious thirst for the devil's juice. Now, after years of debauchery, the booze has bitten back: what feels like a rhinoceros is buffeting its way through his stomach. He wakes cathetered and bed-bound among deranged "regulars" in a hospital with a terrifyingly high mortality rate. And if that wasn't bad enough, a figure from a past he'd rather forget revisits to leave him reeling, raddled with paranoia and facing a scalpel-happy surgeon. Perhaps it's time to reflect on how he got in such a state. Was it the Walsall Academy of New Knowledge or the sideline in "specialist" leatherwork? Or was it having a Smiths fan called Ringo for a best friend, and hookers for next-door-neighbors? Is closing time being called once and for all, or will the pall of his disillusionment suddenly lift?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #376210 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .89" h x 5.04" w x 7.76" l, .68 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Mil Millington
'Funny, moreish, and puts Walsall on the map in the way that Dante’s Inferno did with hell'

About the Author
Paul McDonald was born in Walsall in 1961, left school at 16 to train as a saddlemaker, completed his PhD in 1993 and is now Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton. His published work includes books on the fiction of the industrial Midlands, and the American writer Philip Roth. His first novel, Surviving Sting, was heralded as 'a voice from the Black Country as authentic as baltis and Banks’s bitter' (Time Out). Paul remains in Walsall where, to his horror, he’s developing a taste for chunky jewellery and combat dogs.