Description from book
The trouble started when Howard Sykes came home from school and found the Goon sitting in the kitchen and preventing Fifi from making the tea. He'd come to collect for Archer, he said - Howard's father had got behind with his payments and he'd better deliver fast. Archer wanted his two thousand now. ' "Two thousand!" Fifi exclaimed. "You never told me that!" "Who is Archer?" said Howard.' As Howard desperately attempts to unravel the mystery, he discovers a ruthless plot to take over the world. Events move to a truly stupendous conclusion for all concerned, in this magnificently inventive and hilarious novel by a prize-winning author.

Comments Nominated in the Best Novel category of the 1985 World Fantasy Award and televised by the BBC.
For a review and pictures go to Goon TV

Description from book

Sirius the Dog Star has been convicted of the murder of a fellow luminary. As his punishment, he is sent down to earth to live as a dog, in which form he will die unless he can recover the mysterious Zoi.

With only dim memories of the star-world from which he has fallen, Sirius embarks on his seemingly impossible quest. Struggling to overcome the obstacles placed in his way by worldly as well as other-worldly forces, Sirius discovers that he must join the cold frosty hounds of the underworld in their midnight hunt. Only then can he make his request to their shadowy master.

Review by Jessie Powell

	this picture supplied by Frogybytes

"A frantic sense of loss came upon her, so strong that for a moment she could have cried. Why should she suddenly have memories that did not seem to correspond with the facts?"

Nineteen year old Polly has two sets of contradictory memories. In one set, the linear, single set, she is a student at Oxford who has recently become engaged. The second set of memories, the double set, is more sinister. They involve a man who once meant the world to her, but who she has now completely forgotten: Tom Lynn. As her forgotten memories come back to her, Polly becomes increasingly certain that she must act quickly in order to save Tom from a terrible doom.

“The boy sighs. "Do me a favour, Tan Cou-er-Mr. Piper. Pretend there _is_ a giant. Pretend we'll be dead in a minute unless you do something."

Mr. Piper's foot slips in yoghurt. He goes down with one knee in a pound of butter....... things begin to rain down on the giant through the hole in the ceiling. First comes a large sofa, then a television, followed by a squad of armchairs. While the giant is gasping from these, there is a pause full of sliding noises. Then a kitchen table falls on him, followed by a washing machine, a big refrigerator, a dishwasher, and finally a heavy gas oven."

“She had almost forgotten Mr. Lynn by then, because she was so worried about Dad. Dad had been away so long that Polly knew he was not on a course. She thought he might be dead, and that somehow Mum had forgotten to tell her."

While visiting her grandmother at the age of ten, Polly accidentally/deliberately crashes a funeral and meets the delightful Tom Lynn. Walking around together in the wind after the Reading of the Will, they start making up a story together. In this story, Mr. Lynn is a lowly ironmonger (with a horrible sister named Edna) named Thomas Piper, who in turn has a secret life as the hero Tan Coul. Polly, in the story, is a trainee-hero disguised as a boy named (well, why not) Hero. Long after Polly has returned to her home, Mr. Lynn sends her a story about Hero and Tan Coul fighting a giant in a supermarket. The friendship is cemented when Polly is permitted to visit Mr. Lynn as her mother sees a divorce lawyer in London.

As her parents settle in for a divorce, her relationship with Mr. Lynn becomes more and more important. She doesn't see her father at all, and her mother is perpetually "in a mood". One horrible Christmas, her father sends her a dollhouse (even though she already has one), and her mother drags her off to spend the holiday with her Auntie Maud (who comes complete with screaming infant cousins). The holiday is saved only because Mr. Lynn sends her a parcel of wonderful books, in which she can lose herself until school starts again.

"The car snarled and started with a swoop, and they swept out into the centre of Middleton. There, after a number of interesting wobbles, they raced twice around the main square before Mr. Lynn could rein the car in enough to drive down the Gloucester Road. When he did, they howled swiftly out into the countryside, pausing only to miss a bus and skip the Miles Cross traffic lights. Polly had realised by now that Mr. Lynn drove the way heroes drive.... He did not seem frightfully particular about which side of the road they were on, and he clearly had a passion for overtaking everything else going the same way."

" 'You meen,' she wrote back 'that you want to stop plaing hero binis. I do not blame you. It is up to you. just say...... Dear Hero, I didn't mean that at all. I just meant that being a hero took a different kind of courage."

The stories Polly and Mr. Lynn make up together start coming true. First they invent a horse for Tan Coul and Mr. Lynn immediately has to save Polly from being trampled by an escaped circus horse. Then, after he buys the horse and trades it in for a heroic yellow car, Mr. Lynn finds that the town he and Polly invented together really does exist. When they visit the town, they find that Thomas Piper, his sister Edna, and Edna's son Leslie all exist. Tom Lynn even looks enough like Mr. Piper to briefly confuse Edna. The difference between reality and fiction is in the personalities of the people. Edna isn't horrible, and her son Leslie, rather than being the dark-haired sulking brute invented by Polly and Mr. Lynn, is a cheerful fair-haired young man. The similarities are enough to make Mr. Lynn realise that it takes a different sort of courage to be a hero.

With his different sort of courage, Mr. Lynn decides to leave the British Philharmonic and form a musical quartet with his friends Edward Davies, Samuel Rensky, and Ann Abraham. These three people correspond exactly with Tan Thare, Tan Hanivar, and Tan Audel, three heroes in Mr. Lynn and Polly's stories. Polly and Mr Lynn lose touch with one another as he struggles to form his quartet and her home life collapses. Polly's mother Ivy takes in a boarder named David Bragge, and David and Ivy fall into a relationship. However, that relationship begins to collapse. Ivy blames Polly and sends her to live with her father, Reg. Unfortunately, Reg's wife is under the impression that Polly is only visiting. Hurt and proud, Polly leaves with no money or ticket home. Miraculously, Mr. Lynn's quartet is rehearsing nearby, and Polly finds them by recognising Mr. Lynn's heroic car. The other three members of the quartet befriend her and buy her a ticket home to her grandmother. Seeing that her parents are both completely incompetent, her grandmother becomes her legal guardian.

"Sentimental Drivel. T.G.L." Now, it is Polly's turn to write a Tan Coul story. A romance, which Mr. Piper calls "Sentimental Drivel". One passage in particular, in which Polly describes "the smooth powerful muscles rippling under the silken skin of his back", causes him to make her a caustic reply. Tom isn't entirely a free man, and his keepers make it impossible for he and Polly to communicate openly. Instead, Tom has his musician friend Ed write her and explanatory letter which describes the human back in quite a different way.

"You will find, he says, yellow skin, blackheads, pimples, enlarged pores and tufts of hair. This is making me ill, but Tom says go on. Peeling sunburn, warts, boils, moles, midge bites, and floppy rolls of skin. Even a back without these blemishes, he claims, seldom or never ripples, unless with gooseflesh."

Rereading her story, Polly writhes. However, she continues to fall in love. The more she cares for Tom, the more she becomes aware that something separates him from her. She knows it has to do with the dark Mr. Leroy, his son Sebastian, and Tom's ex-wife Laurel. But Tom flatly refuses to tell her what "it" is. Her need to know causes her to do something terrible to Tom. Something so terrible she can't even remember it in her double memories. But she must remember. Tom's life depends upon her remembering. Polly knows that if she cannot force together her two sets of memories, and soon, then Thomas Lynn will die.

Description from book
Suddenly Polly begins to remember... Halloween, nine years ago. She gatecrashed a funeral party at the big house. She met Tom Lynn for the first time. And he gave her the strange photograph of the hemlock flowers and the fire. But what has happened in the years between? Why has Polly erased Tom from her own mind and the rest of the worlds as well? How could she have forgotten him when he had meant so much to her? And how can she unlock her memory, before her quest becomes a matter of life or death...

Description from book
Polly looked up at the picture above the bed. There had been a time when she had gazed at that picture and thought it marvellous. Dark figures had seemed to materialise out of its dark centre - strong, running dark figures - always at least four of them, racing to beat out the flames in the foreground. There had been times when you could see the figures quite clearly. Other times, they had been shrouded in the rising smoke. There had even been a horse in it sometimes. Here, now, she could see it was simply a large colour photograph, three feet by two feet, taken at dusk, of some hay bales burning in a field. The shapes she used to take for people were only too clearly dark clumps of the dark hedge behind the blaze. It was a haunting picture. It was called Fire and Hemlock...

Description from book
Polly struggled with her own childhood memories. Memories that reached beyond the familiar walls of her home, beyond logic or imagination. Visions of fire, of hemlock, of an old mansion and an eerie funeral procession clouded her thoughts and lured her into the dark heart of an elusive otherworld. A world where dark fantasies had become all too real. Where an evil woman regal as a queen had trapped a man in her spell. And where Polly alone held the key to his freedom from the seductive web of Fire and Hemlock.

Also reviewed in Charmed Lives fanzine.

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