The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived (1995) - Plot & Excerpts
In Cold Comfort Farm, there is a preacher who warns his audience that there is ‘no butter in hell’. Just to warm them up, so to speak. Robert Rankin’s dead protagonist in this novel doesn’t even have the fortune to go to Hell, because that place has been closed down aeons before by a kindly God who failed to foresee that souls would just pile up and there would be a backlog in the reincarnation department. So Norman, who aspired to the gift of wings and in doing so enacted unhallowed rites in the names of beings too foul to mention, is killed by his descending dad doing an Icarus bit and ends up as a ghost. Ghosts, be it understood, remain where they died - in space - so they appear on the anniversary of their deaths when the Earth in its orbit catches up with them.What Norman finds out is bizarre indeed. Not only the backlog in the reincarnation department, but someone is being reborn again and again on their original birthdate, replicating their own soul in several bodies. This person goes by the name of Hugo Rune; poet, bon vivant and professional liar, and father to a tall youth by the name of Cornelius, who in previous volumes has battled the powers of darkness while swanning around in a big Cadillac. Rune is bigger and nastier than before; he now has reversed-colour eyes (black around white), and is planning to electroplate the Skelington Bay piers and as a side-effect kill off everybody, including the souls waiting to reincarnate.Well, enough said. This is the usual manic Rankin roller-coaster ride, this time attacking such targets as car-porn ("my XR3i’s bigger than your XR2i") and those lost souls who tear out perfectly good Art Deco furniture to put in moquette carpet-tiles and draylon covers, and call rooms by things like the KEV-LYN Suite. There is an engagingly silly alien who looks like a sheep, and what is probably a send-up of the *Survivors*-type rural post-holocaust story. It’s fun.
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