The Fandom of the Operator

✍ Scribed by Robert Rankin

• Publisher: Corgi
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 162 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0552148970

✦ Synopsis

THE CROOK, THE LOON, HIS WIFE AND THE WALKING DEAD
It was originally known as Project Orpheus. A genuine top secret World War Two operation to communicate with the dead. It proved to be highly successful and helped the Allies win the war. But in the 1950s something went terribly wrong. That’s when the aliens from another world took over the communication system and another war entirely began.
For Gary Charlton Cheese, it all began when he was ten years old. At that time his hobbies included, sneaking into the restricted section of the local library, reading the Lazlo Woodbine novels of P. P. Penrose and attempting to raise the dead. Gary was not the kind of boy who was ever going to make his mother proud.
Gary now has a job at the local telephone exchange. Bulbsman. It isn’t much of a job, it only involves him sitting in a tiny booth all day, waiting for a bulb to light up, so he can switch it off again. But it is a job for life and it does have a pension. There’s some pretty strange stuff going on upstairs at the exchange, though. Something to do with this old project that the powers that be have got on the go again. A project now called FLATLINE. Something to do with making telephone calls to the dead.
It is all going to end very badly indeed, especially for Gary Charlton Cheese.
This is undoubtedly one of Robert Rankin’s darker novels and while it features gruesome murder, black magic, unfaithful zombie lovers, feuding aliens and double-dealing tricksters, its rollercoaster plot lacks not for “gallows humour”. Mr Rankin, however, wishes to make it absolutely clear that the views expressed by the fictional narrator, notorious psychotic necromancer Gary Charlton Cheese, are not his own. Mr Rankin has never raised the dead, nor murdered people on the grounds that they were ugly. Nor has he ever worked for the GPO as a bulbsman, although he did come close, back in the nineteen-seventies.
--
Eat your heart out, Philip K Dick.
Robert Rankin is uniquely off-the-wall, unparalleled in his eccentricity: there's no other comic fantasy author like him. Thank heavens for that. -- David Langford

**

From Publishers Weekly

Upon "the tragic early death" of British spoofmaster Rankin, his latest novel was dictated from the beyond to medium Lorretta Rune or so claims the book's back-flap author description. Longtime fans know better, of course: Rankin is a master of sophisticated (and sophomoric) practical jokes. His novels are cult classics in England and are attracting a growing following in the U.S. In this installment, Gary Charlton Cheese, abused child, serial killer, amateur necromancer, rabid fan of deceased writer P.P. "Charles" Penrose and bulb boy at the local telephone exchange, decides to "change things" in his boring life. Then he discovers, with the assistance of another employee, that the telephone exchange harbors a secret: FLATLINE, a phone line to the dead. "You dial in the full name of the deceased and the date of their departure. Then times the figure that comes up on the screen by the age of the person when they died and take away the year they were born and, wallah, you have your dialing code," explains a developmental services employee to Cheese. And voil , Cheese finds himself in communication with the dead. Subsequently, a whole new world opens up for the put-upon hero, whose wife, Sandra, has been shagging other guys, including his "bestest friend" in the whole world, Dave. Now he can talk to his dead dad or, say, Elvis but more importantly, he can dial up Penrose. The convoluted plot invariably leads to the question all fans must ask their favorite author "Where do you get your ideas from?" and the answer is revealed in the inimitable, roundabout Rankin way. Happily ridiculous and relentlessly funny, this is just the ticket for those who like dark British farce.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

In Robert Rankin’s outrageously funny new novel, advanced telecommunications technology offers the first-ever hotline to the dead…