Robert Rankin's comic fantasies have a laddish good humour which rely heavily, if not excessively, on teasing, class and beer. His protagonists are always forced to compete in a world in which someone else has a silver spoon in their mouth; they muddle their way through his amiably Heath-Robinsonish plots by a mixture of chutzpah, bluster and endurance. Porrig, hero of Apocalypso has a bad attitude that makes even his parents dislike him, but he inherits a shop from a conjuror uncle—a shop which serves as a gateway to other worlds. Not only has he to redeem his uncle from damnation, he also has to save the world from an unpleasant alien vegetable with the power to cloud human minds. Amid all this, we find out what Nelson's Column is for, why railway ticket clerks take so long to sell tickets and the secret that lurks under Mornington Crescent Underground Station. Rankin's humour is a scatter-shot that misses targets as often as it hits, but his unabashed preparedness to use old jokes and the crudest of slapstick is part of a shaggy-dog enthusiasm that is more endearing than otherwise. —Roz Kaveney

Ever since his comic-sinister debut The Antipope—published for the first time in 1981, or 2 BD(Before Discworld)—Robert Rankin has repeatedly returned to that most haunted region of mythic England: Brentford. Snuff Fiction is the biography of local entrepreneur Doveston (1949-2008) as seen by lifelong friend and enemy Edwin, beginning with richly comic evocations of 1950s schoolboy folklore. Like lurking water-vipers in the park: "If you took a piddle in the boating lake, they would swim up the stream of pee and enter your knob." Doveston's insanely ambitious schemes begin with house-wrecking dope parties and the doomed 1967 Brentstock rock festival, with Edwin the scapegoat for every disaster. Those resisting the inexorable Doveston rise to wealth and power have accidents involving dynamite. Presently he's making nefarious deals with our secret Government, culminating in a millennium party at Castle Doveston where celebrities like Michael Jackson meet sticky ends. Rankin produces a fascinating flow of misinformation about puberty, gypsies (native language Esperanto), yo-yos (is there a manoeuvre called "splitting the beaver"?), Brentford's many ethnic quarters (e.g. Mexican, Navajo, Kalahari Bushmen), rhyming slang (Richard= Richard Dadd= mad) and snuff-sniffing. The awful secret of the Millennium Bug is revealed. Uninhibitedly anarchic farce, full of bizarre verbal inventiveness and dreadful old jokes. Read it and sneeze. —David Langford

Robert Rankin's wondrously oddball fantasies have caused addicted readers' heads to spontaneously explode on five separate continents, most of them in Brentford. Some call him the Terry Pratchett of seedy suburbia, but only if they want a punch in the chops...

Waiting for Godalming reports the greatest case of private eye Lazlo Woodbine, hired to investigate God's murder and the suspicious fact that Earth was inherited not by the meek but by God's other son Colin—edited out of the Bible when Jesus got full artistic control. Woodbine is strong on gunplay, dark alleys, rooftop confrontations and talking bizarre drivel in bars, but one worries about the Holy Guardian Sprout called Barry living inside his head.

Meanwhile, light-fingered Icarus Smith discovers the "Red Head" reality pills that reveal the disguised demons among us for the awful, scaly, insect-mouthed horrors that they are. Meanwhile, Prof. Bruce Partington's "spectremeter" device raises ghosts but can't make them go away again. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists will shiver to the dread Ministry of Serendipity hidden under Mornington Crescent station, and its awful uses for barbers' chairs.

As Rankin's anarchic storylines go, this is unusually sober and logical. There's a flood of running gags, self-referential japes, author interjections, allusions to a million Sherlock Holmes titles, and deranged one-liners like this architectural description of Wisteria Lodge:

To the original Georgian pile had been added a Victorian bubo, an Edwardian boil and a nineteen-thirties cyst.

Full of inspired silliness throughout, this is Rankin in good form. —David Langford

Robert Rankin's fondness for demented conspiracy theories is complicated by time travel in The Witches of Chiswick—which demonstrates again that everything you know is wrong, that Brentford is the true centre of the multiverse, and that nobody is quite as weird as Robert Rankin.

Will Starling lives in a dystopian 23rd century where Brentford Utility Conurbation is crammed with 303-storey tower blocks and synthetic food has made everyone vastly obese. Except for Will, who's mocked for morbid slimness and eccentric tastes—art, for example. When he notices the digital watch in a well-known Victorian painting, a murderous cover-up begins. The sinister Witches of Chiswick are determined to erase all traces of the other past.

Time-travelling Terminator-style automata keep arriving, not from the future but from that lost Victorian age of Babbage supercomputers, flying cabs running on beamed power from Tesla transmitters and the imminent launch of Her Majesty's Moonship Victoria. Thanks to the convenient time machine of a Mr Wells, Will finds himself in that other 19th century, complicating the stories of his own ancestors.

There he's tutored by the flamboyant guru or conman Hugo Rune. He stands in for Sherlock Holmes—called away to a Dartmoor case—and investigates the Jack-the-Ripper murders. As tends to happen in the Rankin universe, he acquires a Holy Guardian Sprout called Barry. Will even meets himself, another Will from a very different future. Even aided by his best friend Tim, by the Brentford Snail Boy (raised like Tarzan by wild animals, not apes but snails), and by the deadly martial art Dimac, can Will hope to foil a witchy plan to reprogram time and send high-tech Britain back to gaslight as midnight strikes on December 31, 1899?

Other walk-ons include Queen Victoria, the Elephant Man, William McGonagall (Poet Laureate), Doctor Watson, the Invisible Man, Oscar Wilde (a notorious womaniser), Wells' Martians, and—in unfamiliar guise—Satan. It's all suitably dotty, larded with running gags and bursts of disarming frankness: ... Perhaps both futures always existed. I don't know. This is very complicated, Tim, and I don't understand it. I'm just making it up as I go along. Like the author," said Tim.

But rather than wrap-up this novel with any of a dozen deus ex machina possibilities, Rankin leaves his hero with a very tough decision indeed. The insane, goonish humour made more effective by a touch of grimness. —David Langford