The Further Fangs of Suet Pudding

By Rhys Hughes

What happens when apeman good meets marshmallow evil? That's the alarming question posed by this novella, which is a double sequel to two obscure and unlikely books, namely The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange by Rhys Hughes and The Fangs of Suet Pudding by Adams Farr...

In a forgotten corner of Africa, an eccentric club of veteran flyers must confront the unexpected arrival of a violet-scented jelloid Nazi with all the evil powers of a psychic pudding at his disposal! Only Stringent Strange, the apeman test pilot (plus his chums and a few readers) has a chance to prevent the repulsive invader from achieving total world domination!!

Heil Pudding! Heil Pudding! Heil Pudding!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rhys Hughes
• Release date: Dec 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301613878

Rhys Hughes

RHYS HUGHES was born in Wales but has lived in many different countries and currently lives in India. He began writing at an early age and his first book, Worming the Harpy, was published in 1995. Since that time he has published more than fifty other books and his work has been translated into ten languages. He recently completed an ambitious project that involved writing exactly 1000 linked short stories. He is currently working on a novel and several new collections of prose and verse.

Book preview

The Further Fangs of Suet Pudding

by

Rhys Hughes

Published By Gloomy Seahorse Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Rhys Hughes

Discover other Rhys Hughes titles at Smashwords.com

Including (among others):

The Tellmenow Isitsöornot

A bumper collection of exactly 100 tales for only $4.99

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This novella is dedicated to

Apemen Everywhere

And also to:

Michael Croteau and his team at Meteor House

Gonzalo Canedo

is the artist responsible for the cover.

Author’s Note:

If you bought my novel The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange then you should be reading this novella for free, as that is part of the deal. This novella is not only a sequel to that novel but also a sequel to The Fangs of Suet Pudding, an obscure wartime thriller written by Adams Farr and published in 1944.

Table of Contents

Overture

The Cabinda Flyer’s Club

The Interdimensional Gateway

And So It Was

The Alarm Clock Gun

Not by the Blubber of My Chinny Chin

Calling a Conference

Itxaso and Hilola

Plantain from Outer Space

The Collaborator

The Chapter with a Chase Scene

Tuckerize Your Backsides!

Barroom Brawl

Libraries Expand the Mind

About the Author

Other Free Ebooks

OVERTURE

The first sentence of this story has just begun and you are reading it right now, your eyes jumping from one word to the next so rapidly and fluidly that it seems more like a single continuous prose path than a sequence of isolated stepping-stones across a river of silence and emptiness. But you are starting to wonder what real point, if any, I’m trying to make with an opening as unconventional as this one.

Or perhaps it’s not as unusual and radical as all that, and if this is what you are thinking, then yes, you’re right. Including the reader in a tale as a character, breaking the illusion of a self-contained fictional world, is a technique that goes back thousands of years to the mysterious origins of story-telling. ‘Metafiction’ is the name of this trick. Metafiction. Married a fiction. Had lots of little microfictions.

Don’t mind me. I tend to get distracted easily.

Some readers regard the use of metafictional techniques as a violation of the principles of ‘immersion’, in other words they believe that they are detrimental to the suspension-of-disbelief ideals they prize so highly. Yet I enjoy using them, finding them playful and amusing. And further to my defence of metafiction I would like to state… Wait! What’s that noise? It sounds as if the end of this paragraph has—

Broken off and dropped into the eternal abyss.

And so it has. But what force could snap off the end of a paragraph as solid as the ones I write? It must have been a mighty impact of some kind or a grotesque natural disaster! The best thing I can do is take a look and report back to you. What’s that? You’d rather see for yourself? Very well. Follow me behind the words on this page into the actual spacetime of the story itself. Take care: it’s a jungle in there!

THE CABINDA FLYER’S CLUB

You’re too old to fly! growled the chairman.

Relax, Mr Backup, said the apeman as he climbed out of the ruins of the biplane that lay smouldering on the field.

I tell ya, Stringy, it’ll be the death of you, the death of all of us, if you keep trying to do those stunts. You’re not the agile mutant you used to be. Age catches up with all of us and it does terrible things, inappropriate and unpleasant things, to the human being, and also to the man-ape hybrid. It makes wrinkles on faces, it weakens bladders and it slows down reflexes. You might have crashed into the clubhouse!

But I didn’t, did I? smirked Stringent Strange.

You crashed into that previous paragraph and knocked the end right off! Who knows if there were people standing in it at the time? I hope for your sake it was just crammed with abstract ideas, rather than flesh and blood characters, or paper and ink characters I ought to say. I bet it’s still falling through the eternal abyss of nullity!

Halfcut Backup, incumbent chairman of the Cabinda Flyer’s Club and formerly heroic aviator himself, removed his battered pith helmet, ruffled his mop of sun-bleached hair and sighed.

Stringent approached him, his jacket smoking.

I’m sorry, Mr Backup. I thought she was a beauty. And so she was. I forgot that a beauty often has a kick to her!

The engines were too powerful for such a flimsy frame, Stringy! Too bad your old mentor, Professor Crinkle, isn’t around to offer you advice. I know you listened to him. You don’t listen much to me, that’s for sure. In my dreams I think you do listen to me but—

Did you say something, Mr Backup?

Halfcut made a dismissive gesture, then he turned and gestured at the clubhouse, which stood above the beach not more than a mile distant. I reckon we both deserve a drink after this.

Stringent nodded and they both ambled over the grass to the sagging building. A rhinoceros watched them pass.

Hey, what’s the plural of ‘rhinoceros’, Mr Backup?

Halfcut shrugged. Rhinocerii?

I don’t know, Mr Backup, maybe it’s rhinoceroses. I only ask in case another one comes along and joins the one that’s watching us right now. I like to be prepared for every eventuality.

You’re too old to worry about such things, Stringy.

The apeman puffed out his cheeks.

The thing is, Mr Backup, I just don’t accept that one should grow old gracefully. You’re only as old as the cliché you’re feeling and I don’t feel any that aren’t fresh, so I think that flying is helping me to stay young. If I just retired I think I would go to seed.

Halfcut digested this and then nodded. "I suppose there’s something in what you say. Look at Tommy Cocknobknees who spends all his time in a corner of the bar playing mah jong against himself and losing. He went senile so long ago that senility has forgotten all about him and left him as sharp as a broken bone in a nasty fracture. But he’s odd, very odd indeed, and I can’t get any sense out of him at all."

It’s just not old age, said Stringent, but the climate and the culture. Some people just never settle down here.

Ah yes! Africa! It does things to some men that medical science can’t always explain. I guess Tommy is one of those. A burnt-out case. We are more robust, you and I, especially you, eh? That is because you are partly an ape. I wish I were part ape, or even an ape entire. It must be wonderful taking so much unalloyed joy from bananas.

Stringent nodded vigorously. "Yes, it certainly is; but I prefer whores to food, to be honest, and the local whores are special. Thinking about it, a whore with a banana, or a bunch, is even better. Let me tell you what they can do with a little encouragement…"

There was an awkward pause.

Halfcut cleared his throat. Look at that, the upper windows of the clubhouse need to be cleaned. I ought to get up there with a ladder and bucket tomorrow, just to change the subject.

Maybe I could pay a whore to clean them? suggested Stringent, but Halfcut pretended not to have heard him.

They passed through the front door and went into the bar.

Ollyhands was reading a book on a stool but he stood up when they approached and grinned widely. Been scaring the giraffes again? I bet they spat into your cockpit when you flew between their legs? It amazes me you’re still alive doing stuff like that.

They didn’t spit, they piddled, corrected Stringent.

You hairy madman! cried Ollyhands.

I’m not a madman, growled Stringent, "but