Fags and Lager // Booze and Burn — Charlie Williams

In this darkly comedic follow-up to Charlie Williams' breakthrough novel Deadfolk, Hoppers head doorman Royston Blake is once again up to his eyeballs in trouble of the worst kind. Since his face-off with the Munton brothers, Blake has been enjoying life as a “pillar” of the Mangel community. Sure, it's a bleak and rather dodgy town, but it's his town all the same. At least, until enigmatic outsider Nick Nopoly waltzes in and starts collecting friends faster than can possibly be legal. Blake doesn't think much of him until he notices a change in the behavior of Hoppers' younger clientele: less beery violence, more nonsensical blathering. But when Doug the shopkeeper comes to Blake for help “sorting out” the newcomer (who just happens to be dating Doug's teenage daughter), the bruiser figures helping out Doug will be good for business…never mind the 400 cigarettes and 400 cans of lager the shopkeeper has offered as payment. Of course, Mangel is Mangel, and it wouldn't be a normal day if Blake didn't soon find himself in an unholy mess. Raunchy, violent, and hysterical, Booze and Burn is an addictive trip into the dark underbelly of small-town England.