Jim Giraffe by Daren King

It's a good shag, Spec, but
I wouldn't want to marry it.

Like all good ghost stories, at least those written by Charles Dickens, this one starts off with a spectral appearance and a triple-threat warning, via the medium of VHS cassette, that if Scott Spectrum, successful scriptwriter for the Science Fiction Channel's biggest hit, to date, Space Man In Space, doesn't slip the yoke of self-repression, he is going to die. Unlike Dickens, Jacob Marley here is a dead giraffe, who lives in the wardrobe, and is called Jim. 

But Scott Spectrum is no Ebeneezer Scrooge. He learns absolutely nothing about himself and, at its finalé, is left a cuckold, unaware that his frustrated wife Continence can't be impregnated by acts of fellatio, his baby suspiciously long of neck and skin mottled with giraffe-ish patterns, forced out of his house, his marriage and his life and left to live with Barry the ghost rhinoceros who until then kipped under Scott's sink.

Cock jokes abound, there is foul language and sledgehammer satire, and if you're going in expecting a grimly believable tale like King's debut novel, then you can take a hike. Jim Giraffe is comic surrealism with a dark and nasty bent, but it balances its nastiness with a strange sense of innocence, both Jim and Scott teetering on the edge of understanding but naively trapped in lives and loops from which there is no escape. And in essence, that's the scariest part of this ghost story; for all the surrealism, Scott's terminal parabolic arc doesn't end with a pot of gold, but with loneliness and despair - we all die alone. Although not all with a ghost rhino for company.

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