By M. John Harrison

Volume 1: Before the Battle

The Elf Queen, who’s eaten nothing for a week but the wadding from benzedrine inhalers, has sex with her dwarf, Cootchie Cootie, in the back seat of his bombed-up 1951 Fleetline Cadillac, while Tolkien and C. S. Lewis look on in passive-aggressive disavowal. It’s a favour for a friend. After that, for the founding volume anyway, we envisage Zap Comic dynamics on a lean-burn version of The Revenger’s Tragedy – the usual tale of poor choices, low ground clearance and self-medication. Emotional palette from A Glastonbury Romance, prose from Destination: Moon and worldbuilding from one of those ads where if you buy the right mobile phone it causes inconvenient buildings to fold themselves away in front of the user so she can get to some other stuff she wants to consume without ever walking round a corner or even, apparently, consulting the phone