As we're on the subject of soul-peelingly awful science fiction, I'd be remiss not to get in a plug for the legendary Lionel Fanthorpe, who in the 1950s cracked out a new 150-page book for Britain's Badger Books nearly once a week. Writing under approximately five scrillion different pseudonyms, Mr Fanthorpe met his deadlines through the simple expedient of hiding under a blanket and dictating his masterworks into a portable tape recorder. Since the schedule didn't allow for anything as time-consuming as editing, they were sent off to the publisher and typed up verbatim by the secretarial pool, resulting in such charming foibles as characters who died in one chapter only to be resurrected in the next because Fanthorpe forgot he'd killed them off.

Naturally it was dashed difficult to come up with a hundred and fifty pages worth of new material every week, so Mr Fanthorpe had to add a bit of padding here and there (and by "a bit", I mean "great heaping gobs"). The fine folks at the Lionel Fanthorpe Appreciation Page (link below) have archived a number of these for posterity, including the following gems:

"When he awoke it was pitch dark, dark as the pit, dark as the tomb, dark as the grave. A thick, black velvet darkness that seemed almost tangible in its intensity. The kind of darkness that got into the pores of your nose..."

"The darkness all around him was thick, black, stygian. It was a stifling, overwhelming, suffocating darkness. A horrifying terrifying darkness. A darkness of the nethermost pit of hell. Indescribable. It seemed an oppressive darkness, like the darkness of some foul underground dungeon, to which the blessed light of the sun never gained access. It was velvety, almost tactile. He was inhaling it; it was penetrating the pores of his skin; it seemed that the world had always been darkness, that the world alway would be darkness. It was a timeless darkness, a weird, horrifying, overwhelming eternal blackness. He felt as though this was the darkness of a tomb, and that he had been buried alive. . ."

Darkness, we may gather, is an important recurring theme in Fanthorpe stories. I'll have to string along with the maintainers of the page in selecting "Our Heroine Brushes Her Teeth in Excruciating Detail" as my personal favourite, but there's something for everyone here.

Were "Mind wallaby" wolf