The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke
By Mark Chadbourn

     Many people are familiar with Richard Dadd’s famous painting The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, and know that the artist spent much of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane. This is a novel by UK fantasist Mark Chadbourn that charts the obsession this painting has over the narrator. Born gifted but poor, Danny was introduced to the painting by his mother and was drawn into its’ mysterious web. The more he looked, the more he saw and then he asked himself what the picture truly meant; did it show a magical world, unseen to nearly everybody but its painter, and could he come to see it too? This sets him off on a quest that causes him to plumb the depths of unemployment, squalor and drug-addiction until he finally realizes what his mother was trying to show him for so long.

      PS Publishing is a small UK-based press that publishes some gems. Many are signed, and often limited editions making them attractive for aficionados of fantasy and thriller writers such as Ramsey Campbell, Michael Moorcock, Stephen Erikson and James Barclay. This slim volume gives another facet to the excellent writing talents of Mark Chadbourn, that delineator of modern Britain and imaginative author of the Age of Misrule series. It is the story of an obsession, not merely with a painting but for Danny to explain his very existence, and his part in things. Is he looking for some hidden truth, or is he merely seeing things that aren’t there? Is he becoming mad, or just trying to explain his gifted yet disappointing life? Like me, the reader will wonder what it all means until the denouement, which is very satisfying and makes the whole book glow. Sure to appeal to anybody who thinks that fantasy ought to be more than weighty Tolkeinesque tomes and an enjoyable, thought-provoking read.