The Golden Frog by David Bevan

 

NIGHTJAR PRESS 2022 (my previous reviews of this publisher HERE)

“In pride of place over the old gas fire, he had stuck a Slayer Angel of Death poster.”

I don’t know where to start to do justice to this tactilely powerful piece. The less said probably the best, so its word spawn won’t be spoilt or contaminated by me. But I will mention the narrator (with a dog called Max) whose evocatively depicted central character is someone he calls by various shortenings of Gollum, the character’s nickname when they were at school together. I knew a similar epitome of sad at school whom we all called Dogsbody in the 1950s. In real life, Gol is a window cleaner, a prying job that somehow cleaned the glass for this vision. And here, the inferred clear-sighted vision is [POSSIBLE SPOILER] Gol’s wondrous transcending of  life’s boggy conduit leading to the eponymous trophy in the prestigious bog-snorkelling championship via the earlier storing of regurgitated frog eggs for later ‘mad science’, I guess. But not so mad at all.

Now I seem to have said more than I intended, because I evolved into wanting to convey at least a soupçon of what I have just read. But, I must also add that I can now empathise, if not sympathise,  with the protagonist in yesterday’s Nightjar story (HERE) where he left money out for the window cleaner because he did not want to have a conversation with him. (From two lakes to a single bog, an irony?)