Jonathan Carroll has been writing novels a lot longer than Neil Gaiman, and is still producing confident, baffling little boxes of wonders and terrors like his latest: The Wooden Sea. Returning again to the setting of Kissing The Beehive and The Marriage Of Sticks, town Chief of Police Frannie McCabe buries an ugly old dog that comes back to life, meets a younger version of himself and goes to experience the last week of his life somewhere off in the future. They’re all clues in an elaborate riddle, clues he must decipher, and decipher quickly, if he’s to have a hope of saving the world, from what he doesn’t know, but there are those who want to stop him and those who want to help him, and it’s kind of hard to tell which is which.

If you read Jonathan Carroll, you’ll know what to expect, if you don’t: it’s well written, painfully human and profoundly mischievous.