https://unbound.com/books/everything-will-swallow-you

https://tomcox.substack.com/p/bloomin-eck-my-new-book-is-finally 

As you all know, I have chosen to crowdfund my latest seven books, rather than - as I once did - going through more traditional publishing channels. I just finished editing my latest book, which means that the supporters list will soon be closing, as the manuscript gets readied for the printers. There’s still plenty of time to order the book before its publication in March next year, of course, but if you’d like your name in the back of it, and to contribute to its funding, the deadline is September 17th at 4p.m.

The novel is called Everything Will Swallow You. The title was handed to me by silent invisible hands (as the best ones tend to be) in January when I was hiking along the West Dorset coast, roughly in the spot you can see in the photo above. It seemed perfect for the book’s main setting - a coast prone to dramatic landslips - and many of its themes, which include the overwhelming nature of modern life. It’s quite a big novel - bigger than 1983 and even Villager - centred around a record and antique dealer - a man from northern England, of roughly my parents’ age - and his… unlikely housemate. I think it’s the one I’m most proud of (I’ve certainly never worked harder on a book in my life). As a thank you for those of you who have supported my work during the book’s creation, I’ve decided to share an extract here today, and there is more exclusive material on my substack: tomcox.substack.com

CARS WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE THIS BIG

 

Once they were walking, Carl felt better. The day had pivoted, letting mild sagging clouds through a narrow window in its rear wall. The unforeseen melt of the glistening varnish on everything reminded you just how much of the lower parts of the landscapes remained underwater. A couple of floods necessitated a detour from the planned route, a steep climb through woods where black earth sucked impartially at your legs. The rain felt less like rain and more like a purifying mood you just happened to be walking through. He relished the feel of his hands as they splashed through the little pools that were slowly draining into the spongey acid turf. The triangle of knowledge that had hit him as soon as he’d walked into Corndon Manor had been one of the vastest he’d ever experienced. It made him feel like he was falling backwards through a series of unlocked exits. ‘Help me,’ he wanted to say to his two companions who, as they engaged in the customary pleasantries of a previously unvisited porch, suddenly felt so far away. That not being an option, he padded quietly off, found a door leading to the garden, let the weight of what was hitting him - all the images informing him that he knew this place, more than knew it, that it was somehow part of him - knock him over, because there was nothing else he could do. When he did give in and permit it to do that, he was relieved to discover that most of the images were not negative. As the images gradually slowed, he analysed the garden: the secret upper tier, through the attractive gap in the granite wall, which - maybe because of something he was seeing in those flickering images coming through the triangle or maybe something in the atmosphere he felt in wandering through it - made him think ‘monks’. There was a rambling rose behind him, swallowed by 2022’s brambles, and 2021’s, and possibly even 2020’s. He was aching to get in behind it, chop the bastards off at the ankles, give the big red goddess chance to breathe. He’d probably leave the moss on the steps leading up to the peeling conservatory to do its thing. It gave them character. But the steps begged for extra definition. Something stately on either side of them. Cordyline, perhaps, or Trachycarpus. Trachycarpus would perhaps be the obvious choice, but Cordyline should never be underestimated. At the beginning of winter, on another record hunt not far from here, he and Eric had driven past a moorland house where they’d once lived and seen the little one he’d planted in the garden there in 2016. It had really gone to work in the intervening years and now reached the roof gutter. 

   A couple of years ago at a desultory record fair in Taunton, where one of the other dealers had put on the second Crosby, Stills and Nash album in an attempt to pump some life into the morning, Carl, from his elongated meditative position under the table, had heard Eric drift into a discussion of the concept of déjà vu with Reg Monk. Reg said he believed it was the universe opening up little windows to the other lives we had lived, past, future and parallel. Eric, being Eric, the man who saw death as a beyond black wall protecting nothing but the void, immediately poo-pooed Monk’s romanticism. ‘Nah. Faulty wiring in the brain, that’s all it is, pal, nothing more. Dust on the needle. An old biscuit crumb stuck in the groove. Blow it away and it’s business as usual. I’ve never been here before and I’m not coming back again and that’s probably for the best.’ Considering the manner of their first meeting and his unquestioning acceptance of all his housemate was, it never ceased to baffle Carl how little credence Eric was willing to give generally to ideas of the unexplainable or supernatural. It was frustrating to have to wait to tell Eric precisely what he’d seen through those triangles in the manor, a wait that would be even longer now that the small industrious lady responsible for the building had unexpectedly accepted Mel’s invite to join them for the walk, but what was there to be so impatient about? He could predict what Eric’s reaction would be. Eric would no doubt tell Carl that Carl was ‘probably just sleep-deprived’, turn it into a joke or deftly reroute the conversation to a quasi-related topic. It would be doubtful that he’d be up for any more lengthy investigation into Carl’s growing theory that recently he’d been experiencing something a little like what Reg Monk had been talking about, albeit bigger, more engulfing version. Carl adored that Eric took him so nonchalantly for whatever he was, without feeling the need for analysis, but sometimes he wished he’d just turn off the irreverence for a minute or two and indulge him in serious conversation where everyone looked the details squarely in the face. ‘Ah well,’ he reasoned to himself, philosophically, but not satisfactorily. ‘Rough with the smooth. Maybe I just have to accept that it is part of the emotional avoidance that so often comes with being a man of the generation that he belongs to.’

Like a giant oil beetle, they made their way up the valley, Carl as the head, Eric the thorax and Mel and Penny as the abdomen, the whole body never less than connected. Carl loved the ritual of these walks, which had become a traditional feature of any foraging expedition in an unfamiliar place - and in many familiar ones - for him and Eric. He had recorded and numbered all of them in his notebook. Mel had joined them for several. Not often did the trio add new members to their party but when they did, on days like today, Carl always welcomed it, despite the fact that it limited the potential for self-expression. He liked the young old lady from the tumultuous house, with her sharpened edges and lack of accent, and not simply because of the way she repeatedly flattered him about his appearance and instinctively knew the precise point behind his ears where he preferred to be touched. She had a bullshit-free aura about her, a lack of self-dramatisation and a nice colourful shoulder bag. He was struck by the certain knowledge that her own house was a smoothly functioning one, that she kept her sofas clean, always remembered to put the food waste out and prevent invasion by fruit flies. ‘Why can’t Eric find a woman like this, to be with?’ Carl wondered. ‘Is it me? Have I been in some way responsible, without ever meaning to, for preventing him finding a woman like this?’

   There was no need for Eric to consult the map, since Penny knew the best paths - including of unofficial ones - to their destination: a collection of three stones at the head of the valley that were sometimes referred to as The Siren And Her Daughters. Penny said the legend was that on every full moon, the Daughters, and sometimes the Siren, if she happened to be feeling expansive, got up and danced, but Penny had been up there during several full moons over the years and had never personally witnessed it.

   ‘Maybe people just haven’t been playing the right songs,’ said Eric.

   Four strangers, edging their way downhill, passed them as they climbed to the summit. Three of these strangers had a version of the same thought: ‘What I am seeing passing me is the New Older People, so different to the Older People of thirty or forty years earlier. They are the ones who flow with technology’s alterations without shrieking or resigning, who stay busy, who have not reserved their retirement bungalow in advance, who progress tidily up gradients in lively-minded trios, barely catching their breath on the way.’ The fourth stranger had no thoughts at all, but that was because he was a man called Damian who had just leased a car with a showy outlandishly manufactured steering wheel and he was lost in a reverie about how nice it would be to soon touch this steering wheel once again, a small near-erotic frenzy building inside him as, with every step, the prospect became more real. At the top of the hill, Carl was relieved to see that Eric only looked partially ragged. ‘Maybe,’ Carl thought. ‘That visibly frail person I saw upended below the hill fort yesterday, and outside our front gate a few weeks before, was an aberration.’

   He took the Siren and Mel and Penny took a Daughter each, everyone with their own stone to lean on save for Carl, who preferred the grass. There was something different about the earth here to the earth at home, something at once strange and familiar. Carl wanted to sink his hands into it. Maybe the desire indicated something more profound than he could yet fully parse. Or alternatively he just hadn’t done enough gardening recently, was feeling the urges that the true botanist feels as winter passes into its final stages.

   ‘I know Sirens are fond of rocks but aren’t they supposed to live closer to the sea than this?’ asked Mel.

   ‘I think the implication is perhaps that at the point when she was around this was the sea,’ said Penny.

   ‘It probably will be again, before long, the way everything is going,’ said Mel. ‘Ooh, don’t these puddles look oily.’

   ‘Hey,’ said Eric. ‘Did you know that it wasn’t until 1975 that olive oil was available to buy anywhere in the UK except chemists?’

   ‘Thief!’ thought Carl, furrowing his brow. The olive oil fact had been one he’d told Eric yesterday after reading it on a blog about the history of cooking.

   ‘Gosh, in my mind it was much earlier,’ said Penny. ‘But I know that for a long time it was only used for unblocking ears. He’s extraordinarily well-behaved off the lead, isn’t he. Does he never bark at all?’

   ‘Nah,’ said Eric. ‘It’s not his thing. He’s a philosopher, this one.’

   ‘You should count yourself lucky I don’t, right now, you rank fucking plagiarist,’ thought Carl.

   Mel and Eric, followed by Carl, walked to the far end of the plateau and tried to locate a 19th Century shipping tower on the coast, five miles distant. A low black chain of cloud was worrying its way towards them from the headland and Mel talked about the summer when she was small and her mum coated herself almost permanently in olive oil and vinegar, having heard from a neighbour it was the best sun protection. ‘She smelled appalling and got skin cancer numerous times in her sixties. On the other hand, she had the best tan in Wolverhampton.’ 

   Upon hearing a low moaning, the three of them spun abruptly around.

  ‘Oh, er, oh, oh, er… oh-h-h-.’

   The moaning carried implications of distress but had a diffident quality to it, as if was equal parts apology and cry for help. Penny was nowhere to be seen and their first impulse was to look with panic towards the steep gorse-decorated drop to their left where sharp rocks and forgotten half-trees jigsawed their way down to a blackly flooded chasm. It was Carl’s idea to look up instead and, as he did, Eric and Mel’s gaze followed, where they were greeted, with a small timid wave, by a horizontal Penny from six feet above head height, where she offered the awkward appearance of a woman who’d reluctantly agreed to recline on an invisible chaise longue.

   ‘Please don’t be alarmed,’ she said. ‘I’ll no doubt be down in a minute, no doubt. I’m sure it will all be fine.’

   ‘Shit,’ said Eric.

   ‘Oh gosh, shit,’ said Mel.

   ‘I am intrigued to know what happens next,’ thought Carl.

   Eric and Mel instinctively searched the barren hilltop for an unlikely soft object - a fully inflated lilo, or a thick blanket, or perhaps a parachute - but, finding nothing, all they could do was place faith in the reassurances offered by the now familiar voice speaking to them from this shallow heaven while, to its rear, the clouds rolled heinously in.