Snow Bees

Rob Goddard knew he shouldn't be travelling during a national lockdown, but it was Xmas and he headed West to see his family anyway. At Waterloo, the train seemed completely empty; perhaps it was, but an exploratory walk revealed at least four other passengers. All dead. They were ghosts. People he'd known; people who had died far too young. At first a convivial reunion, the journey's mood changed when four more travellers embarked, mutating further when two of them hatched into enormous dragonflies, meganeura, extinct for hundreds of millions of years. Rob, a poet, was reminded of the dragonflies that 'draw flame' in Gerard Manley Hopkins' famous sonnet. But these angelic giants possessed many different powers. Also, ominously, it had begun to snow heavily. 'Snow Bees' is an apocalyptic novel with a difference, a roller coaster to the end of the night, a story in which hilarity rubs shoulders with death, and poetry rescues memory: a world apparently charging headlong towards oblivion in the plot of heaven. "In 'Snow Bees', John Muckle has given us an afterlife that feels both inevitable and surprising, one that is a strange awakening to what was already there: old memories, old friends, the nightmare of history from which even death can't wake us, the self with its indelible grudges and regrets and loves. Muckle's prose is linguistically wide-awake even as it traverses the white landscape of dream, and he creates a world so complex and various there seems to be more time and space inside the novel than outside. A stunning achievement." -Sandra Newman