Ruby and the Stone Age Diet by Martin MillarSoft Skull Press, 2010 (originally Fourth Estate, 1989)

I hadn’t read anything by Martin Millar before, but picked this book up because the cover was well-designed and because everyone seems to love Lonely Werewolf Girl. But once I started reading, I wasn’t sure I’d keep going. Here’s the first two sentences: “Living in Battersea I one day arrived home in the early morning and found a corpse, it was the body of a girl who has been around for a short while, I didn’t really know her. She spent her time with the heroin users up the road” (p 1). That first sentence makes me want to grind my teeth, and the rest of the first page isn’t much better. Our narrator’s style is odd and choppy, and he immediately seems a bit off, a bit unable to fend for himself, and not in a way that made me particularly excited to find out more about him. Of Ruby, meanwhile, we learn on the first page that she is friends with the narrator and never wears shoes. She also says that two raindrops that have fallen on the dead girl’s face like tears are “hugely symbolic” (ibid.). I realize I’m not necessarily supposed to like these characters, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around them for the next 152 pages.

But, well, it’s only 152 pages. So I kept reading. I liked this, the narrator walking home ’cause he’s got no money for a bus: “The pavement is strewn with crushed glass. It sparkles under the streetlamps. The notion enters my head that it is a design put there for me to enjoy and I say thank you for making such a pleasing design to entertain me when I am walking feverish along the pavement” (p 3). But then Ruby slips some acid in the narrator’s tea after his girlfriend breaks up with him (or says she does, anyhow), and he hallucinates robbers at the post office, and Ruby writes lonely-werewolf-girl stories, and I thought maybe I should put the book down after all, though Ruby’s stories were kind of pleasing, so I didn’t. And as I kept reading, the narrator and his fecklessness did start to grow on me. I liked when he and Ruby think maybe they’ll become Buddhists but end up at the wrong temple, and I liked how he always seems to be making cups of tea, and I liked how Ruby always asks if he wants to hear a story and then always says, “Sit down comfortably, then,” and I didn’t even mind how outrageously unreliable the narrator is—how he’s always seeing gods everywhere, and how, by the end of the book, you don’t quite know if the narrator’s made Ruby up, or vice versa, or neither.