MANDY, CHARLIE & MARY-JANE BY STEWART HOME
Penny-Ante Editions $18.95 . 26 February 2013. ISBN 978-0985508531

Charlie Templeton, his wife Mandy, and student mistress Mary-Jane Millford survived the London terrorist bombings of 7/7, but history has yet to be made. To save the future of western civilization, Charlie, a schizoid cultural studies lecturer with a penchant for horror films and necrophilia, must fight the zombies of university bureaucracy and summon the will to become the last in a long line of mad prophets announcing the end of art.

"Notwithstanding the appearance of several of Home's trademark riffs, for a good long while it looks as though Home is going to disregard his own disregard for the conventions of polite fiction and actually write something that looks like a satirical novel... Home sets about his prey with extraordinary glee. The dialogue between the lecturer and his students is extraordinarily funny – in fact, there are chunks of this book that count as the best contemporary comic writing I've come across since Howard Jacobson." Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian.

"Of course, it’s a masterpiece. Throughout there’s a process of shedding the scales of his insides in an act of hilarious, up-beat and hay-making desquamation. The names dropped are the pieces of wood pulp that he turns into the paper, the fine particles that end up as the final word. And if ‘Zombie Sex Freaks’ doesn't curl your hair some, then a) you need to check your pulse and b) go away. Home’s writing is the sexiest around." Richard Marshall, 3AM Magazine.

"Stewart Home’s latest novel, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane, is a brilliant satire on academia that begins simply enough then slowly devolves into a blood bath…" Michael Roth, Opsonic Index.

"The simplicity of the prose in Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane belies the book’s theoretical complexity and the multi-layered functions. It was, of course, ever thus in Home’s work. While he has often taken an idea and run it into the ground over the course of a novel,  Mandy, Charlie and Mary Jane proves that Home is, if anything, growing more ambitious and more sharp in his  dismantlement of contemporary culture, and stands as a veritable explosion of ideas. As contemporary fiction continues to slide evermore into formulaic banality, Home’s writing seems more essential than ever." Edward S. Robinson, Paraphilia Magazine.

"Stewart’s Home’s new book, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane, follows Charlie Templeton, a crack-smoking and possibly schizophrenic lecturer in cultural studies at City University of Newcastle on Tyne (CUNT). Between conducting rubbish seminars on Cannibal Holocaust and the Beverly Hillbillies, Charlie finds time to make love to his sleeping wife (Mandy) and unconscious mistress (Mary-Jane), bungle numerous attempts at date rape, put down a local terrorist cell, and expel the only student in his department insolent enough to complete assignments on time." Eugenie Kraftte, Richardson Magazine.

"The works of Stewart Home are often morally devoid. This isn't something the author particularly aspires towards, they’re just by-products of the avant filters he applies to his art." Benjamin Lovegrove, Glass Magazine.

"The word anti-novel is always used when a novel by Home is reviewed, talked about, considered, analysed (and he is reviewed in erudite journals and newspapers; the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the New Statesman to name a few, he must be famous, egotistical notoriety is probable his second name, his not intrinsic nature). But what is the anti-novel? It is a question that is vexing…. So what is the message, unless one casts the book aside after the first page, but then the message has already sunk in (literally), this reader is already the zombie that Home describes, the living dead reading to pass the time, reading because a good story satiates limitation, for this reader there is no message, this reader is the message? And if one does not cast it aside, one ponders and thinks, what one finds is that the anti-novel is an insolent challenge to everything that one knows; a work filled with plagiarism and appropriation, it flouts a society that cherishes the notion of individuality and originality…" Barbara Adair, Sensitive Skin Magazine.

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