TIME'S DARK LAUGHTER

Granada paperback, 1983. Cover illustration by Richard Clifton-Dey.

"INTO THE MUTANT WORLD CAME THE BIRD-CHILD 

Five years have passed since Joshua Green the Scribe and Beauty the Centaur set out across the desert to find the creatures who had destroyed their homes and carried off their wives. 

But now Beauty's wife has willingly abandoned him for the pleasures of mind-link with the mysterious Pluggers. Worse, she has taken with her the helmet that protected Josh from the mental summons of the City With No Name. 

And so Beauty travels once more in search of his wife. And Josh's fifteen-year-old brother Ollie, who has conceived a bitter hatred for the vampires who enslaved him in one of their harems, sets off with the Neuroman Jasmine to rescue Josh. Soon they are engulfed in fantastic adventures in this riotously mutated future world with no use - and little room - for humankind..."

If the function of the rear-cover synopsis is to sell the book to the potential reader, this one didn't work and then it gave me a headache. In all fairness though, this is not the sort of material I'd ever read, and a cursory glance at the actual novel shows that it's not as silly as the bumf on the back makes it out to be. Regardless, it's inclusion here is guaranteed because of Richard Clifton-Dey's cover artwork.