‘Why live in the real world? I mean, you know, shit, if you’re moderately affluent — and let’s face it, guys, nearly everyone is these days — and like nearly everyone else you live out in the ’burbs with a big TV and a nice car, why should you have to deal with all the unhappiness, the trouble, the whole dirty mess that lurks out there, just beyond your Hills Hoist? Let someone else deal with that — I’m going to show you something infinitely cooler.’
—Delaney Miscamble, inventor and CEO of Rat Race, Inc.
‘I’ve been famous for so long I can’t tell light from lightning’
—Amanda Benton, recently vanished winner of the Rat Race.
In the front room of a modest terrace house in one of the leafier corners of North Carlton a tall, gorgeous historian is preparing for his 3,000th consecutive quiet night in, a new personal best. As he drops the needle onto his favourite piece of Mozart and settles into the historian-shaped groove in his chaise-longue, he considers the sublime satisfaction of leading such a pleasant, solitary life.
There is no way for him to know that in fifteen minutes his best friend Completely Trevor is going to return home ten years after popping out for fish and chips and utterly ruin it. He has not answered to the name Banger in ten years, but he is about to.
Before he can confirm the coroner’s finding of ‘dead, or very reluctant to pick up his battered flake and three dim sims’, Banger finds himself helping CT to infiltrate the world’s most suspiciously powerful reality TV show, the Rat Race, with only the assistance of several hastily consumed drinks, Banger’s subterranean tenant and a team of crack conspiracy theorists in plastic trousers who are determined to fight the future, just as long as they get to meet aliens.
Banger, of course, is much too sensible for all of this and would be content for the future to look after itself, if he hadn’t just spotted Amanda, the beautiful Rat Race Champion who has chosen the worst possible moment to decide she doesn’t want to be world famous. Suddenly, Banger doesn’t want to be a lonely hermit anymore. He wants to be a hermit with company.
Which would all be simple enough, except that the terrible truth behind the Rat Race appears to rest deep in the mind of a frail and peculiar old man who believes the dust bunnies under his bed are waking him up at night to tell him frightening secrets and also offer him unbeatable deals on pizza and mobile phone ring tones.
From North Carlton to San Francisco, from the world’s richest megalomaniac to a small plastic frog, from reality to television, Banger falls ever deeper into a world where imagined danger is dressed up to look real and a terribly real danger lurks in the shadows of the sponsors’ billboards.
Meet the characters!
