Black Hole Bar

Simon, a traveller with time to kill, enters an inn on the outskirts of London. Inside he meets a motley crew competing to tell tales for their own amusement. So starts Dave Weaver's new novel, The Black Hole Bar, which has already been compared to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron. Simon is an industrial journalist, on his way to yet another off-world assignment, this time a three month trip to Saturn's moon Titan to write a promotional piece about the harvesting of the Methane lakes on that forbidding world. But Simon is a troubled man. He's sure his wife is having an affair during his prolonged absences; he's bored with his job; and unsure where his life is going. Simon has stumbled into what was supposed to be a closed session for the Black Hole Bar Writers' Group, who meet once a month to take part in a short story competition. Simon writes stories too and begrudgingly they let him participate. The stories begin, and Simon starts taking the competition far more seriously than he intended. Each of the bar's denizens tells two stories, variously strange, amusing and occasionally downright scary. The writers' own histories, lives crossed by tragedy and drama, come tumbling out one by one into the cramped little room and as they do so, we learn more about the background of this future world. A world which is at the same time recognisable as our possible future but also chilling in its recent past.