Blurb

The countdown to the millennium has begun, and people are losing their heads. A so-called Y2K expert gives a presentation to Scotland’s eccentric Tech Laird T.S. Mole’s entourage in Edinburgh, and soon long hours, days, weeks and months fill with seemingly chaotic and frantic work on the ‘bug problem’. Soon enough it’ll be just minutes and seconds to go to midnight. Is the world about to end, or will everyone just wake up the next day with the same old New Year’s Day hangover?

A book about what we know and don’t know, about how we communicate and fail to, My Book of Revelations moves from historical revelations to the personal, and climaxes in the bang and flare of fireworks, exploding myths and offering a glimpse of a scandal that will rock Scotland into the twenty-first century. As embers fall silently to earth, all that is left to say is: Are we working in the early days of a better nation?

Review

Huge thanks to the lovely Will at Renard Press for my spot on the blog tour and for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. This is my third ‘Book book’ experience with Iain Hood, having also read and reviewed This Good Book and Every Trick in the Book, and it is such a joy to be back in his weird and wonderful imagination. You never know where he is going to take you, so you just buckle up and enjoy the ride.

My Book of Revelations opens with a history of the Gregorian calendar and plenty of fascinating facts about time, dates and countdowns. There’s an exuberance to this section that reminded me of Bill Bryson’s brilliant book A Short History of Nearly Everything – the curiosity and desire to know EVERYTHING, making the facts and figures leap off the page, as well as the gently sparkling humour, feels very Bryson-esque. The titbit about Kiribati jumping the International Date Line is just the sort of thing I love to read about, and there are many other treasures besides.

I love the strange way that time behaves in this book, looping and pausing as our narrator inches us closer to the new millennium, and the way the suspended moments allow for a detailed examination of the characters around him, including cameos from Muriel Spark, Jean Cocteau (with a Scottish accent, naturally) along with characters from Hood’s own previous works. Our obsession with countdowns, with the apocalypse, and with our own doom is cleverly explored, and the reference to ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ brought back a memory of my own millennium eve experience, when my friend and I were stumbling home down a country lane, and out of the mist the Grim Reaper appeared, waving his scythe. “Please tell me you see that too.” Luckily it was just another reveller on their way home. (Or was it?)

The narrator, who isn’t quite the expert he seems to be at first, is another great literary creation from Hood – I loved the titles of the short stories he is (not) writing, and at times his stream-of-consciousness style put me in mind of Ducks, Newburyport (albeit with a few more full stops). The whole book is stuffed with references to literature, science, film, TV, music, politics – it’s as if the creator of Trivial Pursuit had written a novel. I always think the dream is to write a book which, when someone asks you what it’s about, you can airily say ‘Oh, everything’ – Hood has pretty much achieved that here. This kind of playful experimentalism is, as I have said before, exactly why we need indie presses who champion writers like Hood. He has produced yet another startlingly good book.

About the Author

Iain Hood was born in Glasgow and grew up in the seaside town of Ayr. He attended the University of Glasgow and Jordanhill College, and later worked in education in Glasgow and the West Country. He attended the University of Manchester after moving to Cambridge, where he continues to live with his wife and daughter. His first novel, This Good Book, was published in 2021, followed by Every Trick in the Book in 2022.

My Book of Revelations by Iain Hood is published by Renard Press and is available to purchase here.