Several odd characters meet up in a grotty old London gym only to discover that their mutual pasts are intricately linked to Artek, an international Young Pioneer camp in Crimea, where an army of instructors and Party propagandists used to brainwash children into believing in a Communist Paradise on earth. Sim Golos, an eccentric Russian refugee in London, spent years of his abused Soviet childhood in Artek. Meanwhile, a dubious British businessman, Archibald Wren, appointed as Sim’s guardian, manipulates the lives and minds of Sim and his London friends. Making use of intimidation and blackmail, he is able to convince them all that they are potential victims of a sinister scientific experiment in which sound is being transformed into flesh. Zinik’s new comic novel incorporates a surreal Soviet family saga of abuse and corruption into the parallel world of modern London. It is a hot mixture of a Gothic horror story and an intellectual burlesque, of a political history and personal testimony.
Paperback