Cowboys, soldiers, drag queens, fantasy, reality, delusion, self delusion - sometimes they all come together... Two novellas published together in one paperback. Novella 1. Sudden Redux! Middlemarch in the Wild West. In WWII.In the 1930s and 1940s an Englishman called Oliver Strange wrote many novels about a cowboy named Sudden that were set in the Wild West. Oliver Strange had never set foot outside of England. So his knowledge of the West can only have been based on the pulp cowboy fiction of Zane Grey and the hundreds of Western B-movies that poured out of Hollywood at the time. That much is true. This novel, Sudden Redux! imagines what a weird man Strange must have been, and how extraordinary it would have been when real Americans flooded into England during WW2. These soldiers would have been only a generation or two removed from the Wild West, would have come from places like Arizona and, culturally, have been actual cowboys. The novel explores the fallout from the collision of the fantasy that sustained him for years - both on himself and the people close to him, who were suddenly able to see through his delusions. To complete the picture, we can see clearly strong elements of his motivations and fantasies that would have been completely invisible to him but obvious to a modern eye - in the vernacular of the West, he was as queer as a two-headed mule and just as ornery! The novel contains within it, unfolding in segments, another Sudden novel that Strange is writing. Much of that material is actually plagiarised from the real novel Sudden Strikes Back. A small amount of material I plagiarised from Zane Grey. I had intended to steal a lot more, but reading it alongside the work of Oliver Strange made me realise it is very good! Good writing, interesting plots and character development: I now share Tarantino's respect for Pulp Fiction.Novella 2. My Parents Named Me Darren. This is a very dark comedy with a feel-good ending. Darren is a young man who lives in a