The Slipkin Papers - a modern fantasy by Paul Morgan

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BEYEFAW

Eric Slipkin is not a superhero or master criminal. He is an ordinary young man living in London in the early 21st Century who generally prefers to just go with the flow. He does however have a job which is rather unusual. He works for an organisation called the Animal Rescue Service, run by a Mr Greenberg. His work involves rounding up exotic animals that have arrived mysteriously at the homes of clergymen and taking them to his contact Mr Redhead at London Zoo. Occasionally, in the middle of his animal collection duties, he gets an overwhelming compulsion to deliver cakes of all sorts to distant locations, including on one memorable occasion a cheesecake to the lower slopes of the Matterhorn. Other than that nothing much has ever happened to Slipkin, except for the time he was run over and the other occasion on which Mr Holyoak, his adoptive father, blew himself to pieces in his garden shed.

One day Slipkin has just retrieved a strangely cooperative penguin from the home of a vicar in Pimlico when he is compelled to head to Northern England, his little white Citroen car laden with seventy-five boxes of chocolate éclairs. He does not know exactly where he is going or who the cakes are for; he just drives. He will know the right place and the right person when he gets there. On a high and dark Cumbrian moorland road Slipkin has an unfortunate accident: his car skids and leaves the road.

What happens from that point on demonstrates to Slipkin why it is that, when asked to explain the nature of reality, Nobel Laureate physicists laugh and shake their heads. He takes a very surprising journey in his little white Citroen into a world where the living and the dead mingle together. There he meets not only present and deceased members of the British Royal Family but also such fellow dinner guests as John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and V. I. Lenin. This would be a disturbing enough turn events even if Adolf Hitler was not the butler.

Soon Slipkin, who has acquired a heart-bursting girlfriend, a huge fortune and some unexpected allies, including Winston Churchill and Laurel and Hardy, has to go on a journey through time and space in an effort to prevent Hitler from leaving domestic service and returning to the real world, even though Slipkin is no longer sure whether or not there is a real world to return to.