Diary Of A Mosquito Abatement Man back

For ten years, from 1989 to 1999, John worked as a mosquito abatement man. Sometimes it would be driving very slowly to spray low-level insecticide into the night sky, sometimes going out to the ditches to find the eggs and bombarding the site with nasty stuff. It must have seemed like an endless task and it makes me think of a Laurel & Hardy short where Stan's trying to put out a raging fire by throwing a tincup of water over it. here'll always be more. Don't insects outnumber us by thousands to one?

This collects all the relevant stories from KING CAT COMICS & STORIES and includes thirty pages of new material and a five-page introduction, and there's so much good stuff it's difficult to pick out my favourite piece. '24 Hours' from 1990 has John, driving and spraying, looking in through the windows of the houses as he goes by. There's a girl doing homework, their eyes meet and there's a brief connection. It's the little details that he notices, like in the dense pipework on the chemical plant he sees someone in a chem-suit riding by on a bicycle. An eerie sight amidst the quiet, floodlit night. At the end of that piece the panels fill up with pipes and his van disappears, eaten up by the construction.

Eventually, his convictions force him to leave the job. He can't face the poisoning and the destruction. The first and last chapters are perfectly placed. It starts with John attacked by the elements, scratched and muddied in the rain. The ending is pure Porcellino magic. Down a dark, country lane an owl flies low over the bonnet of the truck, keeping pace with him before swooping up to the branch of a tree.

KING CAT, to be fair, is one of my favourite reads. Some things will be put to one side for when I've got the time, but KC has to be read as soon as I get it. His compositions are near-perfect, the lines simple and clean.