Goddess Lens, The

'If the Celts have nine gods of eloquence, then Pascal O’Loughlin’s voice in his second novel The Goddess Lens exhibits them all. Pop the goddess lens into your eye for a fabulous postmodern trip that makes itself as it’s unmade. There you will be woven into the creative despair, profound insight and helpless joy of a mind on fire.

The Goddess Lens shares its protagonist between Pascal, a fat, Irish, gay novelist and Christine, a lesbian private investigator, both seeking succour from feminine energies—creative, sexual, maternal—pick one, or them all. The novelist, fidgety with doubt and a ‘horror of toil’ consults his ex, Nigel, for editing advice on Christine’s tale, which shifts dizzyingly from her childhood in an orphanage to a lesbian squat, via alien craft harbouring “a green slime of countless genders.” Then comes Covid to thicken the dystopia.

O’Loughlin’s imagination is agile, nay aerobic, ensorcelling the reader into a maniacal universe—guarded by a woman named Appetite—which worships spider plants and waits to be restarted by a female deity. But will Pascal be compensated for homophobic abuse by the Catholic Church? “I don’t actually have a real life,” he says. “I live in this story. The story wants to infect the world.” ' – Cherry Smyth, author of Famished and My Animal, My Age