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Comedy writing presents a challenge of a complex order in that one has to constantly trip up one’s creations − an obligation that may subvert the storyline. That humour gains efficacy from a deep knowledge of our dreads and vanities, Rosemary Sigel demonstrates with élan in her story of Dorcas Bourne − a young woman who is as fat, sad and devoid of friends as her sister, Titania, is slim, beautiful and popular. Dorcas’s fortune literally changes when she wins the lottery and buys a cottage deep in Wychwood where there are pythons, unicorns, elves, witches and wizards. Soon she learns dark magic is afoot, for an ancient witch is seeking her successor and Dorcas is the chosen one!

In case you imagine you’ve sampled occultural winks and giggles before, let me say that Mother Red Cap's Cottage has outstanding merits, deriving from an ebullient observational faculty allied to a familiarity with every brand and strain of popular paganism, green, black and muddy, each being treated with the same jaunty offhandedness. Sigel knows her West Country, especially the Glastonbury-Frome region, with its sludgy vowels and baffled expletives, and invokes her elves and otherworldly creatures in a credibly rusticised way, so that they emerge as eccentrics and obsessives in their own right rather than wraiths and figments of a high-octane imagination:

“Alf!” screamed the Alf reading Dorcas’s mind once more, “Not a ficky elf, me an Alf! Elfs is nasty, Elfs is rude, Elfs be stupid. Alfs be as smart as paint.”

Only in fairyland could one find one’s dream, only in fairyland could one eat until one bust and stay a size eight.

Titania had received so many [Valentines] that the post office reserved a special sack for her, crammed with risqué rhymes from zit-covered youths.

These extracts − from a sustained feat of comic prose − in many ways do a disservice. The finest effects arise out of the orchestrated narrative rather than momentary felicities. But I hope they will inform the disciples of Terry Pratchett and J.K. Rowley of the debut of an equally gifted rival.

The Genesis of MOTHER RED CAPS COTTAGE lies deep in the West country of England. Around the small country town of Glastonbury lies the mythic Zodiac, and, like a leviathen from the mighty deep looms Glastonbury Tor. four square against the elements, a pointing finger against the diffused watery clouds that enshroud the damp Somersetshire wetlands. Glastonbury, the birthplace of Celtic Christianity and some say the epicentre for that which mystics call 'the Matter of Britain'. Some say Glastonbury is the omphalos of the western world and others a gaudy harlot peddling cheap fairings to the cracked brained loons that foregather like moths to its dark flame.

I grew up under the eye of the Tor. It has haunted me, its spectral shadow even casting its shade over the Irish Sea to Southern Ireland where I now live. My father was Vicar of witch haunted Wookey Hole. As a child I would beat my way through bramble and elder into the deep wildwood that was Wookey Hole Gorge. Here, one hot summer evening I stumbled upon the entrance to a cave, the pungent scent of frankincense lingering in the still air. On the swept earthen floor lay sticks and bones laid out in a pattern, archaic symbols, and the burnt stumps of wax candles. I fled. Many years later I discovered that this part of the Mendip Hills played host to a strange sect of witches, The Clan of Tuba Cain, who claimed decent from The Watchers, the Fallen angels of the Bible and The Book Of Enoch. They Claim that they have the Mark of Cain imprinted on their brow and are a special creation. They honour Lucifer as the Indwelling Mechanism of Humanity, and consider themselves the top of the witch heap, as are the 'inner elite' of all occult orders going back to ancient Egypt who have had this arcane truth revealed.

Well, I go to the bottom of our stairs!. Can this be so?.

After vacationing in the Land of Occult for many years with a particular interest in both revivalist modern witchcraft and its speculative ancient lineage, I decided that we all took our selves far far too seriously. I found little on book shelves other than non fiction. Terry Pratchett of course, but, to my knowledge no one was writing from an overtly Pagan perspective about angels and Lucifer and witches with a happy spin. H.P.Lovecraft had once surfed the chthonic deep and conjured up the horrors of the primaeval Old Ones from their aeon-haunted slumbers, but, H.P did not exactly make one fall off one's perch with mirth. So I decided to contrive a word of witches, a word without constraint, fantastic, but based on sound modern Pagan thinking.

The first book MOTHER RED CAP'S COTTAGE is set in Wychwood, to the south west of Glastonbury. Here, very much in the vein of the now mainly discounted thesis of the anthropologist Margaret Murry, is a place of ancestral witches. Witches have lived in Witchwood under a black moon since old Noah left his arc atop Glastonbury Tor. All will be well with the outer world as long as Old Mother Red Cap Lives deep in the wildwood drinking moonshine, puffing on her pipe of wychweed and singing rude songs.

Of course the balance of the universe is put in jeopardy. A particularly repellent priapic black magician, Cernunnous Horn and his side kick Mother Earth, (a flame haired titan with enormous bosoms) buy Wychwood Manor and seek to steal the Wych jewels, forged from the dense light of the black moon, sister to our own, long sequestered beyond the north star. All sorts of rural perigranations ensue, a midsummer nights dream becomesa midsumer nightmare.

Book two, WYCHWOOD, and book three GLASTONBURY will deal with the nazi occult and the search for the lost emerald from the crown of Lucifer respectivly. Both books packed with rustics, thirty foot pythons that smoke cheroots, mad necromancers, defrocked priests, new age crystal danglers, unutterable wickedness and the meaning of life.

And if you think that cast of characters a rum lot let me remind you that not long ago I read in a newspaper that King Arthur had been arrested on the perimeter of Glastonbury. King Arthur, who changed his name by deed poll to Arthur Pendragon is a Glastonbury eco‑warrior, druid and renowned quaffer. He was aprehended by our boys in blue digging up the road with a pneumatic drill just outside the safeways superstore. Upon his arrest he told the police that the specific spot that he was drilling was at the confluence of major ley lines, under which was the Holy Grail. I raise a glass to him. Give that man a coconut!.