'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 Lockdown 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