Newcomers who wonder what Hooting Yard is all about would do well to hike over to a postage at The Inexplicable World Of Outa_Spaceman, which contains as succinct a summary of Mr Key’s work as one is ever likely to find:

Not to read Hooting Yard is to isolate one’s self from a world of heroic infants rubbing shoulders with tug boat captains, extravagantly bouffanted composers drinking and fighting in seedy dockside taverns, Jesuit priests lurking in kiosks on abandoned seaside piers, bat gods haunting abandoned potato research stations, huge grunting ogres drinking from cisterns in horrible caves, and where diktats are being issued to Community Learning Hubs by suburban shamans.

Mr Outa_Spaceman also captures perfectly the character of the out of print pamphleteer Dobson,

trudging about on canal tow paths, wearing the surplus boots of an obscure army, trying to make sense of a lopsided world by composing mimeographed pamphlets that nobody read.

Many thanks to him for such a clear-eyed view of these important matters.