Oy Rodney cover art – Lee Duigon

The terrible tale of the Kentucky Fried romance novel | The Delve

[Editor’s Note: Ms. Violet Crepuscular is mad at me for switching over to this book cover to illustrate the latest installment of Oy, Rodney. Well, confound it, I can’t find the regular cover anymore! This one will have to do. It’s very much in the spirit of the thing.]

Introducing Chapter CDXXII of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Violet Crepuscular reminds the reader that Queen Victoria is about to elope to Abilene, Kansas, with Willis Twombley, the American adventurer who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad. Word of this has reached Lady Margo Cargo and threatened her impeding nuptials with Lord Jeremy Coldsore–she thinks he and Twombley are the same person and resents her fiancee cheating on her with the Queen of England.

In desperation–and you have to be really desperate to do this–Lord Jeremy turns to Constable Chumley. “Please see what you can do to salvage this mess!” vocalizes Lord Jeremy. The constable replies, “Aye, thar forthin yon cusster, M’lord!”

Making an appointment to confer privately with Lady Margo, Chumley explains to her: “Favvin’ yoster me kippens, Lady me Lad, ye netter by swelvin’ a quarn?” She gives her enthusiastic consent to this proposal. With this to sustain him, the constable arrests Twombley and forces him to bathe in the ice-cold duck pond in Scurveyshire Common. Passersby are appalled.

But just as the constable hoped, this does the trick! Twombley is practically killed with cold by the time Chumley allows him to come out of the water. Passersby turn away, unable to bear the sight.

“Well, that’s froze the romance right out of me!” truncates the American. “Now I wonder what I ever saw in that there queen of yours! But you’re lucky I didn’t shoot you, ol’ hoss.”

“Mizzen yair frocken, sir!” says Chumley. Willis sighs deeply. “One cannot but agree!” he concedes.

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Ms. Violet Crepuscular has taken time out from grinding out chapters of her epic romance novel, Oy, Rodney, to say a few words about that Lord of the Tube Socks cover that she’s been using for… well, years now.

“I chose it originally, dear reader, because the couple featured on the cover were an exact match for how I imagine my two principal characters, Lord Jeremy Coldsore and Lady Margo Cargo,” Violet writes. “Some readers have complained. Tish-tush to them! There are only a few trifling differences between my characters and the cover picture.

“For one thing, Lord Jeremy now has two left feet. This militates against his agility as a ballroom dancer. Other than that, the picture is an exact duplicate.

“The real Lady Margo, it must be admitted, is some thirty years older than the lass on the book cover–with an upholstered wooden leg, a glass eye, and a wig that sometimes is hard to keep straight. She is also missing the hand that was chewed off by a goat, years ago. But aside from these petty details, the cover character looks just like her, pretty much.”

At this point she is interrupted: Dr. Fantod, the life-coaching jumping spider from Rotnest Island, has absent-mindedly wandered into Oy Rodney, intending to provide good advice to whoever needs it. Violet is terrified of spiders and can’t control herself, and Dr. Fantod is lucky to escape uninjured as she flails at him wildly with a rolled-up newspaper. We are not told which newspaper.

Ms Crepuscular objects. “I will not have spiders creeping into my novel from some wretched little island in Australia!” she writes. But it appears she has altogether lost her train of thought. This is a grievous loss to her readers.