Chuckle Stop!

In chapter 8 of his novel Thinks, David Lodge does some amusing parodies of various novelists writing as if they were bats. Here are a few representative extracts:

Martin Amis (freetail bat)
Well, we hang out a lot during the day. We hang out in caves, crevices, under eaves, inside roofs, anywhere that's dark and warm. Caves are favourite. We hang from the ceiling and crap on the floor, only it seems like we're hanging from the floor and crapping from the ceiling because we're upside down. Crapping when you're upside down is an art. The crap generates heat as it decomposes; also, of course, a smell. . . .

Irvine Welsh (vampire bat)
We goat back to the auld cave aboot the same time, Gamps n me, jist iz the sun wis rizin. Scotty wis back already, hangin from the ceiling feelin sorry for hisself. Ah hud goat ma fix from one ay they Highland bullocks that feel like shagpile rugs on legs, n Gamps hud foond a sheep wi its throat torn oot by a fox, the jammy cunt, but Scotty had goat fuckall. . . .

Salman Rushdie (temple bat)
Myself, I am a temple bat. I belong to a colony inhabiting the Surya Deula temple at Konorak, on the Bay of Bengal. How I come to be hanging from the coat hook of a toilet in the first-class cabin of the Air India jumbo jet is a long story, involving a tourist's camera-case, an errant sleeping tablet, and a faulty X-ray machine. The camera-case was carelessly left open and empty on the pedestal of one of the carved columns of the Surya Deula last Wednesday evening, that dusky time when we temple bats emerge from our nooks and crannies in the crumbling sandstone and sift the warm silky air for tasty midges, crunchy mosquitoes, juicy fruitflies and other entomological dainties . . . The bats' Happy Hour, you might say.

Samuel Beckett (blind bat)
Where? When? Why? Squeak. I am in the dark. I am always in the dark. It was not always so. Once there were periods of light, or shades of darkness. Squeak. There would be a faint luminosity from the mouth of the cave. When it faded I knew it would be time to leave the cave, with the others, to go flittering through the dusk. Squeak. Now it is always dark, uniformly dark. Whether at any given moment it is dark outside my head as well as inside, I do not know. All I know, if know is the word, and it is not, is that I can see nothing. Squeak. . . .

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