Normal Rules Don't Apply 

Kate Atkinson

(Doubleday, £14.99)

Coming 20 years after Atkinson’s last short story collection, Normal Rules Don’t Apply mashes up the mythical and the mundane with a zest and mischief that might not see it racking up heavyweight literary awards, but carries it along at a lively pace.

These eleven interwoven tales begin at the end of the world, or something close to it, with the descent of “The Void”, a state in which the whole world goes completely dark for five minutes, after which anyone unlucky enough to have been outdoors at the time is dead.

A momentous happening seen from the perspective of an old widower spending the morning with his dog, and of his granddaughter shopping in Waitrose, it sets the tone of making uncanny events feel intimate and close at hand.

The main recurring element is Franklin Fletcher, 38-year-old producer of the TV soap Green Acres and a hopeless gambler. We get to know him quite well over the course of the book: his parents and their “fast and trashy” crowd; the stepfather wanted for fraud on four continents who left his clothes on the Windermere shore, never to be seen again. Outside his TV career, Franklin is leading an aimless existence. But he is at least given a racing tip by a talking horse – as, it turns out, have several others.

Normal Rules Don’t Apply is largely populated by unfulfilled people like Franklin who have brushes with the miraculous, or figures with a mythic status who find themselves grappling with the everyday world. Mandy is a bit of both. Having given up her youth to be an MP’s secretary at 17, and also regretting not setting her marital sights higher, she returns from the hereafter to find out the truth about her death.

Pamela, a retired Church of England school teacher, has troubled relations with her adult children and is struggling with divorce and retirement, but becomes convinced she’s bearing an immaculate conception. In “Gene-sis”, God’s sister, Kitty has to take responsibility for all creation when her slobbish brother throws in the towel, and finds tweaking and recreating the world plays havoc with her Earthly job of running an advertising campaign for smoothies.

“Existential Marginalization”, a distant relative of Toy Story, zooms in on the weary life of toys under the yoke of a tyrannical child, while the fairy tale “Spellbound” recounts a childless queen’s visit to a wise woman in a bid to get pregnant, the story being told by a folklorist academic to her daughter, an intense teenager disgusted by her mother’s fecundity. When myth and reality blur, the scene is set for a wicked denouement.

Despite a visit to the set of Green Acres and a callback to the Void, “Puppies and Rainbows” is the most awkward fit for this collection, a riff on Harry and Meghan in which an actress, self-medicating her way through gruelling film schedules, gets involved with a royal prince. It’s the idea Atkinson seems least inspired by, and wraps itself up in a way that’s noticeably less satisfying than the others.

The Void being such a massive, Thanos-level event, restricting it to a standalone story or making it the backdrop to all of them might have been better options, as making the occasional reference feels like a half-measure.

That said, the book’s cosiness, its moments of unrepentant daftness, its refusal to be anything weightier or more profound than it actually is and Atkinson’s evident enjoyment in writing it are hallmarks of a book that will no doubt prove to be a guilty pleasure for many.