The Imaginary Corpse by Tyler Hayes

Tippy the triceratops is a detective at the Stuffed Animal Detective Agency. In fact he is the agency. Another world-weary private eye with a hip flask, battling his way through cases in the imaginary realms of the Stillreal. Another day, another Friend in need of his help. But wait - was that an actual death he just witnessed? An idea killed forever, never to return? This is an unprecedented situation for Tippy, but then this is an unprecedented book.

I bought this novel on a whim in the early days of lockdown, browsing the Angry Robot ebook sale. Noir starring a cuddly toy triceratops - it sounded mad enough to be bordering on genius, which turned out to be a fair assessment. Basically it's set in the Stillreal, a place populated by ideas that are so real as to have become embodied in a separate existence. Some of them are things like discarded novel ideas, which you'll be comfortable with if you've read Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, others are imaginary friends like Tippy and his pals in Playtime Town, or personified nightmares.

I should say at this point that if you're out and out cynical this book is not for you. Tyler Hayes himself calls it 'hopepunk' (like cyberpunk but fuzzy?). I like my hard-boiled detective stories, but I also like Paddington Bear. Tippy is a hard-boiled detective as imagined by an eight-year-old, so that hip flask is full of root beer, his wisecracks are pretty tame, and he feels physical pain if someone says even a mild swear-word nearby. At the same time, it's definitely not a children's book, there is trauma and deep sadness, tension and death, but also friendship and love and yes, hope. As Tippy might say, it will make you feel all the feels.

My only slight quibble I guess is the way Tippy worries about invading personal space, and asks everyone he meets for their preferred pronoun - to me that doesn't gel with either world-weary private eye or eight-year-old, but then I was eight in the 1980s and things have changed since then, so maybe I'm out of touch. The world and its rules seem so well thought out as to be complete, I had total confidence and belief in the Stillreal as a place as I was reading. It is the most inventive book I've read in a long time and I would love there to be a sequel. You can buy it direct from Angry Robot.

If I just helped you find your new favourite fantasy novel you can always buy me a cuppa at https://ko-fi.com/jysaville