I’ve been a bit rubbish at promoting The Lost Tribes since publishing it at the tail end of 2018. In hindsight, it was a bad choice for a second novel. It has none of the hooks of altruism or education which have garnered me good reception. Indeed, it’s a nasty book with no redeeming characters, and the central epic of the Ulster Cycle is purposely anti-academic, told through an unreliable berate-r narrator.
(For an actual sourced rendition of these legends, buy up Patrick Brown’s Cattle Raid of Cooley graphic novel.)
‘Spide’ is a slang term in popular usage in Northern Ireland referring to feckless male troublemakers, junkies and layabouts. Another variant is ‘steek’. In England the equivalent is ‘chav’, so I’m told. Spide’s roots come from 1970s Ulster paramilitaries, who wore spider tattoos on their necks, before becoming more casually used. (I suspect that word link muted one editor to compromising over a similarly branded but tangential work.)
The short novel is narrated by Dan Spide, who along with his sidekick Ape, is typical of those Irvine Welsh archetypes to be found on any low-rent council estate: swilling cheap lager; sexist; racist; horizons peaking with the next welfare cash or anticipated beating.
‘The Lost Tribes’ is a multi-fold extension, viewing the scoundrels’ own psychological turmoil in the wider culture of local authority figures with batshit insane philosophies. It’s a feature of N. Ireland’s political communications that a small vocal elite polices with literal Bible truths , Westboro Baptist ethics and tacitly endorsing paramilitary acts.
A subset of these subscribe to an Ulster-British concept where they self-identify as direct descendants of Israel’s lost tribe of Dan. Peter Robinson. Nelson McCausland. Edwin Poots. Never mind that the lost tribe of Dan has more biblical links to God’s banished, (necromancy, for one), these lead politicos and their advisors draw their family trees from Jeremiah and Jacob through Conchobar, Nuada and classical Irish myth. Stories where study tells of alteration to improve the fiction. The time displacement reeks.
I wanted to understand and show the perspectives of Dan and Ape and of these crazy rulers of the world. I’ve paired their ‘truths’ with the train route between Northern and Southern Ireland , making for a sort of psycho’s geography. It’s stories within stories, a slow build into an Indiana Jones romp, if Indy was a paranoid xenophobe. I’ve read their literature. The sources make for the most un-credible conspiracy theories.
andy-luke.com 
Hello Andy,
I hope everything is going well. It’s been a while since the Audio Guide to B5 ended (and there’s no sign of Crusade podcasts starting up), and it occurred to me that as a result I hadn’t heard from you in a long time. So I thought I might as well comment here and say “Hello.”
Voord 99 (you know, the one with Opinions on Babylon 5).
Voord 99, a pleasure to here from you with your Opinions, always a highlight. I’ve been checking in to B5AG the odd time and watching the Babble for Five videocasts on the Youtube. (Their hourly season wrap, in this case SE4, should be along in a week or two) There’d be no chance of us doing a Crusadecast, would there? I’ve only ever seen two episodes of Crusade (newbie part of formula ✓ ), and was thinking a lot about doing some sort of podcast recently.
I’d certainly be up for a Crusade podcast in principle, although (as you can probably tell from how long it took me to get round to replying, I don’t know that I could maintain a very frequent schedule). We could discuss it over email if you were interested.
Slowest response times ever! Drop me a line on drew dot luke at gmail dotcom