D

octor Filippa is an experimental psychiatrist who ‘gets to the bottom of things’. Nova-Jean is her protege, a beautiful, ‘butterfly girl’ who comes to Wet City’s Fabrik Zone so The Doctor can help her discover why she has so many neo-fascist tendencies and why she has no motivation whatsoever to attend her undergaduate course at the city’s Kontskola Art Kollege. However will the Doctor instead discover more about herself through Nova-Jean’s extraordinary world-view and also about the ‘Fourth Parallel’, her own life’s work? Meanwhile the Good / Bad Doctor deals with a stream of suicidal addicts who are obsessed with the very ‘real-seeming’ story of The Monkey In The Tunnel which runs through Skabba Tor, an epic mountain in the city’s beating industrial heart.

In this compedium of linked stories artist and writer Russell Trotter Steedman draws upon his own experiences of overcoming and managing addiction to tell readers a series of highly imaginative, otherwordly tales directly infused with drug and alcohol-tinged debauchery, hallucinations, fun, shame, therapy and chronic personal insecurity in The Monkey In The Tunnel, the first volume of his Tales From The Fabrik Zone anthology.