What is this then?

Scrungle Bungus and the Magic Fungus is the debut novel of renowned satirist M.K.R. Lambert — a fantasy epic about roadworks, Brexit, and Donald Trump (yes, really). 

In the mystical realm of Plom, Scrungle Bungus lives in a tree, commuting via the levitating huba mushroom that whisks him in and out like a fungal Uber. Life is idyllic until, one fateful morning, Scrungle discovers his supply of magic mushrooms has run dry. Desperate, he embarks on a quest to restock. 

Along the way, he meets the Knights of Colour — a chivalric order more invested in personal branding than rescuing a missing princess — who point him toward Plombree City’s Sorcerers’ Collective Society (SCS), currently running a sale.

Joined by Peetles, a loyal companion he rescues from a pack of wolves with questionable mental capacity, Scrungle stumbles into a world of trolls inexplicably guarding bridges, roadworks that never end, political intrigue, civic chaos, and the infamous Hills of Badly Designed Signs. 

Their adventure leads them to a castle tour gone wrong, where they overhear Chancellor Gumptrude and Baroness Bakeeasy plotting to overthrow the king and Princess Isobella. 

Witty, surreal, and alarmingly relevant, Scrungle Bungus and the Magic Fungus is a razor-sharp satire of modern absurdity — proof that sometimes the most ridiculous worlds are barely fiction at all.

★★★★★ A Masterwork of Magnificent Nonsense
Book Review Fantasy & Satire The Literary Dispatch

Scrungle Bungus and the Magic Fungus arrives like a barbershop badger quartet drifting through the woods at midnight — wholly unexpected, oddly soothing, and impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t there.

Our hero is a seven-foot, mouthless, telepathic fungivore who lives in a tree that smells of shoe polish and Thursday afternoons, and who communicates with donkeys about watercolours. He sets off on a quest to find magic floating mushrooms because he’s run out of them and can’t get back into his house. What follows is essentially a picaresque political satire disguised as a fairy tale, which somehow works better than it has any right to.

The worldbuilding is deranged in the best possible way. The kingdom of Plombree is governed by a bluish buffoon called Gumptrude — a man who believes his fingers are “long and beautiful” and that windmills cause cancer — propped up by a Baroness with what the author diplomatically describes as “weaponised cleavage.”

The Brexit parallels are about as subtle as a flag pretending to be a stone on the King’s Road, which is to say they are everywhere, and they are glorious.

Peetles — an egg-shaped creature of uncertain origin who once watched a cloud shaped like a cloud and considered it a worthwhile observation — is the finest sidekick in recent fantasy fiction. Magnificently useless in a crisis, catastrophically bad at riddles, and utterly indispensable, Peetles manages to save the day repeatedly by accident, which feels like a profound statement about something.

The prose oscillates between genuine warmth and weaponised absurdism. One moment you’re reading about a piece of toast falling butter-side-down in slow motion; the next, something unexpectedly touching happens involving a hat stand whittled from a tree branch that once knocked a woman unconscious. The book has a heart the size of the Chana tree itself, buried under layers of jokes about bypass road cones, Universal Credit, and hobgoblins in MPGA hats.

If there is a flaw, it is that the book has approximately forty pages more plot than it strictly needs, and the cheese-based horror sequence in the Hills of Badly Designed Signs goes on long enough to acquire its own ecosystem. But by that point you are so invested in whether Peetles will survive and whether the wolves will get their capers that you barely notice.
In summary: a book that takes the piss out of Brexit, Trump, austerity, road works, and the human capacity for organised stupidity, while also being genuinely moving about friendship, loneliness, and the courage it takes to leave the tree.

Lambert has written something strange, funny, and quietly brilliant.

“The acknowledgement of the Universal Credit worker is worth the cover price alone.”

The Literary Dispatch ★★★★★