Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox

Review by Annabel

If you follow the news from the publishing world, even a little, over the past three months, you’ll probably have encountered Tom Cox and his woes as his previous publisher, Unbound who worked on a crowdfunding model, went under owing their authors loads of money – Tom was owed over £20k. He may have lost all his royalties, but managed to reclaim the rights.

Thank goodness he found a new publisher for his latest novel (and yes, I’d pledged, and now lost, my spondulicks to his latest on Unbound too – grr!). Swift Press, an indie publisher founded in 2020, came to his rescue and not only have they published his new novel, but also reissued some of his previous books including his first 2022 novel Villager, which I adored, and Help the Witch, a great collection of quirky and dark short stories. Enough about publishing woes, let’s talk about his third novel Everything Will Swallow You now.

This novel is about friendship, primarily that between Eric and Carl, who have been friends and lived together for twenty-one years, ever since Carl came into Eric’s life. The easy-going Eric is approaching seventy and still deals in records and antiques now and then. Carl, meanwhile, is the perfect housekeeper and loves to crochet. What a cosy old couple you might think, but their relationship is purely platonic, though they love each other deeply. They love to go on long walks together, and if you spotted them – you’d probably think Carl was Eric’s dog.

Yes, you read that correctly. Carl isn’t exactly human, he’s a sort of dog-man. He talks, he prefers to walk on his hind legs when he can, he’s a voracious reader and auto-didact. Obviously, they keep his real nature a secret from all but Eric’s closest friend Mel, who is delightfully new-age and crazy and totally accepting of Carl being what he is.

Cox tells the story of Eric, and Eric and Carl in a dual timeline – there is the now, then we start back with Eric’s younger years beginning in Liverpool as a guitarist in various bands, and then getting burnt out in the business of marketing records in London, before the lure of the West country called and he ran a succession of record shops in Cornwall and Devon before ending in Dorset where he and Carl found each other.

As he did in Villager, Cox varies formats too. Some chapters are articles from various folklore journals and societies. Some are collections of diary or notebook entries of the main characters. Many chapters have quirky titles like ‘Everyone was called Ken back then’ and ‘Cars were never supposed to be this big’. The whole builds up to a series of episodes illustrating Eric’s life rather than a straightforward chronology, although the two timelines, once set on their way, don’t jump.

Cox used to be a newspaper music critic, and is a big record collector, so when Eric mentions esoteric 60s/70s folk and psychedelia you know that he knows what he’s talking about! Cox even makes reference to himself as an ‘obnoxiously young music critic’ for the Guardian at one point, and then also inserts a reference to the fictional RJ McKendree, who was the main character in Villager, a troubador who released one album, (Cox and friends created and recorded the album to go with the book).

If you enjoyed the word-of-mouth phenomenon, Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession, you’ll find much to enjoy in Cox’s shaggy dog’s tale of friendship – you can’t not love Eric and Carl. Take that and infuse with plenty of rural folklore, a bit of psychogeography, loads of obscure records and funny interludes such as the origins of their friend Meat Tree’s nickname, and this novel is a winner too. Highly recommended.

Annabel is a co-founder of Shiny and one of its editors.

Tom Cox, Everything Will Swallow You (Swift, 2025) ISBN 9781800755918, hardback, 380pp..

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