Novel

Helix Folt, the Conservative

Welcome to Craven’s Bristol - a city where every committee becomes a kangaroo court, every philanthropist a pagan oracle, and every cause célèbre an excuse for public indignation.

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Published: 16 October 2025
ISBN: 979-8267255189
Chapters: 54
In the book: 200 entries

Overview

Into this whirlpool blunders Helix Folt, a hapless Tory innocent confronted with arts bureaucrats, therapeutic nannies, and the small-beer zeal of pub-room radicals. He is tugged from massage parlours to mock tribunals, from octopus-rights crusades to civic pageantry, learning at each turn that virtue in Bristol comes laced with ridicule and rot.

Richard Craven here turns George Eliot inside out, offering not moral earnestness but comic abjection, a panorama of civic grotesque in which the only constant is the lavatory. Helix Folt the Conservative extends Craven’s Bristol canon with the same reckless erudition and gleeful indecorum that marked Amoeba Dick, Odour Issues and Pretty Poli.

Sensitive souls may recoil. The rest are invited to drink deeply from this cracked chamberpot of a novel.

Reviewed in

The Formless Lantern Review by Crispin de Phalluster Richard Craven’s Helix Folt the Conservative is, to my mind, the most complete expression yet of his Bristolian grotesquerie. Read the review →

People in this book

See all 47 in People with their descriptions

Places in this book

See all 63 in Places with their descriptions

Organisations in this book

See all 9 in Organisations with their descriptions

Artefacts in this book

See all 44 in Artefacts with their descriptions

Glossary in this book

See all 35 in Glossary with their descriptions

Chapters

Front matter
Prologue, or the Easement of Bibliophiles
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11.
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Bibliography