The novel follows Allegra's adventures as she quests to discover her true identity in a nightmare alternate England. She encounters King Charles in orbital exile, Stalinist bioplasma engineer Natasha Supanova, the conspiratorial Osiris Club, drug alchemist Eddie Boy Krishna, ex-DJ and reality TV showman Mark 23 and gangland queens the Karma Twins along the way before finally confronting John Dee in his hideout beneath Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath.

This is a novel that takes the legacy of H. P. Lovecraft and updates it for a mediamatic technopagan world.

Cover art by Terry Rentzepis, www.alltenthumbs.com

What they're saying about Meat Puppet Cabaret:

"Meat Puppet Cabaret is an exercise in obscuring logic, feints and half-revelations, and keeping the reader perpetually disoriented, left to put ill-fitting puzzle pieces together into some semblance of a story. Avant-garde science fiction on the order of William Burroughs, Steve Beard crafts a tale from inside a near-future British Interzone, one as lurid and discomforting as any Beat junkie dystopia. "
—Pop Matters

"...there is a deep underlying plot beneath all the bells and whistles—a completely fascinating storyline (peppered with astonishing revelations) that reaches a wholly satisfying conclusion."
—Craig's Book Club

“This horrific farrago of British politics and cultural malaise takes off from the urban legend of Princess Diana's rumored pregnancy at the time of her death in 1997. In Beard's weird alternate England, "King Charles" is in orbital exile, while Diana's lost child, Allegra, wanders about, wondering who she truly is. Allegra resulted from an embryo stolen from Diana at the scene of the fatal car crash by a demonic Jack the Mack (aka Jack the Ripper). How? The clever machinations of John Dee, a hideously wicked black magician. Beard (Digital Leatherette) uses dream sequences, interviews, reality TV/game scripts, net-influenced formats and more to deliver a perverse nightmare of jolting, surreal rhythms and dark despair. His more lurid imagery is sure to repulse some readers.”
—Publishers Weekly

"Beard brilliantly jettisons notions of literary depth for more stimulating forms of intellectual complexity. His book puts all the conpiracy theories about Princess Diana's death through the most psychedelic blender this side of a Merry Prankster Acid Test. Super phat and groovy!"
— Stewart Home, author of 69 Things to do with a Dead Princess

"Meat Puppet Cabaret is a symphony of neologisms and linguistic explosions that one cannot help reading aloud.  Simply put, it's the type of lock-the-kids-in-the-gym-while-the-whole-town-loses-it type of stuff we need more of.  Beware: do not read this book on the train or the bus you will put people off with your squeals of delight as the words tumble past and the confounded story tickles you into snorts of guffaws."
—Eckhard Gerdes, editor Journal of Experimental Fiction

“I’ve been reading Beard for some time and enjoying his brand of fiction along with other discerning readers with a taste for the visionary. My guess is that Meat Puppet Cabaret is going to be his big breakthrough novel, which will reach the wider public he deserves. It’s packed with good stuff. It’s funny. It has an immediacy which rises above the merely contemporary and it delivers a hefty punch of social commentary. And, of course, it’s as irreverent as hell, as relevant as the latest health scare. He adapts techniques from across the media web—from modernist fiction to movies to vid games—it’s all grist to his imaginative mill.

"My guess is this is one of the best and funniest satires you’re going to read in quite a while. But be warned: If you think politicians tell the truth, that the British royal family shares your pain and that power-brokers will listen to reason (or your sentimental desire for world peace) if only you can get your message through to them, then you’d better not get near this book, let alone read it. You’re definitely down the wrong rabbit hole.”
—Michael Moorcock