About The Hungry Table: A novel of Pub Heroes, Pork Scratchings and Questionable Life Choices (The Hungry Table Series Book 1):
THE HUNGRY TABLE
The table in the centre of The Harp eats pork scratchings. It arranges its own beer mats into impossible patterns. And tonight, for the first time in twenty years, it’s waking up.
The Harp is a decent pub. Decent pint. Pork scratchings that vanish when you’re not looking. Arguments about who took the last one. Friendships tested. Decades of quiet, simmering resentment.
Brian sits in his usual seat every night. He can’t remember what you’re drinking – even after ordering the same pint for twenty years. But he remembers exactly who stole whiskey from his cabinet in 1982. His memory works like a spiteful bouncer: only the grudges get in.
Gary retired from the police to make vindaloo from scratch and nurse a secret delusion: he believes he looks exactly like Bradley Cooper. He does not. He has never looked like Bradley Cooper. This has never stopped him.
George downs five pints in forty‑five minutes. One pint, fast. Another. Another. The women behind the bar have learned his rhythm. They don’t panic anymore. Neither does he.
They’ve been drinking in The Harp for years. None of them ever sit at the table in the middle of the room. They don’t know why. They just don’t.
But the beer mats are shifting. The floorboards are whispering. Something that’s been waiting since before the pub was built is finally hungry.
And the zero‑beer drinkers think sobriety is a psychic shield. One of them is about to attempt a dry exorcism with a bottle of Peroni Zero.
It will not go well.
The only thing exorcised will be the lad’s dignity.
Praise (entirely made up, from voices in the author’s head):
“Dark. Funny. Unsettling. I checked my own beer mats.” – The Albrighton Advertiser (circulation: 12, mostly confused)
“A pub horror novel that understands the true terror of someone taking the last pork scratching.” – A Regular
“I tried the zero‑beer exorcism at home. My fridge is now haunted.” – A Non‑Drinker (regretfully)
“I’m not saying I look exactly like Bradley Cooper. I’m saying the role hasn’t been cast yet.” – Gary (probably)
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Author Bio:
Neil Charley has lived in Coventry, London, Chafford Hundred, Chafford Hundred again, and—because apparently one lesson wasn’t enough—Chafford Hundred a third time. He’s also lived in a few places he’d deny under oath, plus one he’d deny under torture. After finally exhausting the possibilities of Chafford Hundred, he moved back to Coventry, proving once and for all that his learning curve is a perfectly horizontal line. He now lives in Shropshire (seven months and counting, a fact delivered with confidence and a straight face).
Along the way, he’s met every type of character Britain can produce, usually over a warm pint in a pub with sticky carpets. The trouble is that people are broadly the same wherever you go: the brilliant, the baffling, the barely house-trained, and those who should never be allowed within ten feet of a meeting room—or a sharp object.
Years spent in cricket and rugby changing rooms prepared him for a certain level of chaos. But nothing—not a flying stump, not a collapsing scrum—prepared him for the corporate purgatory of Barclays, Lloyds TSB, VISA Europe, National Australia Bank, and Bank of Cyprus. He even returned to Barclays at one point, helpfully confirming a long-standing talent for making absurd decisions.
After surviving enough inane meetings to qualify for some sort of compensation scheme (emotional, if not financial), he eventually realised that real life was already a low-budget absurdist sitcom—one with no laugh track and even worse lighting. His books draw heavily on British sarcasm, pub logic, and the psychological scars left by conference calls that absolutely should have been emails—and emails that should have been a single, merciful GIF.