Rattus Norvegicus

The Black Dragon/ Rattus Norvegicus/ Monkfish Elysia School is the setting for the three novels of the Elysia Trilogy by Jay McEnery. Located in beautiful English countryside, with privileged students and a progressive philosophy allowing its denizens freedom to develop on their own terms, in theory it is an idyll. In reality, however, it is a disintegrating moral wasteland and a breeding ground for mental disorder, sexual deviation and existential despair. Jay McEnery's Elysia is a metaphor for the West at the end of the second millennium: a theoretically rich society, finally freed from the bonds of hardship, hierarchy and intolerance, yet still imprisoned in an endless cycle of futile striving, encroaching nihilism and a surprising propensity for meaningless violence. Three engaging stories set in and around the 1980s which explore modern angst with humor, tenderness and even nascent hope, in a study of a world which has almost lost faith in itself.