Everything Will Swallow You

Similar to "Villager" and set in the same world, a mythically-informed West Country, which as Tom Cox says is really a country of its own, as Thomas Hardy knew, "Everything Will Swallow You" is just that bit more annoying. Its protagonists - Eric, Mel, Carl - larger than life but in Eric's case at least somehow that much messier, lives that are interesting to be sure but I don't really care about the minutiae of record-collecting and obscure and often spurious (obscurious?) bands from the 1970s and earlier.
But then there's Carl. Reminding this reviewer of the troll / cat-ape in Johanna Sinisalo's splendid "Not Before Sundown": Carl (short for Housecarl, he comes out of the surf like a serf and only modernises his views later) is a canipithecoid, the educated dog-ape, a four-limbed, furred and tailed creature hiding 24 fingers in his paws, able to walk upright and to speak, and quite possibly of more than human intelligence. He is also keen on philosophical literature, and knitting ... hang on, haven't we seen that before, probably in claymation? Adding Wallace and Gromit to the mix is no great stretch.
The author isn't a fan of dogs in general though -  he notes, as I have, that "Where dogs went, wildlife scattered and hid." and that "Places which were less [used by] dog walkers were invariably the most wild and beautiful places." Dogs are apex predators where wildlife is concerned and if we want to encourage the wild to return, we should rein (or leash) in our indulgence of dogs. Carl, on the other hand, is respectful of wildlife and does his best not to alarm it.
So 'is the cast of characters diverse?' well yes and no. There are as far as I recall no ethnic-minority and few LGBT characters, but there is a good male-female mix, and then there's Carl who isn't even human. Also, rural people are a minority, and one we tend to forget about.
There is a good deal of good messiness and living in the moment and being part of a community of friends in this, which it's all about, as is Tom Cox's belief that the natural world is not an option, not something we can take or leave, but is the whole point. EWSY is maybe folk horror without the horror (or at least not the supernatural variety) but I found it a bit too tousled and brawling for me, these people are all very well but I know too many like them. I was reminded of Slacker - first time I saw that I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread but on rewatching, it's just a lot of people running their mouths based on a variety of mental health issues. Tom Cox's mythologised West Country does seem more populated than the urban-biased media would leave us to believe, and does same without, I'm glad to see, too much reliance on alcohol (like Eric, I rarely drink these days; not a good idea). I think it's a real place and his probably unnamed Town, while not Stroud (probably) was very much a depiction of Stroud so I enjoyed that also. I just thought there was too much going on here, without the concision and precision of Villager. I almost certainly need to read his blog posts and his Substack and all the rest of the stuff that any decent Tom Cox character, downstream of Nick Hornby in his obsessions with living in the past like a Jethro Tull track, would probably reject.