"Heronsbrook" by Edward Picot

 A series of nonlinear short stories mingled with a few poems.

Apart from the first story, ‘Cousin Sheila’s Money’, the stories are told from a variety of perspectives which make up the narrative when pieced together. This allows the possibility of unreliable narrators which is seen most clearly in the story 'He Fell and Stumbled'. Here accounts of a violent assault are remembered differently by the victim, by the man jailed for the assault, by another man involved and by an onlooker. Other details are also inconsistent, for example the location of the skateboarder's piercing.

This technique of the creation of a mosaic of monologues is also seen in:

• Belgium, about a man who has oesophageal cancer
• The Waiting Room, which concerns characters in a doctor's waiting room and the mysterious man whom they all half-recognise
• The Greyhound Murder, featuring a very strange half-naked man with devilish characteristics
• An Unimportant Story, one line of which links to 'Belgium'.

Most of these are written in simple declarative sentences which explore the character's interiority. In most cases, these inner thoughts are well-structured, although there is considerable use of repetition in 'An Unimportant Story'.

'Colours' is quite different. Here there is only one character narrating although she seems to have different moods which are characterised by different colours. Her thoughts come in an unpunctuated cascade of words and this gave a feeling that she has an intellectual or emotional disability; in the 'red' section she considers killing her mother. It reminded me of the first section of 'The Sound and the Fury' by William Faulkner, although Picot's version was more controlled and easier to decipher. 

The collection also includes a few poems, of which my favourite was 'Heron'

Selected quotes:

• “Sometimes it’s as if Jamie really was stuck in Belgium and I was on a boat watching him dwindle into the distance.” (Belgium)
• “Shining golden bubbles forming a chain connecting you to the surface where it's still bright. You have to drag them in through this big heavy thing in your mouth and push them back out again ... It's like dragging a bright chain through a rusty hole and then pushing it back out.” (Belgium)
• “You look at the clock, and it’s eleven. Or you look at the calendar, and it’s March. Or you look at your life, and you’re middle-aged.” (Waiting Room)
• “Time is your currency. You don’t experience it, you spend it.” (Waiting Room)
• “You’re waiting for something to happen. You don’t know what, but something. This isn’t your real life. Your real life hasn’t begun yet. You’re waiting for it to begin.” (Waiting Room)
• “We all lose our way sooner or later. The world gets too complicated, and we lose our way in the tangles. But the river goes on forever, pouring itself out.” (An Unimportant Story)
• “On the way back from London the train slowed and stopped in the middle of nowhere. They do that sometimes. Outside the window was a bank of brambles, half of them grey and lifeless, the other half tinged with red and starting to bud. There was a kind of architectural quality to them: the pattern they made was infinitely dense and complex, like strap work in the Book of Kells, but because it was early in the year and they weren't yet covered in leaves, you could see that basically it was just an arrangement of arches, arches of many different sizes, criss-crossing each other over and over again.” (An Unimportant Story)
• “The two dragons on it are circling around a pearl, or a disc, or perhaps it's meant to be the sun. I'm afraid I really don't know what they're circling around, perhaps it's an egg, but it gives them their pattern. Do you see what I mean?” (An Unimportant Story)
• “Grey scholar stooped over/ this rippled sheet, scrutinizing watermarks.” (Heron)

I was impressed by this collection. The '360 degree appraisal' technique worked very well, especially when the accounts didn't tally. The stories piqued my curiosity and, having open endings, never quite satisfied it, which I particularly enjoy. I look forward to reading a fuller length work from this author.

July 2026; 153 pages

Independently published on Amazon in 2024

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Tales of Love, Madness and Death" by Horacio Quiroga

 Short stories from a Uruguayan who spent much of his life in Argentina, dying of prostate cancer in 1937. He wrote plays and poems and at least one novel as well as short stories. This collection shows that he was influenced by Edgar Allen Poe; in turn he would go on the influence Jorge Luis Borges, although the style he demonstrates in this early collection is very much his own.

The tales range from derivative horror to hugely original stories told about very poor people in the jungle and from the PoV of animals.

One of my favourite stories, Sunstroke, is told from the perspective of a five pet dogs of a farmer. They see the man's doppelganger in the fields and realise that Death has come for the farmer, and they bark furiously, and the Doppelganger wanders off in the direction of a horse. It's a delightful tale with a pack of loyal mutts. And the next story, Barbed Wire, has horses escaping from a field and having a chat with cows about their fearless bull. Another story, Little Jaguar, also features a dog (another fox terrier), considering his scavenging life in the face of a drought: it could be a metaphor for the life of a human on the poverty line. Another of his stories, The Exploited, considers just such a person: a man who builds up a debt in port, being taken for a ride by women and barmen, and then has to work almost as an indentured slave to repay his boss. And the final tale, Meningitis and Its Shadow, which is perhaps a metaphor for the attachment between a therapist and their client, tells of an engineer recruited to dance attendance night after night on an aristocratic girl on her sick-bed since it is only his presence that can soothe the fever caused by her meningitis. 

A fascinating and original collection published by Will Dady at Renard Press who seems to be making a habit of unearthing forgotten classics. 

Selected quotes:

• “When a man lusts after a beautiful body he doesn't let opera glasses get in the way.” (Isolde’s Demise)
• “On moonlit nights, the grave digger walks amongst the Tombs with particularly rigid steps.” (Artificial Hell)
• “The honeymoon gave her the shivers.” (The Feather Pillow)
• “Footsteps echoed throughout the house, as if years of neglect had refined its resonance.” (The Feather Pillow)
• “The only thing a labourer really owns is his brutal capacity for squandering.” (The Exploited, Los Mensu)
• “There has been no time of greater joy for Maria and me than that which our aunt afforded us, with her death.” (Our First Cigarette)

March 2026; 213 pages

First published in Spanish in 1917

My paperback edition of a translation by Diego Jourdan Pereira was issued by Renard Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Uncanny Stories" by May Sinclair

Seven short stories with a supernatural theme told in a matter of fact way. There is no feeling that the supernatural might not exist. 

All stories are written in the past tense and third person, although they may contain first person perspectives. May Sinclair was the author who first used the term ‘stream of consciousness’ in a literary context when she reviewed the first volume of Pilgrimage (Pointed Roofs) by Dorothy Richardson. However, there is little hint of modernism or experimental writing in her style.

The stories are very much of their period in terms of the tension 

generated at a time when sexual transgression generated high levels of social disapproval. They are also contemporary in terms of the social hierarchies: the characters (except in The Victim) are well-educated upper-middle-class people who don’t really need to earn their living and have servants to assist them with the earthier aspects of life.

It's also of its time in the number of semi-colons the author uses.

The stories:
Where their fire is not quenched

Harriott Leigh is unlucky in love. Her father said she was too young for George Waring and, as she was waiting to grow up, George died. She is sure that Stephen Philpotts will propose marriage to her but instead he tells her he is in love with someone else. So she becomes the mistress of married Oscar Wade, an affair which has its moments of horror. But when she dies ...

The token

A man who can't express his feelings. A wife who longs to be sure of his love. They row about a paperweight. That night she dies. And her ghost haunts the room where he works, forever hoping to know whether he loved her.

The flaw in the crystal

The longest story in the collection. Agatha has the gift of making people well. But when she tries to cure Harding of his insanity, things start to go wrong. How can she help others and at the same time protect herself?

The nature of the evidence

A barrister’s adored first wife dies. Her ghost then prevents him having sex with his second wife.

If the Dead Knew

Organist Wilfred Hollyer’s mother who raised him from a sickly child, protecting him ... or over-protecting him and preventing him from being able to earn a decent living. As as result he can only marry love-of-his-life Effie Carroll when his mother dies which might be twenty years away. But he loves his mother. But ...

Guilt in the form of supernatural phantasms.

The Victim

Chauffeur Steven Ackroyd becomes violently angry if he perceives anyone coming in between him and his girlfriend, Dorsy, a fellow servant. So when she leaves Mr Greathead’s employ, he plans the perfect murder to revenge himself upon his master. What could go wrong?

The Finding of the Absolute

Mr Spalding develops his own metaphysical consolation in place of religion after his wife leaves him for an Imagist poet. Then he dies. Heaven seems remarkably like the role-playing computer simulation Second Life, decades before it started. With Kant.

Selected quotes:

“Women never seem to consider that a man can get all the talk he wants from other men.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“Sleep made him beautiful and innocent; it laid a fine, smooth tissue over his coarseness; it made his mouth gentle; it entirely hid his eyes.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“Then, suddenly, the room began to come apart before her eyes, to split into shafts of floor and furniture and ceiling that shifted and were thrown by their commotion into different planes. They leaned slanting at every possible angle; they crossed and overlaid each other with a transparent mingling of dislocated perspectives, like reflections fallen on an interior seen behind glass.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“The revolving doors caught her and pushed her out into the street.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“The strange quality of her state was this, that it had no time. ... She was aware of things happening and about to happen; she fixed them by the place they occupied, and measured their duration by the space she went through. So now she thought: If I could only go back and get to the place where it hadn’t happened.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

“Their passion weighed on them with the unbearable, unescapable boredom of immortality.” (Where their fire is not quenched)

"All Milly's plans had been like that; they fell to dust; they were dust. There had always been that pitiful, desperate stirring of the dust to hide the terror; the futile throwing of the dust in the poor thing's eyes. As if he couldn't see through it." (The Flaw in the Crystal)

"The Easter moon, golden-white and holy, looked down at her, shrined under the long, sharp arch of the beech trees." (The Flaw in the Crystal)

"It was now as if her being drunk with every pore the swimming darkness." (The Flaw in the Crystal)

"This is the story Marston told me. He didn't want to tell it. I had to tear it from him bit by bit. I've pieced the bits together in their time order, and explained things here and there, but the facts are the facts he gave me." (The Nature of the Evidence) It seems a nice way of asserting that this is gospel truth while leaving room for an unreliable narrator. But I couldn't help feeling that the reader might have had more fun if they had been presented with Marston's incoherent jumble and had to organise it themself.

"He was one of those bigoted materialists of the nineteenth century type who believe that consciousness is a purely physiological phenomenon, and that when your body's dead, you're dead." (The Nature of the Evidence)

"The library was the room Rosamund liked best, because it was his room. She had her place in the corner by the hearth, and they were always alone there together in the evenings when his work was done, and when it wasn't done she would sit still with him, keeping quiet in the corner with her book."  (The Nature of the Evidence) Very few of the women in this collection have any agency in this world. Many of them achieve it in the next.

"Before they could marry, they would be fifty-five and forty-five; old, old; too old to feel, to care passionately." (If the dead knew) I'm 68. Hmmm. 

"His beliefs were always the expression of his fears."  (If the dead knew)

"He knew the joy that made Jerry, the black cat, dance on his hind legs and bow sideways and wave his forelegs like wings." (The finding of the Absolute)

July 2025; 197 pages

First published in 1923

The paperback edition was issued by Renard Press in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Appleby Files" by Michael Innes

 

A collection of short stories, mostly murder mysteries solved by the Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Sir John Appleby. My dad was called John Appleby. But he didn't belong to quite that level of society. Sir John is a connoisseur of claret and takes guests to his London club. He goes trout-fishing. He and his wife, Lady Judith, visit stately homes; one of them usually knows the owners. His son Bobby wrote a successful anti-novel. This sort of thing might have gone down well when the 'Appleby' series started in 1936 (he appears in at least 20 novels), but by 1975 it looks decidedly dated. Furthermore, the stories are mostly too short to allow a proper deployment of clues and red herrings. 

There is a certain amount of nostalgia: I too remember the days when currency restrictions meant that a Briton holidaying in France was only allowed to take £50 plus £15 in cash. Per person but even so it made things tight.

I have read at least one of the novels (Hamlet, Revenge!) but it was a long time ago. 

Michael Innes also write critical books and literary novels under his real name J I M Stewart.

Selected quotes:

• "What the old lady must look out for is and adolescent girl - preferably of worse than indifferent education, and necessarily of hysterical temperament. If poltergeists exist, it's almost invariably when some such young person is around." (Poltergeist)
• "It is well known that poltergeists, in common with other agents of the supernatural, frequently sulk when attracting the attention of persons sceptically inclined." (Poltergeist)
• "'But a philosopher's argosies,' he said a shade pedantically, 'must voyage in distant waters, don't you think? They may return all the more richly freighted in the end.'" (Death by Water)
• "He'd toasted his bottom before the fire of life." (A Question of Confidence)
• "It dates from a time when you put on your warmest clothes to go indoors." (The Thirteenth Priest Hole)

If you enjoy elegant if pompous prose and old-fashioned class snobbery, Appleby is the detective for you.

June 2025; 192 pages

First published by Victor Gollancz in 1975

My edition issued as a paperback by Penguin in 1978

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks" (and two other stories) by Natsuko Imamura

 Strange stories from Japan which blur the boundaries between reality and illusion.

The first story concerns a girl who, growing up, discovers that no-one will ever take any food she offers them. Ever. This so upsets her that when she becomes a pair of chopsticks, the joy of delivering food straight into the mouth of her owner is transcendent. (In a nod to panpsychism, the flat is full of other girls and boys who have become blankets, doorknobs, rucksacks, reading lamps etc.)

The second story is about a girl who, no matter how hard she tries, cannot get hit. Water bombs thrown at her miss, frisbees are intercepted by dogs ... She starts self-harming and it is all downhill from then on.

In the third story the protagonist spends her youth lying in her bedroom until one night when, despite having lost the use of her legs, she goes into town. There's a sort of weird 'what if humans were domesticated pets' vibe going on here?

Fiction is all about the art of imagining things that aren't actually true. Although I personally prefer my fiction to stay within the realms of likelihood, fantastic stories have a long and honourable provenance, underlying myth and fairy tales and, in literature, classics from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Kafka's Metamorphosis. Often, the point of travelling to the edges of imagination is to critique reality, as with Swift's Gulliver's Travels or The Time Machine by H G Wells. Each of the stories in this collection could be analysed in that way (the first is about the need of people to feel useful, the second about the fact that suffering is a psychologically necessary part of the human condition?).

I was intrigued by the fact that these stories are told in a dead-pan style as if weirdness is a normal part of the everyday. I've just read Ronan Hession's Ghost Mountain and that has the same style: a stripped-down delivery without embellishment that leaves no room for doubt despite the unlikelihood of the events it recounts. This style, as encountered from the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis ("As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.") seems to be able to blur the line between the waking world and the world of dreams. Where the protagonist themselves are transformed, the narration is always in the third person. The only first person narrative in which the narrator-protagonist are themselves transformed that I can recall offhand is The Golden Ass by Apuleius. So it is possible but are there any other examples?

I imagine that there are a number of stories nowadays written from the perspective of a ghost (eg Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost), a zombie, a werewolf, or a vampire but this is a genre I don't really know. I believe Black Beauty by Anna Sewell is narrated by the horse. Other examples? Perhaps I need to dedicate a page on my blog to these sort of stories.

November 2024; 178 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"My Man Jeeves" by P G Wodehouse

 

A collection of some of the first short stories in which Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves make their appearance. The collection also includes some stories featuring Reggie Prepper.

I would argue that Jeeves and Wooster represent the pinnacle of Wodehouse's oeuvre and it is interesting to trace the evolution of these characters. First there was Psmith, who first appeared in the novel Mike as schoolboy cricketer Mike's new friend. Psmith, like Wooster, has an air of indolence and a wonderful way with words but unlike Wooster he is really rather wise and it is he who enables the farcical plot to reach a successful conclusion. It is as if he is Wooster and Jeeves in a single person. Reggie Prepper is more like Wooster in that he is likely to get himself into scrapes and need rescuing; he is also the first person narrator of the stories. The transcendent moment came when Wodehouse took Psmith, removed his competence and placed them all in Jeeves, and, as with Prepper and also rather like Watson and Holmes, used Wooster as the foolish first person narrator.

The Wooster stories are set in America where Wodehouse lived during the First World War and where the third Psmith novel (Psmith, Journalist) is set. 

The joy is in the farcical situations in which the upper class twits are enmeshed and in the wonderful verbal dexterity with which the stories are told, as evidenced in some of the quotes below. His principal talent is for exaggerated similes and metaphors.

Selected quotes:

• "One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them." (Leave it to Jeeves)
• "I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself." (Leave it to Jeeves)
• "I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare - or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad - who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping." (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest)
• "What's the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don't yield to them? Makes it so bally discouraging for a great city." (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest)
• "The days down on Long Island have forty-eight hours in them; you can't get to sleep at night because of the bellowing of the crickets; and you have to walk two miles for a drink." (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest)
• "Women with hair and chins like Mary's may be angels most of the time, but, when they take off their wings for a bit, they aren't half-hearted about it." (Absent treatment)
• "'Women are frightfully rummy,' he said gloomily. 'You should of thought of that before you married one,' I said." (Absent treatment)
• "In his official capacity, Voules talks exactly like you'd expect a statue to talk." (Rallying Round Old George)
• "I did a murder last night ... It's the sort of thing that might happen to anyone." (Rallying Round Old George)
• "'How long were you engaged?' 'About two minutes.'" (Rallying Round Old George)
• "It's just on the cards that I may have drowned my sorrows a bit."  (Rallying Round Old George)

June 2024; 135 pages

Other Wodehouse works reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Minority Report" by Philip K Dick

 Not a novel, as I thought it was, but a collection of short stories, named after the first. I read many more novels, and I write them, so I think I understand the form. The constraints of a short story means that they are inevitably more about the plot and less about the characters. In addition, PKD is writing science fiction, so there is considerable emphasis on the concept. Given these parameters, I am sure he is a master of his genre. But I didn't find his work particularly enthralling.

• Minority Report
• The future police use three "precog idiots" to predict the future so that they can arrest and sentence those who will commit crimes. Sometimes the precogs disagree so the police use the majority verdict. Then the chief of police discovers that the precogs are predicting that he will kill a General so he goes on the run.
• Imposter
• Is Olham Olham or is he a robot booby-trapped with a bomb who has been engineered not only to resemble Olham but to think that he is Olham?
• Second Variety
• The UN are winning the post-nuclear war against the Russians because they have invented the 'claws': autonomous robots who trick their way in among soldiers and then cut them to pieces. But suppose these robots are beginning to evolve, designing themselves into new varieties?
• War Game
• The toy manufacturers of Ganymede are creating toys designed to subvert terran defences so the terrans have to test each toy before it is sold in the shops.
• What the Dead Men Say
• When millionaire businessman Louis Sarapis dies he can't be resurrected into half-life ... but then messages arrive from deep space seeking to get his protege elected President.
• Oh, to be a Blobell
• Munster is a human-blob hybrid who has children with another hybrid and has kids. According to Mendel's genetics, one is pure human, one pure blob and two hybrids. Munster's wife wants to be a human but, for tax reasons, he wants to be a blob.
• The Electric Ant
• Poole discovers he isn't a human but a robot who thinks he is a human. Discovering that his perceptions are governed by a reel of punched tape, he experiments by covering some of the holes, making new holes, and cutting the tape. These cause his perceptions to dramatically alter. Or is he actually altering reality? Solipsists beware.
• Faith of our Fathers
• In a quasi-Maoist totalitarian society, with significant echoes of 1984, humble government servant Chien is invited to meet the Absolute Benefactor. But is he being fed hallucinogenic substances by the government or by the rebels and what will the Leader be like when he encounters him?
• We can remember it for you wholesale
• Quail wants to go to Mars but he can't afford it. So he buys a memory implant so he can remember having been to Mars. But as the technicians implant it they discover that he already has memories of having been to Mars ... which have been erased ...

As you can see, many of these stories involve how we can tell what is true and what is false, whether we are awake or asleep, dreaming of being awake.

Selected quotes:

• "The late-afternoon wind carried the muffled booming of many people packed tightly together." (Minority Report)
• "It was amazing how transformed a bald man became under the stark potency of an officer's peaked and visored cap." (Minority Report)
• "He could not grasp what he was reading - or rather unable to read. ... All he found was a procession of words, randomly strung together. It was worse than Finnegan's Wake." (What the Dead Men Say)

July 2023; 290 pages

Also written by Philip K Dick and reviewed in this blog:

• The Man in the High Castle (this one is a novel!)

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Laughs and Tears Galore!" by Heather and Tony Flood

This is an easy-to-read anthology full of feel-good entertainment.

Most of the poems are either rhyming couplets or quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme; they typically utilise fairly free scansion. I would relish seeing the poets explore alternative forms. The subjects of the poems are mainstream, rarely challenging perceived wisdoms, and frequently, sometimes explicitly, point up a moral. My favourite poem is Heather Flood’s ‘If you let it’, whose title is also the final line of each of the three four-line stanzas; its cleverness rests on the move from negativity to positivity for the final verse. But my favourite line is from Heather’s Star Dust: “Scantily clad reason treads softly the day, with pathways uneven” which provokes a fascinating image.

The short stories frequently carry a clever twist at the end. Several of Tony's stories refer to immoral behaviour, sometimes of a sexual nature, including ‘Never take anything for granted’ which relies on a clever double meaning and made me laugh aloud. Several of Heather’s stories revolve around death and the afterlife. I particularly enjoyed ‘Heaven or Hell?’

This link should take you to the Amazon page to buy the book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/LAUGHS-TEARS-GALORE-Stories-twists/dp/B09VG3SHC7

March 2020

"Let's Imagine" by Stevington Writers

This anthology of poetry and short fiction was written and published by writers in Stevington, Bedfordshire, UK; all proceeds from its sale are donated to the Bedford Food Bank.

A caveat: Regular readers of this blog know that I don't really understand poetry (and I'm not much better at short fiction).

I thought this had a lot of remarkably good work. 

The poems

There were poems about memories (Baking memories by Ruth Ivey, Tethered by Tricia Lennie) 

There were, or course, poems about lockdown (The Succession by Robert Collins, Lockdown by Heather Eadie, Walk With Me by Fran Stone, Beyond the Bubble, The Fallout by Ruth Ivey and, I suspect, The Reunion by Robert Collins). I Choose Life by Stephanie Field incorporated a delightful multiple lliteration in the line "So many folk so fearful". Some of these were downright sinister:

• The obsessive Possession by Ruth Ivey which starts with the wonderful stanza:

I want you,

Locked Down,

With the rest of humanity shut out 

and made me shudder with:

Shatter every duplicitous mirror,

For,

I want solely the reflection that I see in your eyes.

• Opening Up, a sort of prose poem by Heather Eadie, spooky and mysterious, in which a disdainful woman arrives at dawn
• Freedom from lockdown by Steph Field in which a woman watches the virus-wary people outside while looking down at the dead body of the man who had locked her down with his controlling ways.

There were poems that made me think such as Rebel, Rebel by Fran Stone and these:

• Freedom to nibble by Robert Collins suggests that people who struggle to make their bodies conform to an idealised image are perhaps unhappier than those who are "free to nibble"
• We are so lightly here by Fran Stone is about “Celebrating the ordinary” and ends with the brilliant line:

Does a kitten need a rope to abseil?

• The Threshold by Tricia Lennie explores the dangers from con men and burglars that can come to a door, while the writer sits waiting for a loved-one to return late at night.
• Creation by Fran Stone considered humans as collections of organs, as consciousnesses, and as part of a greater whole. It contained some lovely lines:

And this ego that we call me 

- where Angels sing sweet songs 

and the saxophone makes love

There were poems about climate change and pollution and other threats to the natural environment.

• Endangered by Fran Stone has an interesting quasi-playscript nature and links Covid to the extinction of animal and plant species. 
• Opening Up by Tricia Lennie compared walking along a beach then with now and had the lovely image of the beach being "seagull scavenged". 

There were celebrations of nature, such as My Small Pleasures by Steph Feild and these:

Hanging On by Jane O’Connor was about nature at sunrise. I particularly enjoyed the line:

Ermine moth more regal than robes

Bird Songs by Robert Collins used the folk description of a bird call to inspire a paragraph or two of prose. My favourite bit of this was "The charity in beams of early morning sun gives no respite to shivers felt from the damning call of the Woodpigeon."

One of my favourite poems was Tomatoes by Tricia Lennie which made me laugh when it started:

I often wonder why

The tomato is called the love apple.

Rows of unlikely suitors named

Sungold, Sweet Baby, Big Boy ...

The short prose

• The reality by Robert Collins crams into a flash fiction format all the aspects of a short story, including the surprise at the end.
• 1974 by Heather Eadie is a perfectly pitched vignette of summer love
• The Key by Ruth Ivey, written in the present tense, describes a day being locked out of home with two young children: a trivial incident assumes great importance.
• A place I love by Steph Field is bucolically descriptive, whereas It's not about me by Heather Eadie details the claustrophobia and frustrations of a visit to an old relative.
• Dave Fitch's Lock Down Your Brothers has a Last of the Summer Wine vibe as four old men try to meet up during lockdown. I loved the mix of new technology and old language in: "Look at this selfie I've sent of myself - my girth's like a maid in the family way."
• Not All About Me by Steph Field is a short philosophical musing on the illusion of our indispensability.
• In Lunch is Served, Jane O'Connor remembers Sunday lunch when she was young: I loved her description of the gravy as "unctuous".
• TV Times by Heather Eadie is the longest piece but it never flags as it gently recounts the relationship between a lonely and depressed woman and a young schoolgirl, starved of gameshows.
• In Andromeda by Ruth Ivey, the title character's parents attempt to pimp her out to a slob.
• Dave Fitch madly mixes literary sources in a pub history in The Red Lion in Winter Part Two 
• Trica Lennie's Work In Progress has a wonderful villain: "Amelia 'I have my suits sprayed on' Carter"

And finally, a poem by 'RJC' supplies us with the title of the book.

A brilliant miscellany by some talented writers. January 2021; 59 pages

This review was written by
the author of Motherdarling

"Invisible Architecture" by Steven Kelly

This is a collection of three novellas set in Vienna.

It is a ritual
Set in the course of 24 hours, the narrator, an Austrian living on inherited wealth, plans and prepares a dinner party for his three friends: Cruise, a famous Yugoslav poet and communist who works as waiter, Leppard, a romantic anarchist and art critic from London, and Axel, a Dane. They eat and drink, arguing into the small hours; after two of Cruise's dodgy friends arrive they four friends go out on the town and drink and eat and enjoy themselves till dawn. Then comes the reckoning.

Great moments:

• "I will sit by the windows overlooking the street and watch the shoppers go by ... as they fulfil their weekly duties, exploited as consumers just as they are exploited as workers the rest of the week."
• "To appreciate sensual things fully, one has to be very quiet."
• "It takes only the smallest iota of imagination to create a fiction substantial enough to draw the world into itself."

Breakfast was simple
Another multicultural group of friends: Medar, a Turk, Reid, an Englishman, Christa, his one-time-only Austrian girlfriend, host new arrival Feargal, an Irishman one of whose hands is a hook. They spring Franz, an old Jewish Austrian, from his care home by setting off the fire alarm and they take him to the zoo. There is a lot of discussion about violence and its links to romantic or classical culture: this dialogue seems staged. Reid is aware that the arrival of Feargal, who is to stay with Christa, will change the dynamic of their friendship: there is some jealousy but also some relief.

Great moments:

• "Franz should have been squeezing his life dry, not allowing it to evaporate away."
• "If the violence is too overt the romance is lost."
• "The romantic is inextricably bound up with the violent."

There were rules
Reid reappears, and Franz, although this is a story from before Franz goes into the home. Reid is hunting for a painting by Schiele. Adele has secret rendezvous with bar-owner George where she and he get naked and she paints him. She is trying to recapture the Schiele painting which she owns; it hangs on her wall. Adele is Monika in the bar where she knows Reid. She needs to finish the painting before Reid finds the original.

This is a tale of art obsession in the same formal prose as the previous stories.

Great moments:

• "Leopold had been born a victim, had lived and died a victim of the circumstances under which he came into the world. But he had killed for his art."
• "You have to be so careful with words. Slippery things and they get slipperier the more you drink."

February 2020; 162 pages

"Until Amy is found" by Mo Kerr

This is a book of short stories. Most of them are in the gothic horror tradition: there are some clever updatings of some classic motifs such as the broken-down car, the empty farmhouse and the strange stranger in Lucky Jim and the "Psycho made in Yorkshire" in The Long Stop. The title story really goes to town, including a small, isolated community, an encounter at a cemetery, a remote woman (an heiress of course) in an isolated house (complete with servant) to which the young man pays a professional visit (which reminded me of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black), a man sent mad by a love who died, a lunatic asylum and even has the ghost of a smuggler who cursed the island!

But the point is that the author has updated these and played around with the tradition in such a way as to leave us guessing as to the ending. My favourite twist was that in The Long Stop; very clever!

Some of the stories are written in the present tense, which adds something to the tension, and although the narration is usually in the first person there are one or two third person though the point of view is still usually that of the protagonist. The lengths of the stories vary considerably (Until Amy is Found is the longest) and one or two (for example, Not Waving But ... and  The No. 6 Bus) might be described as vignettes.

The stories were well-written. I like the way this author can freshen a cliche by leaving off the last bit; for example "We're blood relatives for crying out." There were some beautiful descriptions and some great quotes:

• Until Amy is Found:
• "I liked nothing better than to jog along the beach into town, running through clouds of my own breath."
• "He peeled off gardening gloves and set them on the table where they sat like scrunched up, petrified birds."
• The Black Doll:
• "The house I grew up in was the last one in the village. It stood alone, hidden by a row of trees that screened the sun and a busy road that sliced the village in half. Traffic trundled by and the trees drooped, casting long shadows over the house."
• "Dad was always drooping in Mum’s shadow. After one of her snide remarks he’d steam up but never come to the boil."
• The Long Stop:
• Butt naked and swaying in and out of a slant of sunlight, Ray is at the window, rubbernecking."
• "there’s the sun, like the top of Humpty Dumpty’s head. Looks like any minute Humpty’ll bob full up and dangle his skinny legs over the side."
• Homecoming:
• "It was as if she’d said goodbye to herself, packed her bags and left, closing the door quietly behind her." 

Enjoyable. April 2019

"A Very Murderous Christmas"

Crime short stories with a Christmas theme, including:

The man with the sack by Margery Allingham
A country house burglary takes place under the nose of Mr Albert Campion. A festive crime depressingly full of snobbery. The old rich look down their noses at the ghastly nouveaux riches. In the end the old order is triumphant.

• “He’s like a depression leaving the Azores.”
• “Jail shyness, that temporary fit of nerves which even the most experienced exhibit for a week or so after their release.”
• “A neck that would disgrace a crocodile.” 

The Adventure of the Red Widow” by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr
A Sherlock Holmes short story involving a guillotine.

Camberwell Crackers by Anthony Horowitz

A wonderful story about the murder of the owner of a Christmas Cracker factory. Full of dazzling wit. I particularly liked the jokes but Horowitz sparkles and his detective, on his first murder case, is wonderfully incompetent. Great fun, especially the original denouement in which the reader knows who dunnit but the copper doesn’t. Brilliant.

• “A chimney which had given up smoking.”

The Flying Stars by G K Chesterton
A Father Brown story

• “If you’re born on the wrong side of the wall, I can’t see that it’s wrong to climb over it.”

A Problem in White by Nicholas Blake
A murder in a snowbound train in Cumberland. Not exactly the Orient Express but a challenging whodunnit.

• “A voice succulent as the breast of a roast goose.”

Loopy by Ruth Rendell
A classically macabre tale in which a man devoted to his mother likes to dress up in a wolf costume ...

Morse’s Greatest Mystery by Colin Dexter
Scrooge-like, miserly, grumpy Morse and the case of the money that went missing at Christmas.

The Jar of Ginger by Gladys Mitchell
A discussion club debates methods of murder including a poisoned piece of ginger in a jar.

Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces by John Mortimer

Rumpole is a brilliant creation and this offering is, as they always are, full of wit and character. 

• "My first impression of Coldsands was a gaunt church tower, presumably of great age, pointing an accusing finger to heaven from a cluster of houses on the edge of a sullen, gunmetal sea.  ... As soon as we got out of the taxi, we were slapped around the face by a wind"
• "He made cruciform gestures, as though remembering the rubric 'spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch' and forgetting where these important items were kept." 

The Problem of Santa's Lighthouse by Edward Hoch

A tale set in New England in 1931

Most of these are whimsical. The best (Allingham, despite the appalling snobbery and racism, Mortimer and Horowitz) can write really well despite the limiting temptations of the format. Those stories that focus on the solution of a puzzle are forgettable, perhaps especially so in a short story format.

January 2019

My wonderful wife bought me a subscription to Books and Beer; each month I receive a crime book and some cans of beer. The other titles I have received so far are:

• Most Wanted by Robert Craik: a fast-paced thriller set in California
• The Devil's Dice by Roz Watkins: a whodunnit set in the English Peak District
• Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth: a stunning tale of crime and revenge, of temptation and sin, of evil and redemption set in 1880s Queensland and as gritty as only the Australian Outback can get.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction" (third series) edited by Anthony Boucher and J Francis McComas

When I was a kid (in the 1960s) I used to go to the library in Sunbury-on-Thames and read. They had these SciFi collections. I loved them. Now they seem quaint. They beautifully reflect the culture and concerns of 1950s America. The Bomb. A world post-apocalypse (still a concern of Sci Fi today). And interstellar travel meeting strange new creatures. This collection, dating from 1954, is a classic of its kind.

In Attitudes by Phillip Jose Farmer a gambler on a strange world observes aliens in an activity that he believes is a kind of gambling game. He joins in. But has he understood the signs rightly? The priest doesn't think so. A brilliant central scene; the obsession of gamblers is clearly shown. But the first scene seems misleading; it has overtones of Pascal's wager and Faust but it seems redundant. And the twist at the end was easy to spot.

In Maybe Just a Little One by R Bretnor a schoolteacher invents a nuclear reactor in his basement. Fuelled on beans. His community think he's mad. A very off-beat tale.

The Star Gypsies travels from town to town helping the destroyed communities with primitive technology, showing them how to make a sickle and a bicycle.

In The Untimely Toper by L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt Mr Pearce is cursed by a newcomer to the bar so that each time he gets drunk he goes to the rest room and when he comes out finds that a day, or a week, has passed by; the time seems to be proportionate to how drunk he gets. This story contained some great lines:

• "If he had ten times as much brains as he has and cheated on the entrance examination, he might be able to get into a home for the feeble-minded." 
• "A look on his face that I'd not be wanting to take to bed with me at night"

Vandy, Vandy by Manly Wade Wellman is the  story of a musician finding an old hillbilly family who were celebrated in song; the devil who is bothering their daughter is the same man as the one who bothered their great-great grandmother; he has magically been enabled to live for 300 years ...

Experiment by Kay Rogers is a very short story about a Venusian falling in love with his slave girl (an earthling) even though Venusians don't love.

• "A faint, slanting shadow lay along either cheek subtly pointing to her lips." (p 98)

Ward Moore's Lot was the best story of them all. A man is driving his fractious family along a grid-locked road away from his Los Angeles suburb after the Bomb has dropped. He has had the foresight to pack the station wagon with all the things necessary for survival (fish hooks, needles ...) But his wife is in complete denial. She wants to phone her friends although the phones are out. She wants to stop at a gas station with clean rest rooms and at a motel for a decent bath and a nice meal. The two boys (the sixteen year old fast turning into a juvenile delinquent and a younger lad) whinge away from the back. Only his daughter understands the gravity of the situation. And all the time the radio utters reassuring messages. This story about a family on the road was brilliant; Lot, fleeing from the destruction of the Cities of the Plain.

P M Hubbard's Manuscript found in a vacuum was a very short take off of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille.

In The Maladjusted Classroom by H Nearing Jr a teacher in a military school solves a timetabling problem using the fourth dimension and a Klein bottle he has invented.

In Child by Chronos by Charles L Harness a woman, born after her father has disappeared, presumed dead, tells of her difficult relationship with a mother who makes a firtune by foretelling the future. A clever twist on time travel.

New Ritual by Idris Seabright is the story of a chest freezer with the power to grant wishes.

W B Ready's Devlin was almost unreadable. In fact I skipped lots. I think it was about the devil who arrived at a town without a piping band and helped the menfolk form such a band and then did a pied piper act.

Captive Audience by Ann Warren Griffith was the story that has (almost) come true! Little discs are placed in products by advertisers so that, after being triggered by radio, the products themselves advertise to you. Most people are hooked on this cacophony of inescapable advertising; it has actually been made illegal to possess earplugs.

In Snulbug by Anthony Boucher a wizard conjures up a time-travelling demon so that he can find out what is going to happen tomorrow and make a fortune, only to discover that time travel isn't that easy. A delightful characterisation of a surprisingly Yiddish salamander:

• "The demon ... dived into the flame, rubbing himself with the brisk vigor of a man under a needle shower." (p 214)

Shepherd's Boy by Richard Middleton is a very short ghost story.

• "Above me in the blue pastures of the sky the cloud-sheep were grazing, with the sun on their snowy backs, and all about me the gray sheep of earth were cropping the wild pansies" (p 230)

Alfred Bester's Star Light, Star Bright is a rather poorly written story with some extraordinarily unconvincing characters which was nevertheless nominated for a Hugo Award.

The stories are interspersed with poems, many by Winona McClintic. None of the poems floated my boat.

It was fascinating what the obsessions were in the science fiction community of those days (and also how much tolerance where was for alternatives such as ghost stories). There is a clear interest in plot rather than character which makes a strong contrast with short stories being written today. I bathed in nostalgia but I was rather disappointed by the quality. This collection is not as good as the Sixth collection which is reviewed here.

February 2018; 252 pages