Review by Siobhian R. Hodges of "Scablands and Other Stories" by Jonathan Taylor

Each story  in this collection was uniquely captivating, and the various lengths created an overall pace that matched the book's genre, a kaleidoscopic symphony of its very own. With such a busy life (like most of us have) and not nearly enough free time as I'd like, the book was perfect for me to dip in and out of. It may sound clichéd but Scablands and Other Stories truly was the type of book that I could not put down.  

Every night for the past week, I found myself wanting to read "just one more story" - like my daughter regularly asks me at the end of one of her Disney bedtime stories. Being an adult, however, I was able to make my own (hypocritical) decision and would continue reading Taylor's book long into the night, enjoying the fully immersive worlds and (mostly) endearing characters.

I especially loved "A Sentimental Story," "Heat Death," and of course "Scablands" - the final story that will stay with me for a long time, just as, I imagine, the memory of Mr Chandler will stay with the boy-who-is-no-longer-new.

Thank you to the author for this collection of bittersweet escapism. I'm looking forward to reading more of your work!

 

About the reviewer
Siobhian R. Hodges is a Leicestershire multi-genre writer, author of the supernatural thriller Killing a Dead Man and coming-of-age anthology Untitled Decade. She has an MA in Creative Writing and was shortlisted in 2021 for the Page Turner Book Awards. She lives with her graphic designer husband, their two chalk-and-cheese children, and their dog-like cat.

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "Connective Tissue" by Jane Fraser

The short story form has received a lot of renewed interest of late, with many attributing this to our shortening attention spans, the form’s capacity for allowing authors to take stylistic risks, or the fact we can more readily squeeze a short story in and around our increasingly hectic lives. Whatever the reason, it’s encouraging that publishers – including industry heavyweights and small independents alike - are investing in it like never before. 

Jane Fraser’s Connective Tissue is a moving, thoughtful and considered collection that deftly explores what it means to be connected to others, or rather, how our disconnectedness from a shared reality can lead to a greater understanding of self. At the centre of many of the stories, are individuals who are dealing with the aftermath of some personal loss, change to their circumstances or who long to assign some greater value or meaning to their lives.

In one of the collection’s highlights, ‘After a certain age you can either have good shoes or good feet,’ a widow speaks directly to her departed husband, and hence keeps the memory of him alive: ‘You place your hand on my arm. It feels icy just as I expected a spirit would.’ The couple take to the garden lawn as if it were a dancefloor, the narrator enjoying a moment of unbridled happiness, amid so much grief. Other standout stories include ‘Connective Tissue,’ ‘Anti-clockwise on the Circle Line,’ ‘Crow’ and ‘Plenty of time, Jane,’ all of which feature strong women dealing with extreme changes in their personal fortunes. Yet it is in ‘Words,’ where Fraser’s mastery of the form is most apparent: the playful first-person narrative turns more confessional and intimate, bristling with incidental and sensory detail: ‘And that’s when I saw her, looking at me from the mirror … I sat on the edge of the bed and stretched out my hands, fingertip to fingertip with the girl in the glass.’

At times, these stories seemed so tantalisingly short I wanted Fraser to develop them further; they have the type of brevity that left me wanting more as a reader. Or maybe that is the author’s point: people drift in and out of one another’s lives, and this experience is shared both by the reader and Fraser’s cast of well-drawn and recognisable characters, each of her creations edging forward into the light to impart some nugget of advice. Fraser’s skill is considerable in that she not only persuades the reader to listen with interest, but more closely.    

About the reviewer
Dr. Paul Taylor-McCartney is an author, researcher and lecturer, with interests in dystopian studies, children’s literature and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and academic articles have appeared in a range of notable UK and international publications including Aesthetica, The Birmingham Journal of Language and Literature, Writing in Practice (National Association of Writers in Education), Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine and Dyst: A literary Journal. He lives and works in Cornwall. You can find out more about him and his work by visiting his website here. 

You can read more about Connective Tissue by Jane Fraser on Creative Writing at Leicester here.  

Review by Louise Brown of "Eastmouth and Other Stories" by Alison Moore

 

Alison Moore’s Eastmouth and Other Stories is a beguiling read. Her ability to build the world she transports you to, together with her themes of domestic confinement and calamity are gripping. 

In “Eastmouth,” the entrapment of the main character in the gloomy confines of a boyfriends’ claustrophobic family and seaside town is told in such an understated way that the sense of claustrophobia is heightened. A local tells her "You are the Webster girl," and while she denies this, she sees a crowd of locals advancing towards her, who are described as "an army in beige and lilac."

The atmosphere of the characters being trapped or even killed by the places they inhabit grows in each story, and nature colludes too. In “Winter Closing,” the story opens with a sentence that foreshadows the calamity contained in an old house inhabited by Derek. She tells us, "The garden path, on which there was black ice this morning, has been salted to prevent the fracturing of wrists, the breaking of hips, the shattering of pelvises." The malevolence of the house, and the path that leads to it, is placed in the forefront of our minds.

In “Seabound,” a doomed love affair is entrenched in a forlorn house and surrounding landscape. The main character, May, lives in the clifftop house, and is trapped in a hopeless shrine to a teenage lover. As her life passes, the sea is described as "clawing its way towards the foundations of that clifftop house." Despite the risk of it falling into the sea, May ignores her daughters’ exhortations to leave the doomed house. The sea is also somehow calling to her, and in her dreams, she tells us that, "Vast and cold, the sea climbed her bare legs. It was rough but she stood her ground. Sometimes, when she woke from these dreams, the sea was so loud it could have been right there in her room."  Only when her dead lover, "a man made of water," and "the seaman," visits her in her dreams, does she answer the call of the sea and she is finally released by one final act of homage to her beloved.

Moore’s powerful depiction of buildings, nature, and the doomed choices of her characters, results in a potent weft of inevitability, calamity, and tragedy, with writing and characters that stay with you long after you have put away her compelling vignettes. 

About the reviewer

Louise has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leicester. She is an Employment Judge and is also working on her first novel.

You can read more about Eastmouth and Other Stories on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Laura Besley of "The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories" by Brian Howell

Brian Howell’s latest collection of short stories, The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories (Salt, 2022), is wonderfully weird. What can be done in a short story, which is much harder to sustain over the length of an entire novel, is to explore feelings and situations that are off-kilter, at odds with the norm. These are narratives that push the boundaries of acceptance and conjure feelings of uneasiness, sometimes even repulsion, but that also challenge views on how people choose, or are forced, to live. 

Lucie McKnight Hardy writes: ‘Sensations brought about by the manifestation of the Uncanny – dread, unease, that inescapable sensation that something is not quite right – have been said to derive from that which is familiar (homely) becoming unfamiliar (unhomely)’ (Writing the Uncanny, pp.9-10). Some of Howell’s stories start out innocent enough, like the opening of ‘Green to Blue’ or ‘The Shore’ wherein a young girl asks the main character which book he is reading. Whereas others drop more quickly into a world that is not quite as it should be. The opening line of the titular story – ‘As Ishii started out on one of his daily walks past the local daycare centre, the screams of the children sounded out’ – could’ve been a man merely taking a stroll, but for a singular word: screams. This word can, of course, be read in various ways, but to me it was immediately unsettling. 

Howell makes great use of silence and space between the characters to heighten their sense of disjointedness which in turn enhances the sense of unease in the reader. One example is from ‘The Folding Man’: ‘[Pippa] seemed not to be looking so much at her mother as into a pocket of space between them’ until a ‘chasm opened up, a resentment that cannot be filled with cheery conversation, it seemed.’ Another is a one-sided conversation in ‘The Shore’ between an American man and a young Asian girl. 

In his essay ‘What My Gland Wants,’ Adam Marek states that ‘the short story reader has the ability to suspend their disbelief to a far greater degree’ (Short Circuit, p.147). This is true in many of the stories within Howell’s collection, not least ‘The Folding Man’ wherein the main character’s skin is peeled back to reveal his organs and ‘wonderfully, no blood spilled anywhere.’

Some argue that short fiction doesn’t need any description; it is only a distraction and readers are able to imagine characters for themselves. Tobias Hill, on the other hand, likens physical character description to ‘having the salt beside you when you are cooking. You don’t need a lot of it … But it is necessary to have just enough’ (Short Circuit, p.108). This singular description of Mandy in ‘Family Tree’ is not only concise, but also serves as foreshadowing for what will later unfold: ‘She seemed concerned over little else but the doll she dragged along in the dirt. I thought how much it resembled her, with its Belisha-beacon orange hair, its staring, unseeing eyes, its fixed, reprimanding expression.’ 

Bearing in mind these elements, I feel The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories, although not for everyone, is not only wonderfully weird, but also weirdly wonderful.  

    

About the reviewer

Laura Besley is the author of three collections of flash & micro fiction: (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred and The Almost Mothers. She is also an editor for Flash Fiction Magazine. She tweets @laurabesley.

You can read more about The Man Who Loved Kuras and Other Stories on Creative Writing at Leicester here.