Review by Laurie Cusack of "Encounters with Everyday Madness" by Charlie Hill

Charlie Hill’s fascinating collection is a tidy reminder that we are all on the mental health spectrum. Every day one sees madness or experiences it in one form or another, as we go about in the world − I know I do!

Opening these splendid off-kilter stories is ‘A walk by the river’ that’s written in the second-person perspective, which grabs the reader’s attention straight away. Hill magnifies a family outing with a nod to the film Deliverance. I have to confess that the frenetic ‘Duelling Banjos’ twanged in my head when I perused this passage: ‘The fish wriggles in the father’s hand and, holding it by its tail, he smashes its head against a stone and tosses its unwanted body into the water. The boy laughs. It is not a pleasant laugh.’ What should be a halcyon walk turns into a brooding ordeal for our detached protagonist and kicks Hill’s collection off, majestically.

In Hill’s captivating ‘Stuff,’ existential angst and anxiety disorder are tackled with humour and aplomb. The nullifying grind of the everyday is deftly realised in elegant style. Hill’s Kafkaesque protagonist gets a dose of inner-city blues over seven days. I loved the hilarious interior monologue conducted whilst he’s walking to the shops on Monday, concerning the fascist household on his route: ‘I think there must be all manner of social-anthropological connections between garden centres and fascism.’ Moreover, Hill’s authentic portrayal of anxiety disorder is spot-on, too. It is well defined and captures someone in mental freefall, exquisitely. In this respect, Hill’s text reminded me of an Akira Kurosawa’s quote: 'In a mad world, only the mad are sane.'

There are no weak narratives within Hill’s collection. Whether flash fiction or short story, all hold the reader throughout. I found this collection, with its superb West Midland detailing, very compelling. ‘The man in the churchyard’ exemplifies this: ‘Through Highgate and into Balsall Heath there is an Islamic Centre and the Moseley Road baths – Men First and Second Class; Listed, with Victoria in its bricks – and a carpet warehouse and shuttered curry houses and then fruit and veg shops with shopkeepers arranging plastic bowls of fruit out front like a market, oranges and tomatoes and mooli and chard. Then there is Zaffs.’  

Hill’s urban sensibility inhabits every inch of Encounters with Everyday Madness and this is truly standout writing, which deserves an audience. Highly recommended.

About the reviewer
Laurie Cusack (PhD) studied Creative Writing at Leicester University. He writes from the gut − from the underground − about the underdog. His collection of short stories The Mad Road was published in September 2023. He is now an actor-simulator, writer and community advocate.

You can read more about Encounters with Everyday Madness by Charlie Hill on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Gus Gresham of "The Mad Road" by Laurie Cusack

As reviewer Alexandros Plasatis says on the back cover, "The Mad Road is a hooligan of a book.” It’s easy to see why as you dive headlong into these riveting, gutsy tales. If you like your fiction cosy and fluffy and all wrapped up with a pink bow, stay clear!

In the opening story, "The Bottle and the Trowel," a man walks out along a soggy rotten board on a scaffold, falls to his near-doom and ends up on life support. "You’ve got to hear this, Gerry!" his friend says at the bedside as he begins to narrate the harrowing circumstances that plague their lives. And this story could be a metaphor for the whole collection. Reading these stories feels like walking along a dodgy scaffold, hoping that the next step you take won’t send you plummeting to the ground where unknown horrors await.

"A Doc Marten boot met the crack of Desmond O’Hara’s arse" is the opening line to "Ghost Estate" in which our anti-hero faces retribution for his exploitative dealings during the years of the Celtic Tiger economy. What will become of him? 

Whether the stories are set in Ireland itself or amid London Irish communities, Cusack serves up a smorgasbord of characters who are as contrary as the day is long. In The Mad Road, we get an up-close-and-intimate perspective on these fallible lives. Lovable smooth-tongued travellers; a young man new to London whose rites of passage bring him face to face with the menacing Zen-like character known as "The Bear"; a woman on the edge making a passionate stand against social injustice; a father who will give anything to get his girl through dancing school.

What will become of any of them? As Oscar Wilde once said, "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." So if you like your fiction gritty, turbulent and off-the-leash, this is the book for you. It has heart, it has soul, it has guts. It will mess with your head.

One thing’s for sure, I’ll probably never be able to look at a building site or a coin-operated laundrette in quite the same way again.

About the Reviewer
Gus Gresham has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing (NTU) and has worked variously as a mechanical engineer, construction worker, fruit picker, community activist for Greenpeace, writer, English tutor, audio-book producer, medical-scenario simulator and facilitator, and building surveyor. He’s had short stories published in literary magazines including Brittle Star and Under the Radar, and his most recent novel, Kyiv Trance – a dark, twisty love story and crime thriller – is available on Amazon. You can read more about Kyiv Trance on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Kate Durban of "In Their Absence" by Hannah Stevens

Countless people are lost every year. Hannah Stevens’s debut collection of short stories is a haunting exploration of what it means to be missing, both for those that disappear and those left behind. She follows her characters so closely that the reader can’t help but feel part of each devastating experience. Each story is breathtaking, and lingers in the memory long after the last beautiful page. 

One after another, the stories deal with yet another view of what it means to lose or be lost or to bear witness to loss: there is death, abduction, and abandonment. There is the couple on holiday who visit a café, where their toddler disappears from under the table when they are momentarily distracted. Then there is the hotel room where a man and a woman have sex after meeting in a bar. They drink and snort cocaine and then she jumps out of the window. And there are numerous others, each as painful and memorable as the last.

Hannah’s seemingly effortless prose brings her stories alive with devastating details that are both deeply authentic and agonisingly poignant. One couple, who are moving out of their house following the disappearance of their child, leave behind an empty swing in the back garden. The worn spots beneath it are being covered over by grass, now growing unimpeded by the feet of the missing child. There is the man who throws himself under a train, witnessed by the woman who innocently follows him to the platform. She likes his Fedora and picks up his still-warm coffee cup from the platform on which he stood just moments before.  The imagery is sparse but beautiful. 

The stories are sometimes connected which adds texture and augments the impact of each already powerful narrative The wife of the man in the fedora  receives his suicide note by text and doesn’t know which service to ask for when she dials 999.There is the story of a woman who runs away and joins the circus, followed by the story of her husband scanning the garden from which she has just disappeared. 

It might be tempting to avoid this book, which shines its lens so relentlessly into the darkness of what it means to be missing. But these stories are like jewels, small, but beautifully complex and bright. In them, perhaps we recognise our own secret desire to renounce our responsibilities, to disappear, as well as the losses we all inevitably experience in life.

About the reviewer
Kate Durban is a Cancer Wellbeing Specialist Nurse who lives in Northamptonshire with her husband and two dogs. She is currently completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Review by Louise Brown of "Between the Lines" by Matthew Bright and Christopher Black

Between The Lines is an unusual and charming love story between a lonely Victorian gentleman and a sad young girl living two centuries later. Dashby is uninterested in the female suitors in his life, while Beth has become jaded by the modern world of dating and casual relationships. She types a bleak text after soulless sex with her ex, although she doesn’t intend to send it, and when she wakes the next day she discovers it has been sent to an unknown recipient. It then mysteriously arrives in the form of a letter to Dashby. He replies to her by letter and she receives it as an email. The ensuing texts, emails and letters become a sort of time travel with both characters traversing the ages and communicating with the other.

The stories intertwine cleverly, and they start to sit side by side on the same page as each narrator tells their story in step with the other. In the 21st century Beth has some terrible sex, and in Dashby’s tale he is being pursued by a keen female admirer who, after he spills hot tea on himself, then insists on trying to dry the stain by rubbing him with a cloth.

The authors repeat this mirroring technique in each story until they merge and coalesce into one  whole. This method of story-telling makes you think about how the real stuff of human existence, matters of the heart that is, never change over the centuries, and speak to the human condition of wanting to find a soul-mate and someone to love. I became immediately invested in both characters and was willing them to overcome the boundaries of time so that each character could have their fairy-tale ending. The writing is beautiful and the form skilful and innovative, and I recommend this original and inventive publication to any reader.  


About the reviewer
Louise Brown is studying for her MA at the University of Leicester. She started writing in the summer of 2018, believing that it is never too late to start something new, and will have her poem 'The Deep Blue' published in Acumen in May 2019. She is writing poetry, short stories and is also working on the first draft of her novel. She lives on a farm in Rutland, and is kept busy working as an employment solicitor, while also writing, reading and looking after her three children. 

Review by Lee Wright of "Selfie and Other Stories" by Nora Nadjarian

'Let me start at the beginning, or what I think is the beginning,' says the unnamed narrator in the story, 'The Gentleman on The Train,' which makes up one of the twenty-five stories in this original collection by Nora Nadjarian, author of previous short story anthologies, Ledra Street (2006) and Girl, Wolf, Bones (2011) along with three further books of poetry. Each story here reflects true passion and intimacy through startling first-person narratives which are built around human contact. And, later on in the same story: 'Smashing girl. I’m a smashing girl, and I don’t even know it, because nobody’s ever called me a smashing girl before. I can just see myself going around, smashing men’s hearts and denting their lives with a hammer and asking them what they’ve done to deserve me.'

Nadjarian is a gifted wrier and in this book, she is at the top of her game. The story 'Truth' opens with 'At the exact moment my neighbour tells her lover “I’m leaving you,” a rainbow appears somewhere behind her.' This is the kind of fiction that shines light on blackness. 

There are pleasing similarities with Raymond Carver and Franz Kafka, whom she writes directly about in the story 'Kafkaesque': 'He hated me till the day he died. He called me a schmuck and he was right.' The collection is full-to-bursting with characters who live with people they think they know but don’t - who speak in puzzlingly witty dialogue, and have us engrossed until the often-ugly outcome.  

The author returns again and again to solitary women reconstructing their thoughts and desperate dreams: 'I’m a character in a play, but I’ve forgotten my lines ... In the kitchen my mother makes babies with flour and eggs ... My sister said she was carrying a bird inside her, a bird which would soon be drinking water out of her navel. “I am a cage,” said my sister.'
  
Nadjarian doesn’t concern herself with such old-fashioned basics as plot. Because life isn’t about plot, but about glimpses, moments. Some of these stories are just good moments, while others are purely wonderful.    
  

About the reviewer

Lee Wright was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire in 1980 and has been writing both fiction and non-fiction since 2008. He is taking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester.

Review by Terry Potter of "Goat Music" by Will Buckingham

This review is also published on The Letter Press Project here.


The stories and myths of the Classical World remain an enduring source of inspiration to contemporary authors who reinterpret, rewrite and recreate both the stories and moral lessons the originals are so rich in. Will Buckingham, novelist, philosopher and university Reader, has added to this body of work with his take on the tale of Marsyas, the Greek satyr who challenged the God Apollo to a music competition.


One of the attractions of revisiting the original sources lies in the way the stories are so open to interpretation - character, motivation and detail can be invented and reinvented time and again without compromising the integrity of the tale. On top of the written versions, the oral tradition can also add a layer of extra interest or complexity to the stories and these versions provide more material to draw on. In crude terms the original stories of Marsyas tell of how he found the double-flute or aulos made by the goddess Athena which she has cast aside in a rage when the other gods made fun of the face she made when she played the instrument. The satyr goes on to claim his musical prowess is greater than that of the great Apollo and challenges this infamously wrathful God to a competition. Marsyas loses and is flayed alive for his presumption.


These tales are often interpreted as a warning against hubris - how could even the most talented mortal being defeat a god? How could he be so deluded? Other commentators have focussed more on the fact that Marsyas is actually defeated by a rather underhand trick that unfairly benefits Apollo and emphasise the great skill and wisdom of the satyr - qualities unusual in their kind. A line of thinking that Buckingham has seized on in his retelling.


The story Buckingham tells us gives Marsyas and the gods he associates with a much more rounded - even modern - set of characteristics and back stories that make the individuals come alive. He's largely sympathetic to the satyr who, although by no means perfect, is ultimately the flawed hero of the book and a victim of a cold, vengeful, chilling Apollo who punishes the mistakes of mortals with no hint of mercy or proportion. Indeed the tale Buckingham tells us is essentially a humanist one - the gods are largely spiteful, arbitrary, self-centred and generally driven by shabby motives and the only sense of mercy or empathy is found in the mortal but chastened Midas - who has learned the hard way that the gods are not to be trusted.


This is indeed a story of incautious hubris but in Buckingham's hands its also a tale of the arbitrariness of power and exercising that power for the pleasure of the cruelty it can inflict. Power exercised in this fashion robs the victim of their identity and their dignity just as Apollo robs Marsyas of his skin.


I read this story at one sitting and that's a tribute to Buckingham's storytelling powers - this rips along at a fair old pace - and it's full of incident and pretty graphic detail. This is, of course, one of the other advantages of using these stories of the Classical world - they are ram packed with sex and violence and Buckingham embraces these elements with glee.


Whatever messages you take way from this reinvention of the Marsyas stories the one thing I can guarantee is that you'll be drawn into a vivid and visceral reading experience that you'll find hard to put down
 
About the reviewer
Terry Potter is a Senior Lecturer in Working with Children, Young People and Families at Newman University, Birmingham. He is also joint founder of The Letterpress Project, a not for profit initiative that promotes the importance of the printed book.