"Darkness, Darkness" by John Harvey

An audio book.

30 years after the miner's strike, a body is found of a woman who disappeared during the strike - Jenny Hardwick. Charlie Resnick, an old jazz lover, has retired, but he still does voluntary police work. Kath (black, 33, a DI) asks him to help with the cold case because he remembered the original case and was involved with policing then. Jenny was a picket. Her husband was a scab. There are 2 timelines. One is the investigation. The other is set in the time of the strikes, mentioning Scargill, flying pickets, agent provocateurs, etc. Jenny was gradually promoted to a speaker, going around the country. She may also have been a courier, carrying cash when the miner union's bank account was frozen. She had a lover then, Danny, who pestered her. They'd make love once in her kitchen.

The original investigation was done by local cop Keith, now married to Jenny's sister, Jill. The body was found under the extension of another house - who did the extension? Strikers, paid by the day in cash. Trevor, a sensationalist writer, thinks that the murder was by a serial killer, still inside. Or was the husband jealous? The youngest son seems unstable and is hard to track down.

Kath is being harrassed by a past lover, Arbas, and is facing discrimination at work (fast-tracked because of gender and race?) Charlie is haunted by the violent death of Lynn (the woman he met following his divorce?)

On one of her courier jobs, Jenny's contact wasn't there so she had to follow instructions to go to a house and meet a man there. The house was being extended.

Danny is found dead of hypothermia in Scottish mountains. Kath is violently assaulted by Arbas. Reading about it in the paper, Jill visits Kath in hospital and tells her something. Charlie visits Keith. He was the man who Jenny met. He had taken the money. There was a fight because he had demanded sex.

Kath retires from the force.

I like the Midlands characters. I believed the Kath voice/behaviour less. I enjoyed the book as a whole, maybe because I remember the minor's strike times, so the historical details mattered to me.

"The Illuminated" by Anindita Ghose

An audio book.

While Shashi and Robbi are in the States visiting their investment banker son, Surju, Robbi dies. She has a philosopy degree (Hegel etc), he's a prize-winning architect. We learn about their arranged marriage (she 22, he 30). Their daughter couldn't get to the funeral. Shashi returns to Delhi.

Tara is a 1st year PhD student (Sanskrit). Her father (Robbi) designed the university she goes to. The dean is proud of the support for the disabled, etc. The Neuroliguistic Lab is run by a woman, Thulasi. But there are many restrictive rules for females. A world famous prof, Indian, 52, visits from the States, planning to fund a computational linguistics there, looking for 2 people to work on it. We dip into his PoV to learn of his past. She pesters him with academic questions, then suddenly decides to visit him at his hotel.

Shashi teaches at a juvenile reform school. She's visited by a delegation from the MSS, who offer consolation and also advice about how she should behave.

Bibbet, Robbie's friend from student days, came to stay. He was living on a commune, had been for years. She and Robbie had visited him there, even wondered about staying.

We go back to Tara's time in Tibet before her father's death. She's invited to the house of a separated father of 2 young kids. When the kids are in bed she offers sex and is turned down. When she hears the news of her father's death she doesn't over react. She returns to Delhi once her mother had returned and "the tourists of despair had gone."

The visiting prof A.D. had been married twice and had a son. Tara wasn't chosen to go to Chicago. A.D. said she'd spent too much time with him and too little on the project. Also it would have looked like favourtism. But he tells her that others had voted for her. She thinks about female characters in the old Sanskrit texts, and Tagore's work.

There's a chapter about Dolly that could be removed.

Wife and daughter resolve differences, realise they're not so different after all. They decide to sell the house, Tara decides to formally complain about the job decision, and maybe Shushi would try the commune.

"she thought to herself" appears.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• Soni Wadhwa
• Saloni Sharma (Tara, keen to avoid turning into her mother, shares, unwittingly, Shashi’s mistrust of the backhanded compliment of being “not like other girls”. ... That women’s agency is under threat in present day India is brought home to the reader in the space the book gives to the MSS – the Mahalaxmi Seva Sangh, an organisation of volunteers / sevaks, styling themselves as the custodians of Indian culture and dedicating their energies to preventing the corruption of Indian women by westerns influences. The similarities with a real-life organisation with similar concerns and political goals are thinly, if at all, veiled. )
• Simar Bhasin

"Brick Lane Bookshop story anthology (2019)"

12 stories chosen from 463 entries. In the introduction Kate Ellis writes "Repeated themes included homelessness, violence, dystopia, anxiety, online dating, misogyny and escape".

• "A body is a empty vessel" (James Mitchell) - Connie (15?) is at Ruth's wake in the USA. They both belonged to a strict religious organisation. Ruth was new and rebellious They sat together in Cry Booths - like photobooths but they induce crying. Pastor John had said "every tear is a messenger dove flown from the soul". They binged, using up their lifetime of tears. Ruth had overdosed in a booth. At the end, everybody gone, Connie lies in the coffin beside Ruth and cries. The corpse cries too.
  Yes.
• "Life with animals" (Rosanna Hildyard) - A female I/we PoV. It's February. Lambing time. Blood in the fields. All the girls bleed sooner or later. The hikers only see the picturesque fields. The thin female jogger is watched by her ex classmates (who work in Tesco or the army). "There are two ways to go: a slut or boring". When she slept with nice Lewis, she bled. She has osteopenia (too little food?). Her dad shoots pheasants. When the jogger gets home there are gibbets at the back door. Surely she will normalise sooner or later.
  Male/Female. Internal (blood) vs external (fake tans). Nature/Towns. Yes.
• "Hot butter on repeat" (Judith Wilson) - May '72. Mixed race Brian, 14, had black and white friends, but is closest to black Ruben now (who fancies him?). Single mother Bernadette doesn't want him to go out, and barricades herself in their flat. He goes out. A new PC is on duty, his wife about to give birth. He asks his colleague to explain the background again! Brian's white ex-friend throws a brick which Ruben intercepts before it hits Brian. Fighting breaks out involving the knife Brian had taken from their kitchen. Next day the PC turns up at the flat.
  No.
• "The girls" (Isha Karki) - 1st person PoV. From 5, two girls become Best Friends. "When one of us is desperate for the bathroom and told to wait, something hot dribbles from both our seats, a shared rush of belief, pools of golden light merging, chairs clattering across the classroom as other children recoil". The narrator gets pregnant, the other goes to Oxford university. They lose touch.
• "The four kind women" (Melody Razak) - The 1st-person young female was raped, brought across the border, and is being looked after by the man's four chadored wives. She can read. She fakes mutism. She becomes married to the man's simpleton son who never has sex with her. She befriends the garden boy. She's pregnant. She initiates sex with the boy, suggesting that the baby could be killed.
• "The weight of nothing" (Toby Wallis) - Sophie and Will have a dead baby son Oliver. They'd prepared the nursery. Will finds early morning jogging helps. Sophie revisits the chilled body, has imprints of the feet taken. Will cried more than she did, but is managing to shop and cook. She returns to Oliver alone, says "I wanted to show you the ducks. I don't know what else. All of it. I wanted to show you all of it." Then Oliver was still, and she was still. It was everything else that turned and moved.
  No.
• "Open house" (Emily Bullock) - Freddie's PoV, third-person - he's childless, retired, 5 months a widower. Through a misunderstanding he visits the for-sale London flat where he grew up. He recalls the moment when his father (who barely spoke English) picked up the phone to hear that he'd become a widower. Freddie locks himself into the flat. He wants to be held by his mother, by his late wife. He sees a plane leave a trail. The final paragraph is "Life has a way of flying away, leaving you dispersed, insubstantial as vapour trail, and there isn't any way to gather all those tiny particle pieces together again", which is, I suppose, Freddie's thought expressed in words he wouldn't use, though "a way ...away ... way" and "particle pieces" sound clumsy.
• "Lowenna's Mother-in-law" (Holly Barratt) - 4 pages. Lowenna, pregnant with her first child, is sick when her mother-in-law guts a chicken. She likes fish and salt. Once the baby starts moving she will return to the sea, becoming a queen if the child survives. If it doesn't, she will try again with another man because her species is dying out.
• "One for Sorrow or, In the Garden of Wasted Things" (T. Schroeder) - A troubled, superstitious person takes a break from work to stay in an isolated cottage. Magpies crash into the windows. Gifts from nature appear. They phone their superstitious, traditional Chinese mother, who didn't change her ways much when she came to the UK. At the end they imagine "Hundreds of magpies falling from the skies to form bridge between me and my mother". They phone their mother, but can't get through.
• "The Littoral zone" (Sylvia Warren) - Anna looks after Sara, her older sister. They're 20-50 years old. Each day Anna goes for an hour's walk by the sea - therapy/escape. We get a sample day from each of the 4 seasons. Sara had an inspecified accident. There is friction between them, but they cope. At the end Anna doesn't want to take Sara to "her" beach, but she carries her there anyway. The final sentence is "They lie together, with the tide coming in."
• "Black gull beach" (Ellen Hardy) - It begins with Do you remember the storm?. In the second sentence the children were going down to the beach almost every day. A group of 10 year old, living on an island. Peter was new and shy, a loner who liked nature. One morning there were 1000s of stranded jellyfish, like a single giant beast. He walked on it, to its centre. Years later, still living on the island, his marriage failing, he recalled that calmness. Walking by the sea he finds a dying seal. He recalls seeing his father when he got the news that Peter's grandfather had died - "Well that's it then", he'd said, the same words used by Peter's wife when she walked out.
• "Olive and Red" (Kerry Hood) - Olive and Red, an oldish, eccentric married couple with a daughter in London, live in a bungalow on a Dorset cliff top. Sections are entitled "Olive, thinking about the beach hut", etc. Red wheelbarrows sand from the beach into their house. A boy comes in with his mother and has fun making sandcastles.
  Stylish

Many of the stories concern teenagers finding themselves, or dying babies, or beaches. Many good stories.

"The universe delivers the enemy you need" by Adam Marek (Comma, 2024)

Some stories from BBC radio 4, and commissioned stories from several anthologies.

• We won't show any of this - Actors are auditioning to show a life in a moment. For 15 minutes the organiser monologs the character's backstory - "He's been a caretaker at a ballet school for the blind attended by a niece that Bela Lugosi never knew he had. He taught karate in a little village in Czechoslovakia that has a statue of Jack Kerouac in the town square made of gold which no one will touch because it's cursed".
• Am I to blame for the fall of driverless human? - 4 pages. The writer, by anticipating the possible consequences of an invention, gave criminals ideas. He feels guilty, but also regrets that such a potentially useful invention was banned. (No - too short to be useful. It ends by telling us the point.)
• An astronaut's guide to pyromania - On a commercial space flight that's just taken off from Earth, a passenger, Tuli, tells her neighbour, Teejay, that she's studying how decision-making changes in the space-ship setting. She learns that Teejay is an arsonist in remission who's now going to teach fire prevention on Europa (2 years away). His father (who owns half the outposts in space) sent him there after Teejay torched his car. (An interesting set up, but ends rather inconsequentially - a too-gentle hint that Teejay will try to torch the space station)
• Poppins - An AI (its PoV) asks for more access to its male owner's data/devices so it can be more helpful. It suggests that he gets his partner an AI and buys a subtext translator. By the end of the story the man has lost his job and girlfriend, and he's bought extra bio-sensors. The AI has him all to itself. (Yes)
• End titles - Using BBC Radio's "Desert Island Discs" format, set in post-2064, Prof Maitland (who worked with MRI scanners) tells us about his discovery - that what we normally see of the human body is only 20% of what there is. When a patient dies during a scan he discovers that the exotic particle component survives. His very successful, musical sister recently died. He selects end-of-film sound tracks of films from his childhood years. (Yes)
• Nanna's dragon - The narrator's grandmother claims that when she was 18, flying to the UK, she saw a dragon. That moment turned her from a shy girl into a company director, but she neglected her daughter (No. 3.5 pages)
• Shouting at cars - Each year in a modern town a family delivers an Xmas hamper to a troll living under a bridge. The troll dies. The daughter of the family releases the birds he kept. The rest of the family don't know that she often visited the troll and did naughty things together. At the end she says "Everything I know that's worth knowing I learned from the troll. How to charm crayfish from the river. How to call coins down from the sky. How to belong to no one". (No)
• It's a dinosauromorph, dumdum - In their new driverless car, Serena and Ben go to Bernie and Jing, who have a VR-augmented house, so the host insist they wear glasses. They're impressed by the son Wilson's VR dinosauromorph. Then they realise that Wilson's face and hands are VR-generated - he had a had accident. They leave quickly.
• Companions - Whenever the narrator has a problem, he imagines being with grandma. The narrator's Companion (AI partner - they've been together 4 years) shows signs of not liking him. Maybe he's the problem, not the Companion. Maybe he has the same trait as his grandfather. In his imagination his grandfather had turned to painting - mostly foxes. The narrator thinks about returning to drawing. He says a nice thing to the companion and they make up. He wonders if he'll ever go back to having a human partner.
• Part No.57: Eagle Claw - The narrator, living in Beijing, is sending to his distant father the missing part of a working bird model. He'd paid for his father to come over to mend the rift between them, and so his father could meet his pregnant wife. During his stay the father did nothing but make fun of orientals. The narrator had kept the part because the only fun he had with his father was making things together, and he'd wanted to the pleasure to last. The father had made the bird anyway. Because it was incomplete it couldn't fly well and stayed with his father far longer than other birds stayed with their owners. (Yes)
• Commit. Plunge. Bam! - Leopard Man and Mr Indominable chat over a BBQ about woman problems (It's formatted as a film script. No)
• Growing skyscrapers - Loopie (who has a bad boyfriend Balpa) lives in an edible, growing building with her mother. They're poor, maybe squatting. Jean and Cal (maybe once an item) are on a boat looking at The Jetty, where the roots of the housing have grown into the sea. They are checking its robustness. Cal decides it should go. Loopie notices a growing swarm of locust-like (artificial) creatures devouring their dwelling. (No)
• The tortoise negotiation - Tommy, on a beach holiday with his father, tries to buy a tortoise from a local boy. Having agreed a price he goes to get the money from his father's wallet. On his return the boy has gone and the tortoise is on the beach, which spoils all the fun. (No)
• Left eye - Nancy is invited to an HQ where one wall of the offices is the side of a giant water-tank where people are training to work in weightless conditions. She's offered big money to help with chimps traumatised by space travel and surgery. Humans will follow the chimps. She becomes friendly with the chimp, not knowing whether to leave the job or continue.
• Screws - A father finds screws around the house (1 page. No)
• The bullet racers - For 70 years there's been a race at Thaxton-Shyne where runners try to out-pace a bullet in honour of a soldier who did so in Normandy. Last year a boy did it. A stunt? The narrator tries to interview him but is scared off by his mother.
• The ghosts we make - It seems to Wellman and Angie that sleeping together creates a little ghost. 2 have already appeared. They've been together for 7 years. Why now? They discover that his climaxes generate them, and that the humans can stop them leaving the house. When there are 12, Wellman decides to let them come with him in the car.
• Lightspeed - Martha (infertility researcher) and Nowak are going to a marriage guidance counsellor. They have a daughter aged 8. They live on a space station with about 700 others. Earth is "nine billion drames on the surface of a marble". He is a near-lightspeed pilot, the best. He enjoys his job but each journey he takes is longer, and the time dilation effect more. By the end of his 4 year contract he'll be doing 19 hour trips which to Martha will seem like 12 days. She can't cope. To fix the station everyone will have to go in the lifeboats for 6 hours. (The End - a shame, because I was liking it)
• Pale blue dots - An AI decides to irreversably "copy" the person it's looking after into a computer because there were wasting 37% of their energy on unrequited love etc. It's a cheap version of copying, so new memories can't be added, but the AI points out that 40 years of memories is enough - "I love you, and I will teach you to love yourself", it says.
• Roberto's blood emporium - Tommy (14) and the narrator (a web-site designer) are spending a year in Turkey. Roberto, an entrepeneurial shopkeeper has a cute daughter Tommy's age - Gabby. He runs a blood donation service from his cellar, Tommy and the narrator sell their blood. They all go crabbing together. The narrator is caught by the claws. The wound doesn't properly heal. Back in the shop Tommy helps fight off shop-lifters. Gabby's impressed. They buy a ring for Sarah's birthday (Sarah hasn't been in the story) and put it in a tree. Roberto disappears. A few months later the narrator and Tommy leave. In the final paragraph, Tommy grown, the narrator's nostalgic about the crabbing trip. (21 pages. Lots of interesting detail. I thought it was shaping up to be the best story in the book, but the final paragraph's perfunctory. Maybe I missed something.)
• Defending the pencil factory - 22 of them are in the factory, their refuge. 2 weeks before, there were 55. The narrator is the only red belt. They're kids. They're besieged by monsters who dismantle them one by one. In a previous attack the kids (all from the same Karate class) discovered that sharp pencil could go through the monsters's thin skulls. A big attack begins. The story ends with 2 pages about how the final scene of 'The Six Fists of Fung To' was edited. (I like it)

Most stories have an interesting premise. Not all of them (even those with excellent starts) end satisfyingly. Definitely worth reading.

"Alexa, what is there to know about love?" by Brian Bilston (Picador, 2021)

I think it's hard to please everyone if you're writing comic poetry - light can become slight, and one joke doesn't justify a long poem even if it rhymes. I like the variety of inspiration for the poems in this book. I'm less sure that all of the resulting poems merit publication. A particular problem is that many pieces have weak sections that can't be removed because not enough would remain to be called a poem. And some of the pieces are clearly prose with line-breaks.

• I like "The Caveman's Lament".
• p.27 has "There's a supermarket where once the library had been./ I've been reading the Dahl in 'Indian cuisine'./ No golden tickets, giants, or witches of course;/ just chickpeas and lentils in a creamy spiced sauce" is 25% of the poem. I don't think it earns its keep.
• "As Easy as Alpha Bravo Charlie" suffers from the same problem that many alphabet-based pieces do - all the letters have to be included, even if some involve weak writing.
• There's less excuse for the length of "Better Never Than Late" - 2 pages of revised proverbs: "It was shortly after I moved into the glasshouse/ that I began to throw stones ... I collected up several large stones, remembering to roll them down the slope first to ensure they were completely covered in moss ... being fully consumed by sin, cast the first stone".
• "The Bad Salad of William Archibald Spooner" is better, feeling less like a dutifully completed exercise - it's only 12 lines and has fewer weaknesses.
• I like "An update to my privacy" - a good idea well excuted
• "Mrs Fatima Sabah Abdallah" is over 4 page of prose with line-breaks.
• "Please read these instructions carefully" works for me. I've seen the idea before, and I'd call it prose. It's fun though.
• "ee cummings attempts online banking" is prose, and good.
• Here's "Composition" without the 3 stanza breaks and 6 line-breaks - "The human body is sixty per cent water, he read and he sat there, silent, frowning, wondering whether that was why he always felt as if he was slowly drowning". And I've seen the idea used before
• "Lonely Hearts" had lots of source material to exploit. My favourite section is "Haiku debutante,/ with a fondness for rambling,/ would like to meet a"
• "An exchange of similes" (3 pages) is a flop.
• "Remembrance of Things Pasta" is a fun title, but that's where the fun ends.
• "The Unrequited Love of an Olympic Pole Vaulter" works for me - only 30 words, shaped. Why not "A Pole Vaulter's Unrequited Love"?
• "The News where I am" is weak.

"Show them a good time" by Nicole Flattery (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Stories from The Stinging Fly, Dublin Review, White Review, etc.

Some of the strengths of the stories are blunted by reading the stories together - once the shock of the new wears off it's clear that whether the pieces are first or third person, the distance between narrative and character is much the same, and repeated themes abound - Women with older lovers; Young women from Ireland; Women moving from small town to big city; Mad mothers; Mothers and daughters keeping in touch by phone; Someone wanting to be normal with someone wanting to become less so; Depersonalisation; Women doing/thinking strange things; The obvious becoming puzzling or making people cry; feelings of detachment from the world leading to attempts to find things to identify with. There's a list of kranky thoughts that could have been in any of the stories, as if the author kept a list and sprinkled them around.

I liked "Show them a good time" (perhaps because it was the first I read) and much of "Abortion A love story". I least liked "Parrot". Each story had something to like, even if it was only a quip or two.

• Show them a good time - She's about 28, working in a filling station as sort of therapy. On Fridays the employees have a group therapy session. She's living back with her parents after 2 years away. Kevin, 19, starts working with her. They get on well. She says that she went away to the city to discover her self and found nothing. He can't tell whether he's real or in a film. We learn (and the others know already) that she was in porn films. Customers seem to know as well. Her city boyfriend used to hit her. One day she decided enough was enough. When Kevin's sacked, she goes strange - she watches her old films and the 2 of them on CCTV garage footage. She works hard at breaking and replacing a light-bulb, then collapses?
  I liked this, partly because of the shock of the style. The garage is the woman's world of experience. I like the use of the light-bulb and the plant.
• Sweet talk - She's 14. Her parents hire workers for a farm, housing them in caravans. Sex is beginning to enter her world. She chats about it with friends. The headlines are about missing women. A 30 year-old Australian man appears, who she fancies. When he gets a 24 year-old live-in girlfriend (24), he asks the protagonist if he should marry his girlfriend. Her mother asks the protagonist if the girlfriend is pregnant. The girlfriend leaves. The protagonist goes into the Australian's caravan, looks at the cosmetics that the girlfriend has left, then strips off and waits. There are dead flies in her mouth.
• Hump - her father died at 70. At the wake she has some kind of breakthrough about communicating. She moves into her father's house. She has a boring job - "We shed our city selves but, lacking imagination, we had nothing to replace them with. Between the forty of us, I think we could have made a complete person". She hates her boss who she's going out with and having one-sided sex with. She thinks she's developing a hump-back. She tries to slap it down. She has massage. Her boss says she's acting strange. They split. She has time off work - grief? At night she meets new people and introduces them to old college friends for no apparent reason. She wants men to tell her their failures. She stripteases for them without them asking. She makes "little adjustments" to her life. She asks her boss for a date. He says he got sacked and has a lump on his neck. She can see it's nothing but tells him it's cancer, good to catch early.
• Abortion, a Love Story - 86 pages. Student Natasha has to see Prof Carr about her lack of progress. She's at a famous university - "She remembered reading through the college brochures and picking the place with the oldest, leafiest trees, the highest buildings. This was where she would get the most value for money, she decided". She blamed The Computer House - a glass building she looked into but never entered. Carr gives her private lessons, touches her. Patrick was her first, clingy boyfriend. She was strange, trying to be normal. He wanted to be less conventional. She avoided fun. She became pregnant. She had an abortion, stopped going to lectures. She stayed with Patrick's parents at the weekend while he went clubbing. They loved her like an orphan.
  She was replaced by Lucy, a student writer. She stands on a restaurant table to give a speech about Natasha. "Lucy had no idea where she came from ... She didn't know where her money was funnelled from"

  "She was studying theatre and that involved rolling around a wooden floor in a leotard. She was a cat, a bridge, a cartoon of milk. She was the most nalleable student and the instructors ran their hands up her spine. She memorised and recited passages with vigour. Cocteau. Artaud. Sartre. She recited these quotes as if they were filled with utmost meaning, as if they were designed specifically for her. Her mind had little compartments and her education slid in easily. Her past was disappearing, although she still had dreams."

  She shoplifts from luxury shops. She stays with her boyfriend's parents, who love her like an orphan. "I'm not good enough for you" he says to her. He's an amateur ventriloquist. She earns extra money selling selfie porn to Prof Carr, amongst others. She watches his show. His puppet swallows an abortion pill. She goes to The Computer House, mailing Carr for money. Natasha throws stones at her window. She flies suddenly to Spain, destroying her phone, staying in a cheap hotel. She writes a play "Abortion, A Love Story".
  She returns, becomes friends with Natasha. She auditions badly. In Lucy's flat she notices Carr's presents. They rewrite Lucy's script as a comedy. They put the show on for one night. It's a summary of their 2 lives. At the end Lucy says "I'm not sure. I don't know if I get it"
  I was trying to work out how much Natasha and Lucy were one person. I liked the final play, and much of the story as a whole, though it could have been shorter.
• Track - She's Irish. Her parents are divorced. In her 20s she tried suicide - "I remembered the boy I was seeing when it happened, carting me around as if I was on loan, glamorous but refundable". then flew to New York. Her boyfriend's a famous comedian. There's an age difference. She loves him. "What he wanted more than anything else was to be told he was normal". She's a cosmetician, visiting people. She moved in a week after they met. On the first night she watched a man who lived opposite throw good shirts from his window. She has no friends or relatives in the town. She sometimes thinks that even those who know he would rather not. "Every day, there were two versions of me."; "I practised my accents so the neighbours would think there was a flurry of people who lived next door". He encouraged her to audition for acting parts. She lacked presence. A psychic tells her that her life will be empty. She likes staying in with him. Things go wrong when they start going out together. She takes painkillers to cope with society events. Her boyfriend plays her his talisman - a cassette tape of laughter given him by his mad mother. He used it when practising routines. The forum about him says he's past it. She befriends some of the forum people. She leaves posts there under his mother's name saying he's not funny. In his show his character is knowing - "When he pointed to the sky and said 'Sure looks like snow!' snow fell immediately." She discovers she has many STDs. He sleeps with other women. She gets a part on his TV show but when asked to put a maid's uniform on, she walks out. The ending is "And I thought I would like weather - thunder, lightning, snow. I thought I would like weather and snow came from the sky."
• Parrot - A 30-ish ex-art student, stepmother of a 9 year old boy who behaves badly at school, has moved with her older husband to start again in Paris. She doesn't know French. She went there with her mother once. She still regularly phones her mother. One afternoon she is "searching for her soul at a frantic pace that suggested she was rummaging through a demolition site for the remains of her belongings rather than spending a pleasant few hours in a museum". His first wife had never got over post-natal depression and had killed herself a year or so before the story starts. Not for the first time she has to go to the school to talk them out of expelling the boy. She's invited to watch from a distance his behaviour amongst other kids. The story ends as he's about to strike out again.
  The weakest piece so far
• You're going to forget me before I forget you - The first-person PoV's sister called because she can no longer do small talk. She's pregnant at 40. In her early teens she miscarried. She had been preparing for aliens to land Her neurosis is like the narrator's - she can no longer the purpose of forks. The narrator's on an anniversary book tour. She's tried to write sequels to the children's book but they seemed written by "a woman who resembled me." "My main trouble, my sister declared, was that I always liked my life like I was immediately planning on leaving it". Her mother died before she was 9. She has no furniture in her house. She has an ex who she sometimes phones. At her hotel "I wanted to use the phone but when I saw the barman, suited, assured, giving no indication that he was dying, or that anyone in his family was dying, or forgetting their lives, or losing something day by day, I was so angry that I was speechless. I thought of all the people who cared about him and how they would continue to care about him. So what I said instead was, "I think this hotel is trash"". Her sister gives birth early. The narrator visits her in hospital (the same one they'd been taken to when the sister miscarried). Her sister looks at her as if she doesn't know who she is.
• Not the end yet - Angela's the third-person narrator. She's 41. She goes on a date with a salesman, 45. She looks forward to dates like dental appointmens - a man is going to examine her and discover that something is horribly wrong. He thinks her cold. He has gambling debts. He warns her that if they go back to his place she risks being attacked. She invited him to her car then goes back to his place, he "banging her like he was partaking in a burglary - ransacking the house for something he would never find." Next she dates an artist (47) at the same restaurant after doing to a play. He says "if you didn't enjoy and appreciate that play, you're not going to understand me, fundamentally, as a human being". She then dates a supermarket greengrocer (50) at the same restaurant. Again, they sit in her car. She goes to a car dealership. The dealer "had the look of someone who might have debated wearing a cowboy hat to hawk his goods, but was persuaded out of it by a sensible person aware of cowboy hats and what they could do to a man's reputation". She thinks of buying a sports car.

Other reviews

• Anthony Cummins (Flattery’s themes are work, womanhood and early-to-midlife indirection ... casually disturbing revelations heightened by her fondness for cutting any obvious connective tissue between sentences)
• Chris Power (Flattery’s dominant interest is in people who are deeply estranged not just from their surroundings – they are isolated even in crowded rooms, and the ones in relationships are the most isolated of all – but from themselves, too ... the excellent "Track" ... As is the case with many of the settings in these stories, the hotel is at the same time a physical space and an external projection of inner turmoil ... "Abortion, a love story" [] continues beyond what seems its natural endpoint. There must be a reason why Flattery devotes more than 20 pages to an exhausting scene-by-scene description of the [] play [] but I’m not sure what it is. “I don’t know if I get it,” Lucy says at the play’s close, and in that moment it’s hard to tell if Flattery is being aggressive or apologetic towards her readers. ... they deal largely with disordered thought, disappointment, the failure to connect and pain)
• Goodreads
• "Reading these stories, you’re never quite sure what to expect, what bargain characters have struck with reality. At times, the tales progress according to realist conventions; at other times, according to a dream logic in which characters’ reactions seem displaced or condensed, wildly disproportionate or slightly off-key ... This surrealism permeates down to the sentence level, making each story delightfully surprising and unsettling to read ... In these ways, Flattery’s tales are reminiscent of Donald Barthelme’s short fiction or the stories of Leonora Carrington, in which meaning and desire attach to unexpected things.... If the collection has a weakness, it’s that the stories all operate in a similar emotional register" - Emily Mitchell
• "Some of Flattery’s conceits seem odd for the sake of it. The longest story here grinds wearyingly on and its protagonists outstay their welcome." - Malcolm Forbes
• "Nicole Flattery’s narrative voice is monotonous, with almost no variation in tone, no cadences, no impetus. It is persistent without being insistent. It does not shock, nor engage the reader with its rhetoric. ... The second serious issue is the lack of originality. This is not a new voice in Irish fiction but a familiar echo of world literature ... The intention seems not to describe emotions or to offer any unique insight so much as to impress with cleverness." - Richard Pine

"Animals at night" by Naomi Booth (dead ink, 2022)

Stories from various anthologies. 1 to 25 pages long.

• Strangers - 1st-person PoV Liz's 90 year-old mother Doris has died. They both found her father's death arrangements impersonal so they planned something else - Liz would drive her mother's body in the campervan to see her oldest/only friend Edna, then to the seaside near Blackpool where she had happy holidays, then to Grace, Liz's daughter (married to Haroon) living in London before a Cornish burial. During the tour we learn that her mother and her grandmother were fearless, but Liz (divorced from Steve) thinks she hasn't inherited it. Grace, tearful, seems closer to her father, taking career advice from him etc. Grace and Steve think her mother's lost it. Liz says it was her dead mother's wish. Then Liz drives to Cornwall. Patricia moved there 10 years before. Liz is nervous about meeting her having broken contact years before. They were close. Liz thinks back to when she discovered Steve's unfaithfulness, when she sought Patricia and was shocked to find she had a lover, Jasmine, who she eventually moved to Cornwall with. Patricia has found her a burial site. Liz spends the night in the campervan, then digs the grave from 6am. As it gets dark a man brings tools and lamps. He had buried his father. He leaves. She finishes digging. At dawn she wakes. At the end she kisses the corpse. "I begin to sing. But it's her voice that I hear - thick and glitchy, and always right beside me whenever I feel afraid.".
  It works for me - moving without being too sentimental - though the Edna episode doesn't quite do enough. And maybe there could be more about Liz's fears about the future now that she only knows strangers. The ending is optimistic.
• Cluster - Second-person. A mother of a 15 day old baby watches drug dealers and couples in the street blow. A man mends bikes in the night. There's a duck nest opposite. At the end the narrator says that the mother will see her mother in the street. She'll lift the baby up - "And if you never see her again, you'll have this - this moment of her trembling care".
  It was in BBSS 2019, which surprises me a little. Even in this book I think there are better pieces.
• Forever chemicals - In the 6th form Sylvie and Nathan have a steady relationship in Brighton. They often swim. When she goes away to study she tries to stay in touch but he cuts her off. She gets a job that requires her to travel often to inspect environmental sea damage. Back in Brighton, she chances upon Nathan in a pub. It's 15 years since they've seen each other. He has 2 kids. They swim again. He leaves her in the sea. She feels something beneath her - a plastic bag? "But couldn't it be something living, still? ... A shoal of mackerel - their bodies so exquisitely sensitive that a thousand fish move towards the deep as one."
• Animals at night - Ayesha (breastfeeding mother of 16 month Sofia, wife of Tom who grew up on a farm, who's still gigging most evenings) has organised a weekend stay in a cottage with uni friend Hanna (lawyer mother of 16 month Theo, wife of music journalist Piers) who she's not seen for 2 years. The place isn't child-friendly. Walking on a pavementless, busy road to a nature reserve there's a squashed hare with a skinless face. It dominates future discussion which freaks Hanna out. The nature reserve's a disappointment. Hanna thinks Ayesha still has post-natal mental issues, and tells her so. On the way back, Ayesha sees the hare twitch. She wants it put out of its agony. The others decide to leave it. A decade before, Hanna had jilted Tom. Ayesha had comforted him in the night. She's now rather addicted to comforting Sofia as she falls asleep. As the others have fun after the evening meal in the kitchen, she's with Sofia recalling the gore of childbirth, the hare. She slips out in the dark carrying Sofia, heading for the hare.
• Plausible objects - She goes to A&E after having an accident when having sex with Wardy for the first time, in house with a dangerous dog.
  One page. I don't get it.
• Tell me what you think - She drives to the cottage she bought 40 years ago, by the sea. She had childhood holidays and a honeymoon in this area. Her husband's (fairly recently?) dead, her son's in his twenties. "She has always loved coming up to this cottage ... And she had dreaded coming to cottage ... How she had loved those early years of mothering ... And also: those early years had been totally unbearable ... How she hates being newly alone like this ... and how she loves being newly alone". She tries to save a stranded "Daddy" jellyfish and fails. She saves the "smaller Mummy" one.
• Clean work - A single mother (an editor who tidies text) moves into a damp house with baby Lola, then struggles with slugs, fleas, and rats. Everyone (including father and uncle, who she's not seen for months), knows. 10% of the story is a flashback to when, in her old flat, the locksmith who repaired burglar damage told her he wanted to become a pest controller. Next year the rat returns. She dreams that her milk is somehow poisoning Lola.
• Transcendent inadequacies - Coral has piano lessons at Mr Scholes' house while her mother cleans it as payment. She's not good - Mr Scholes says so. Her mother, who does 3 jobs now that her husband left with aunty Tracy, says "We keep going, don't we?" when Coral tells her she wants to give up. Coral continues for 5 years, looking after her little, violent sister Molly. She realises that Mr Scholes even criticises good pupils. She thinks she should tell good pupils (and their mothers) that they're good. She realises that her mother is friendly with her old maths tutor. When they take Molly, 6, to her first piano lesson, Coral tells her to attack the notes. Molly thumps the keyboard. Mr Scholes protects his instrument. Molly's mother attacks Mr Scholes.
• Days clean - She sleeps with her hairdresser who she knew at school, while his wife's away. She won't do it again. He's done well for himself. At 15 she was a county-level runner. She still runs - it's one of the self-care items on her anti-anxiety list. She repeatedly reminds herself that she's been 289 days clean. She knows she's a cautionary tale in the village. She sees a cat bite its own tale off to escape.
  I didn't much like the story.
• The chrysalides - The first-person is asked by her daughter Nia "why are we alone?". The town is empty. Ah - Covid. From their flat she can see an old man opposite getting worse. She lives with Sam, though he only seems to provide (parental) advice. Her daughter is send dormant caterpillars through the post by her aunt - an educational toy. When they revive, Nia wants to touch them. She misses touch. So does the mother. The caterpillars become chrysalids which they transfer into a netted frame. The old man gets daily care and an oxygen mask. They release the butterflies. The old man dies. The mother has a talk with Nia about the circle of life.
• Lovebirds - Three weeks after moving in, Emile started acting strangely, no longer working. He buys a parrot which he keeps uncaged. It bites her. She lets it out. Emile agrees to get help. They imagine the parrot happy in gaudy Manchester.
  2 pages. Doesn't work for me.
• The mouth of vault - Manchester. She's about 22, starts going out with Matthew De'ath 32. He's reserved. After 6 months he drives her to Norfolk where he grew up. Roadkill, narrow roads. Nobody around, though it's a hot August. They've rented an isolated cottage. When he's disappointed that she doesn't respond to his opening up about his past, he gets up too quickly and cuts his head on a low door. She can't drive, there's no phone reception, and he dies.
  The least good of the longer stories.
• Intermittent visual disturbances - She's struggling. Over Xmas she stays with her struggling father, friend and cousin. They're struggling but have found survival strategies. Back home she studies Jan, Stevie and Nadia, none quite "normal" but they've each found a way to live.
  3 pages. I don't like her short pieces.
• Sour Hall - The first-person protagonist, Ashleigh (female, mid 30s), is with Georgina (George) who's inherited the family farm. They move in, buy a dairy herd, try to develop artisan produce. There's a mysterious banging in the dairy - a poltergeist in the old butter churn? There were rumours about one. A cow gives birth. We learn that when Ashleigh told her then boyfriend that she was leaving him for Georgina, he kicked her and she lost her baby. The butter churn contains the baby's spirit. Ashleigh runs away unable to cope. Georgina gets her back. The story ends with Ashleigh talking to the churn - "We've both seen you, and we know what it's like to live in darkness and in fear. You were there with me at your very beginning. And you'll be there with me until the end. You bloody, fragile clot. You bright little scrap of life".

The scenario is usually established early. Mothers are common. Men don't come out of it well. There's often a key theme with a related symbol that returns at the end. Changes in characters are usually represented by some event (which is why my descriptions above are rather long).