Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Monday, 2 April 2001

"pleasure VESSELS" (Angela Royal Publishing, 1997)

I enjoyed reading this collection of 22 stories from the 1995 Ian St James Awards competition, but soon into the anthology I was struck more by the stories' similarities than their differences. 2/3s of them are in the first person, only 2 of them are in any way fantastical, and all have a strong, single-stranded narrative drive. Couples in a critical moment of their relationship are the most common characters, the situation being described for a page or so before the narrative really kicks in, flashbacks providing background information. For variety of narrative structure, the TV programmes "Frasier" and even "Startrek - TNG" offer more.

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