"Dazzling the gods" by Tom Vowler (Unbound, 2018)

This collection was crowd-funded. Stories came from "The Lonely Crowd" (3 times), Manchester Review, Litro, Prole, Unthology, etc.

• Debt - Two brothers, one (the first-person narrator) a music teacher, the other, Conor, an ex-criminal living comfortably in Spain, return to Dublin to take revenge on a loan shark who's exploiting their mother. The narrator offers to be look-out while Conor goes into the loan shark's house, but he recalls when Conor spared him a childhood lashing by taking the blame for something. He also feels he's missing out on pleasures by being good, so in the end he goes in with Conor.
• At the Musée d'Orsay - A UK couple stay with friends who've recently moved to Paris. The dynamics are tense, partly because of cultural one-upmanship. The guests are shocked by some performance art.
• Dazzling the Gods - The 3rd-person male protagonist and Electra are drug addicts. One hot morning while she's out of the house he decides to leave her, but before he's finished packing she returns with a baby she's stolen.
• The Grandmaster of Gaza - In war-torn Gaza, a father and his daughter Yasmeen are at home playing chess. The school's been bombed and the rest of the family have been killed. The father's father was an excellent chess-player. The father works in the tunnels, smuggling. He also cares for injured birds (they call him the "Birdman"), returning them to the wild if he can.
• Scene Forty-Seven - An actor regrets an unscripted scene where he disrespected an actress. Only 2 pages long.
• The Offspring badge - The main character visits Ben (a happily married ex with children) who she left for Peter, who she's just divorced. While with Ben she was talked into an abortion. While with Peter she discovered she could no longer have children. She wonders if Ben still thinks about her. She wonders how she can leave her mark on the future. And that's that, really.
• Banging Che Guevara - Multiple privileged third-person viewpoints, in paragraph chunks. While Clive is in a hotel room with employee Tanya (young enough to be his daughter), Tanya fantasises about promotion and a hunky workmate. Meanwhile Clive's wife is planning how to leave him for another woman. Clive fails to perform sexually, and Tanya gets to the shops too late to buy any clothes. Lots of activity in a few words.
• Romi & Romina: An Enquiry into Morals - The first-person male, a local reporter, meets wacky Romina, a post-doc philosophy researcher who's creating a self-learning simulation (program plus an animatronic head that's a copy of hers) of a human mind in the hope of discovering the source of consciousness. Soon after they have a child, Romina dies. Later, the project loses funding. He's asked if he wants to have the now outdated head.
• Neruda in the woods - A literary Ph.D student accompanies his science Ph.D girlfriend Mia as she positions instruments in the woods, because she's been approached by strange men. He reasons that if things go bad, at least he's have material for a new poem. He's the one attacked though - by a dog that Mia fights off.
• Blowhole - A colloquial monologue in the form of a letter to Mrs Stanley by Susie, a childless woman married to the domineering, somewhat lawless Preston.
• An arrangement - a middle-aged wife, childless, is about to leave her ailing husband for her monthly meeting with her lover. It's told from his viewpoint (first-person) and he's not entirely at ease with the arrangement. He's an associate professor. The language is initially lush, similar to the style that a character in another story warns about (p.114).
• Undertow - Long (25 pages) and good. A middle-aged loner, male (ex-prisoner; his wife and daughter somewhere far away), is in his cliff-top hovel one evening when he sees a woman disappear into the water. He pulls her out, resuscitates her. She's in her mid-twenties. Next morning she's better. He goes for a walk, content that he's saved a life, knowing that she's likely to have gone by the time he returns home.
• Lucca: Last days of a marriage - The narrator's an editor who's been asked to complete a novel left unfinished by an author's suicide. Pollex's previous book was a best-seller, but this new book returns to his more literary, unpopular style. The narrator, who has things in common with Pollex (he worked with him before his success), visits the setting of the novel, trying to understand what was on the author's mind.
• Fly, Icarus, Fly - The third-person protagonist (but the voice is merged with that of the narrator) is out for a rustic walk with his older brother, Blue, and his mates. They're out to hunt for eggs. Blue takes his brother's place in a solo climb to steal a crow's egg. The rest watch while attacked by the flock, he falls. He survives, crippled and brain-damaged, institutionalised. At the end, the protagonist, 15 years after the accident, is on a regular visit to Blue - "when it is just the two of them, a silent entreaty issued from Blue's eyes, to do the right thing, and he wanted to give this finality to him, but all he could do was hold his brother and promise not to let go".
  The first page has two phrases I'm not keen on - "tamping down pathways like arteries" and "Volatile, like a gas".
• Upgrade - Roland's being sacked. He's 54. His wife, Greta, is into mystical self-improvement involving a course run by Stefan. He can't find another job. "Perhaps they should have had children, adopted once their own had been ruled out". He goes downhill. Delivery men bring a man-sized crate - an upgrade, one of them says.
• Fireflies - A man (second-person) walks with his son along a coastal path - an annual pilgrimage of sorts. He leaves flowers in memory of his wife. "you look out beyond the headland, picture the rusting hulks of wrecked ships that ghost the sea floor, forests of kelp slowly claiming them". "You watch your son blow into his hands, steel yourself for the year he won't want or need to come on this walk, his own life taking over, the memory of her receding a little more. You wonder if you'll be strong enough on your own". Less than 3 pages.

It's all realist, the narrative voices usually male, the characters easy to believe in. No tricks. Absent fathers, childlessness, stand-ins, birds, unhappiness and chess appear more than usual. Aside from those features, there's much variety - voices from various classes, various points-of-view, and though there's a tendency towards open endings, some stories nearly have punch-lines.

Other reviews

• Dovegreyreader
• Nuala O’Connor (Vowler is a writer of intricate, intelligent fiction, with a welcome wryness, and an interest in the macabre, that is lightly but surely woven throughout. His prose has a formality of tone that works well with his troubled narrators ... There is welcome diversity in Vowler’s work)
• Kathryn Eastman (Childlessness, in particular, crops up time and again throughout the collection. ... My personal favourite in the collection is ‘Undertow’. )
• Literature works (These moral dichotomies are excellently realised with the charismatic wit and well timed delivery of Vowler )
• Emily Harrison (Ambiguity and diversity. Where tone shifts from one page to the next, one story to another, and no two characters are ever the same. ... Rather than a quick read, over short sentences, you savour every part. This is no truer than with Banging Che Guevara and Fireflies, two widely different tales but tales too, that are linked by the set-up.)