"Other household toxins" by Christopher Allen (Matter Press, 2018)

Flash from Pure Slush, Flash Frontier, Spelk Fiction, Indiana Review, Smokelong, Every day fiction, Cease Cows, JMWW, Reflex Fiction, Bath Flash fiction, etc.

Books of Flash are a relatively recent idea. The market's still settling down, expectations still being established. I often feel that authors have been published too early - that there aren't enough knock-out pieces in a book, that the ordinary pieces don't compensate by adding variety. I've begun to think that I might be setting the standard unreasonably high. This book shows it's possible to take risks and still succeed. All but 2 of the pieces have been previously published, which is a good start.

There's variety along several dimensions -

• Realism - The book starts with "The Birds in the Gate", where the first-person narrator is a boy, changes tone when we learn that his mother is dead. Some other pieces involve broken families, with boys having thoughts that they keep to themselves. But realism doesn't rule. In the 4th story, "The Number 4", a boy wants to be the number 4.
• Logic - There are stories where people deal logically with illogical situations, and vice versa.
• Time - There are stories where time crawls, where time jumps, where time repeats. In "When Chase plays chocolate", the main character changes age and is sometimes 2 ages (when feeling contrasting emotions, etc).
• PoV - There are various approaches to point-of-view too. In "Fuk the police" the PoV switches without warning.
• Empathy - some invite empathy, some are "cold"
• Conventionality - some stories are mainstream. Others are odd - too odd for me.

I like most "The shoes, the girl and the waves that washed them away" and "A Practical Silence". "Providence", "Everything we had", "Green Graffiti", "Census", "Santa Caterina" didn't impress me so much. "A knack for dying" and "Falling man" have many ideas, though I'm not sure the stories works.

"Fred's Massive Sorrow" is 33 pages long, in several parts. The sorrow is a tree taking over an apartment block. I wasn't convinced.

The title story, which I liked, is about story-making and memory-making.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• story366 (the characters in these fictions seem most troubled, most bothered, and most hurt by the ones they love)