"Things like this" by Dave Alcock (Arroyo Seco Press, 2026)

37 Flash pieces, all of which have been previously published from 2017 onwards in the "Journal of Radical Wonder", "MacQueen's Quinterly", "The Dribble Drabble Review", etc.

I read it in one sitting. Even just flicking through, the variety is evident: "Mortician" is laid out like a poem - 24 lines with at most 4 words per line; "Sun squares" is a 3 page prose piece, conventionally laid out. Most of the pieces have something of interest - sometimes the characters' struggles and realisations, sometimes a phrase (e.g. a flock of lorikeets "flushes through the treetops like a psychedelic wind"). There's no whiff of gimmickry or workshop exercises. It's an enjoyable read. I've a slight preference for the shorter pieces.

There are leit-motifs giving the book coherence, though I wondered whether the effect of some pieces was diminished by being beside stories which shared details and tropes. Unsure whether I was being objective about this, I did some counting -

• Light effects - "sparks of the bonfire" (p.1); "sloping column of light" (p.4); "Cones of streetlight" (p.8); "beams of his headlamps" (p.15); "Shafts of yellow light" (p.19); "A ray of light" (p.57); "a sunbeam ... broke on a wind wave into a galaxy of stars" (p.57); "a yellow shaft of light" (p.57)
• Cars - p.8, p.14, p.27, p.33, p.42 (Some car-parks and "traffic" too - hardly a mention of public transport)
• Hands - p.1, p.17, p.23, p.35, p.38, p.41, p.49, p.57. (some fingers and thumbs too)

None of that's out of the ordinary - when one reads a book non-stop, one is bound to notice such preferences. I'm less sanguine about the recurrent tropes. For example, there's a lot of staring into the distance, especially towards the end of stories (symbolically transcending the story, looking to the future) -

• "John looked through the window" (p.5, penultimate paragraph)
• "He looked through the windscreen" (p.9, final paragraph)
• "Her father looked out at the garden" (p.11)
• "Pete kept staring through the window" (p.15, final paragraph)
• "Richard ... turned to look again out to sea" (p.19)
• "Richard blinked and looked out at the sea" (p.21, final paragraph)
• "He turned his head and looked beyond the car park into the near distance" (p.25, final paragraph)
• "looked at the sea" (p.33)
• "She looked at the skyline" (p.34, final paragraph)
• "he would look down at the lights of the pit" (p.43)
• "He looked up from the page ... into the darkness downstairs" (p.48)
• "looked out across the field" (p.50)
• "looked through the trees to the wide brown river" (p.57)

Even if there's no staring at the end, there's sometimes a hint of distance -

• p.18 ends with "launch him skyward, on a one-way journey from the world"
• the last sentence on p.39 includes "distance"
• on p.51 the penultimate sentence include "distance" and the penultimate paragraph includes "distant yellow field"

The sea, the horizon, darkness and fields play the role that stars and the moon might in other books.

Another recurrent (though less so) concept is the idea of background movement/noises repeatedly punctuating the foreground dialogue/action. p.11 has buses and motorbikes. Elsewhere bicycles and wipers provide the contrast.

The abiding, endearing theme is parenthood, passing knowledge on -

• The first piece ends with "your words of guidance I seem always to forget"
• The last story ends with "he took the boy's hand and they set out again along the path"

Father and young son is the most common pairing, the father trying to do his best - p.4, p.8, p.13. On p.8 a father teaches a son about hiding emotions. On p.11 a father teaches a daughter about white lies. p.23 has a father with son (4) and daughter (7). On p.36 the son is at least 21. p.39 has mother and son. p.56 has parents and children. The fathers/husbands aren't perfect - they have affairs or they separate. "Transients" has a female PoV - I'd have welcomed more.

p.s. "Succour" is mentioned in the Acknowledgements but isn't in the book.