"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.)

"The Method" by Tom Vowler (Salt, 2010)

Sometimes I read more as a budding writer than a reader, seeing (or imagining) the churning mechanisms - Chekhov's guns and nails hanging from every wall. My writerly reaction to this book might have been because

• The author and I try for the same outlets - he's winner of Salt's Scott competition (which I entered); there are stories from Brand, Riptide, etc (which I've never been in, though I've tried).
• I use the same rather scientific analogies that he uses, and I often write about raids on the past.
• Though I empathize with the downbeat mood, it's hard for me to continually empathize with the relentlessly embittered characters
• Once I realised that hints of terror in an initial paragraph were never in anticipation of a visit to the dentist or being dragged by mum around clothes shops but were more likely to involve murder, I was less immersed in guessing the ending.

PoV is 1st or 3rd person. Both male or female voices are represented, usually aged 25-40 and street-wise, WASP, in a generic England during the noughties. A few non-linear forms keep readers on their toes. The language is lively and entertaining. The mood is sustained using a catalog of woes. Halfway through the book (after stories about death of parents, child abduction, wife-swapping, visiting an ex) I tried to guess what further common themes would be used (a partner leaving with a same-sex lover; upstanding parents embarrassed by relatives; waiting for results of (partner's?) medical tests; how to cope with a young daughter's pregnancy and unsuitable boyfriend; pretending that you've not lost your job; a relationship crisis on a family holiday). In the end there were none of those, though we had an e-mail epistolary piece.

In the title story an author lives out his draft character's life. A nice idea, well executed. The 2nd piece, "Seeing Anyone", stays just about on the approved side of the contrived/controlled border. A man's visiting his re-partnered ex. Here are the images and turning points that struck me as I read

• p.11 It starts with "The day stretched out before him like some vast desert he didn't want to cross"
• p.12 The long initial build-up of tension continues after he's arrived, then suddenly she says "She's in the garden, under the tree". Who? Ah, their dying dog - apparently the reason for the couple communicating after a gap of months. What does it symbolise - their love hanging on for dear life? (the woman says "I have to decide when enough's enough for her, really. Not be selfish about it") Or the child they never had? (the bitch's stomach - ironically? - is bloated) Or her image of him?
• p.12 We learn that her current partner's away on a golf weekend. Aha.
• p.13 "'I didn't know whether to tell you [about the dog]. I thought about it for days'. A warm breeze weaved between them carrying a small flower from the cherry blossom in the far corner. It caught in the strands of her hair". More objects fill the gap left by their silence about their feelings for each other
• p.13 "He remembered looking hard at her that day, trying to see if all her love for him had left, like a distant star that's seen but is no longer there". Neat though not original
• p.14 "the Doppler effect of love, where sound and language differ so much depending on whether it's arriving or departing". Neat. New to me.
• p.14 At the start we're told that he'd bought some photographs. Now they appear - "She took the envelope and started to look through photographs of the first four years of the dog's life. 'I don't remember any of these'". There's ambivalence in her eyes, then she recovers. He offers to copy any that she wants.
• p.15 "The homemade soup was like visiting his childhood home" - his memories are being pushed further back, looking for roots to re-grow from.
• p.16 "He pictured himself in an upstairs window, watching as she tended the garden" - his imagination is building a new life based around domesticity
• p.16 "They didn't wave. He looked at her in the mirror watching to see if his brake lights came on". Up to now, the story's all from his PoV, so how are we to interpret this final phrase of the story? Apart from a timely glance and prolonged goodbye hug (both of which are given alternative explanations in the story), the only come-on is the timing of the weekend, but that's accounted for by the dog having only days to live. One imagines the dog might be taken to the vet on Monday.

In "Busy. Come. Wait" a son meets his sister at the house where they grew up. Despite the initial hints I was doubting at first whether their father was dead. He was though. She blames her unfaithful mother for their unhappy childhood and her unhappy life. He doesn't tell her that their father was no angel either.

"They may not mean to but they do" intersplices narratives from 2 eras. Dating turns to the real thing. Then there's a plot turn that's not new, but it caught me by surprize in the context - he finds a soul-mate, she wants to find her natural parents, and there's a clash. The story does a lot in a short space.

"Staring at the Sun" is nearly in real-time, the protagonist waiting 10 minutes in a pub for a blind-date to appear. His previous partner had died of lung cancer. He runs through various metaphors of time and grief. "My father would have understood. 'Just look at the stars,' he once told me. I'd opened the telescope that was a badly-kept secret one birthday. 'That's looking back in time.'". It ends with "I observe the moment as if from above, for the first time glimpsing a time ahead of this one. I once read that if you forced yourself to stare at the sun for eight seconds, you'd go blind. I stand, wave to the woman and smile"

Welcomingly McEwanesque is "The Last Supper" where the death of a child leads to the parents' suicide pact, dying by starvation. But before they board themselves in they cook themselves a final meal. "Hare's Running" concerns skullduggery in betting shops, "Breathe" is only a page - macabre. "Offline" is set in the future, satire coming thick and fast - "As he lay dying in the transition ward". "One Story" is about writers block where a drunk, separated writer chats to his idealistic son -

'The icecaps safe tonight, then, Jack?' I ask.
'Can't stop. Got to be somewhere.'
'Let me guess: knitting bongos outside some landfill?'
'I see you're drunk for a change.'
'When you've lived with your mother a few more years, you'll see it's a perfectly desirable state. Care to join me for one?'

Several of the pieces involve private/secret missions to re-live, commemorate (or avenge for) a significant event. Retribution can easily go as far as murder. The indirection of these stories' first paragraphs (mysteries about the age, gender, status, motivation, etc of main character) could have been extended to generate tension, but issues are usually resolved on the first page. As an example of how info-dumps are avoided, take "Homecoming" which begins with

Shop façades offered different wares but it was the buildings themselves, the roads and trees, that resonated so profusely with a childhood echoing through the decades. And the bridge, of course. He'd crossed it that day, just ahead of the others - breathless, still convinced that some game had gone wrong.

It's a teasing start. We know that the character is decades from childhood, that he probably hasn't been to his hometown for years, that something momentous (and bad?) had happened. In paragraph 2 we learn that the event erased his previous childhood. By paragraph 3 we're pretty sure that he's alone. In paragraph 4 we're told that he's called Michael. After the initial inevitable bridge a gate leads towards the place; a gap in a hedge leads him further. Paragraph 8 mentions that he's been in "a unit" for a few years. In paragraph 10 there's

Didn't cells constantly die, being replaced by new ones? Aren't we, literally speaking, recycled every couple of years or so? And without a soul, wasn't it the case that he was no more connected to the boy he was that day than to the ground he now stood on? Only history linked him. Just a narrative, that's all.

The location helps him recall the event, even some new details as he traces his steps. By the end of the story we know with forensic precision what happened.

"The Arrival" and "Team Building" were the only disappointments, though by the time I'd reached "The Little Man" I'd met enough bitter murderers. That, I suppose, is my main criticism - en masse the stories dilute each other. In "Reload" the main character says "I wonder if I'll be regarded a serial killer and how they decide. I think it's something to do with the gap between the first and the last" (the gap's about a 100 pages in this book). I've tried writing about happy people (most successfully I think in an unpublished piece called "Good Losers"). Life's not a bowl of cherries, but well, you have to try. The author/narrator/language/reality constellation remains pretty stable too.

Diction tottered in places - "parochial denizens" (p.88) and "aired reluctance" (p.143) for example seem misplaced. I noticed only 2 typos: "ringing water from a sponge" (p.106 - or is that deliberate?) and "she call my a" (p.136).

Other reviews include

• Melissa Lee-Houghton (Short Review)
• Lisa Glass (Vulpes Libris)