ARMEL DAGORN reveals the cruelty within two poignant short stories, one French, one Irish: ‘Picture this: a man steps out, and maybe it’s a good day, and the stars, or traffic lights, align, and all the simple pleasures of a sweet summer morn are revealed to the purposeful flaneur.’
ZOE MITCHELL explores short stories by women writers from Nothern Ireland in Glass Shores: ‘As a collection, all the stories display a tension and contradiction at their heart, that comes from the vivid portraits they present…’
KATHLEEN H. STORY looks at Stephen Graham Jones’ dark tale of fatherly love, and asks how far would you go?: ‘Parents often say they would give their left arm or even their life to save their children. That they could kill anyone who tries to harm them. But would they really? This story will force you to question yourself.’
JULIA ANDERSON follows Stan, the unreliable young narrator of Joanna Campbell’s ‘Upshots’: ‘Campbell’s writing is known for its wry humour, and ‘Upshots’ is no exception as she gives Stan an engagingly naïve voice and many incisively observational one-liners… ‘
DAN COXON takes a look at Tom Vowler’s collection, Dazzling The Gods: ‘It’s this sense of fight, of falling as low as they can go and yet still struggling on, that characterises Dazzling the Gods, and that makes these stories more than an accumulation of hard-luck tales and sob stories…’
HANNAH RADCLIFFE looks at the Northern lives in Martyn Bedford’s collection, Letters Home: ‘ Perhaps what I found most poignant when reading this collection of stories were the things that were not spoken between characters; the words that fall between the cracks. Time and time again, characters seem to slip past one another, their true intentions never quite vocalised…’
SHORT STORY ADAPTATIONS: this month, Dr. CHRIS MACHELL looks at decaying masculinity in John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’: ‘The Swimmer is as much as an attack on the self-involved counter-culturalism of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation as it is on self-satisfied wealthy suburbia…’
NICOLE MANSOUR looks at the drama, joy and pain in Lucy Caldwell’s Multitudes: ‘ Caldwell’s collection is a lively and poignant rendering of childhood, adolescence and motherhood, and of how we navigate the landscapes of love and loneliness throughout the course of our lives…’
MORGAINE DAVIDSON braves the chilling worlds and haunted rooms of Eight Ghosts: ‘What is it we love about ghost stories? What is the source of their charm, their pervasiveness; that peculiar place they hold in the collective unconscious? Perhaps our curiosity is to blame. We are, after all, an inquisitive species…’
STEPHEN HARGADON finds subtlety, power and wit behind the familiar scenery in Elspeth Davie’s short story ‘Allergy’: ‘…there is a richness here, a resonance, an ability, keen and tender, to look at the world from odd angles, to see the extraordinary, the mystical, in the daily churn of human commerce…’
