Matt McAvoy Book Review

A collection of ominous and entertaining short stories – real crackers, too – with large part metaphor and a tangible portion of underlying menace.  Mac is a fine writer, with a tremendously twisted sense of justice, injustice and just desserts.  A variety of different writing styles are employed, from a curation of fictional letters to a play manuscript, then standard format narrative, told in both the first and third person.  Mac seems to write what he pleases, and does so with a marvellous, enticing relish.  There is a very subtle sense of the supernatural, fantasy or sci-fi running throughout these tales, though personally my favourites were probably “Bummed Out” and “Fresh Ideas”, which are perhaps a touch more simply sinister and wicked.

In the case of this particular author, shorter is definitely sweeter – the tales are anecdotal, with an almost knowing nudge and wink toward the varied underlying discourse of each.  If I’m being totally honest, on that note, I found the two longest of the tales in the collection a little difficult to gain traction with, and with that in mind I’m not sure how well I would gel reading a novel written by this author.  That said, however, it would be very interesting to see which genre category any feature-length work would fall into; the author undoubtedly has numerous strings to his bow.  Additionally, Mac is clearly an author with much to say about present day society, particularly the brewing culture war, and the scourge of political correctness; with a contemporary hue to all of the tales, even the most fantastical, this is undoubtedly a current book in many ways – the resulting contrast is one I always like a lot in fiction.

I enjoyed this collection, it has to be said; for the most part, it was definitely my bag, and well worth a read if you like short stories dark, atmospheric, ominous and taking place on a world subtly parallel to our own.  Good fun; I think you’ll enjoy it, too.