Matt McAvoy Book Review

I wouldn’t necessarily call Nom D. Plume’s mind an odd one, so much as a very high functioning, obscure one, and good luck trying to get on the author’s tangent – though if you do, you’ll be rewarded, for sure.  I like short stories and poetry, and I really like this collection, too.  The tales, I would say, are more like little vignettes or snippets of narrative, as bizarrely offbeat as they are exceptionally intelligent and well written, and as utterly random as they are astutely crafted within a wider context.  The characters appear to overlap from tale to tale, the timeline varies and moves in different directions, and the genre appears to change throughout.  There is, I’m certain, a very tenuous link between these stories, despite the apparent differences in their settings.   Some feel contemporary, others hinting at some fantastical distant future, yet all share the same melancholic feel; bleak and hopeless.  Of course, the fact that book’s foreword is narrated by Death itself is not random or stylistic; it is relevant, and the oppressive presence of this aspect never feels too far from the surface.

This is a wonderful collection, and Nom D. Plume is a truly creative, engaging writer of both fiction and verse.  It is in some ways a shame that he/she chooses anonymity, as I feel this is a piece of work to be proud of, and would be eager to see more, even feature length, from the author.  I love the suggestion and implication underlying these pieces, and would unusually recommend that readers who enjoy this book (which will be all of them, I’m sure) to read it again, paying attention to subtext and their own intuition.  Much is left to the reader’s interpretation, I think, and I like that about it very much.  If you like short stories, vignettes, poetry and obscurely tenuous fiction, with the mixed styles and tenuously organized randomness of Cloud Atlas, I think you’ll enjoy this one a lot.  I did.