SHORT STORIES
THE WRONG HEAVEN by Amy Bonnaffons
(W&N £8.99) THIS debut collection by Amy Bonnaffons is smart and strange, aslant with odd moments of metamorphosis and mysterious happenings. These goings-on appear entirely normal in the tip-tilted world her characters inhabit.
In The Wrong Heaven, a woman is subjected to the judgmental opinions of light-up Jesus and Mary statues, who offer annoying advice on her life choices.
In A Room To Live In, a dolls’ house maker worries about how her husband will cope when the tiny figures she has carved come to life.
In the most startling offering, two friends inject each other with hormones every morning, both hoping for something transformative to happen: ‘We have different goals. Serena wants to be become a mother. I want to become a horse.’ Brilliantly unexpected.
HOSTAGES by Oisin Fagan
(Head of Zeus £8.99) OISIn FAgAn’S Ireland is a disconcerting place alive with elegant observations, such as the embarrassment of a teenage crush: ‘He blushed so deeply that little white stars edged into his vision, creeping along his sight until he forgot his name’; or the look of hoar frost on a window.
The stories are unnervingly wayward, surreally real. The opening story, Being Born, fizzes with energy and excess and sets the tone for the collection.
A school is in chaos, overwhelmed by a cast of characters who run scared, run rackets and run riot. elsewhere, gruesome dead bodies mysteriously appear in the rural landscape, a family history takes a turn for the worse and acid rain goes to work on the family patriarch.
THE FIRST PREHISTORIC SERIAL KILLER
(Bitter Lemon Press £8.99) HeRe, Catalan crime writer Teresa Solana turns her hand to the short story in an accessible collection that marries dark deeds to broad satire.
In the titular tale, a troglodyte nod to Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, a cave man attempts to solve a series of skull-crushing murders with detection techniques that haven’t yet been imagined.
He also invents prophecies, gods and the ability to tell the future by interpreting dreams.
In other tales, a concerned mother and her equally elderly friend have a very novel way of dealing with an abusive son-inlaw, an old-fashioned vampire misunderstands the nature of a very modern bloodsucker, with macabre results, and a piece of modern art shows worrying signs of decomposing while on display.