Devil’s Trumpet, by Tracey Slaughter (Victoria University Press, $30)

Reviewed by Maggie Trapp for Kete books

Datura, also known as nightshades, include the devil’s trumpet – a plant with irresistibly gorgeous flowers that are highly toxic. Beautiful and imperilling: that just about sums up the lives of the characters in – as well as the reading experience of – Tracey Slaughter’s newest book of short fiction.

This collection of stories runs the gamut from bracing flash fiction to carefully constructed long-form narrative, from intimate first-person to more arm’s length third-person narrators, from numbered lists of rapid-fire impressions to sustained, traditional story-arcs – all bound by riveting language, imagery and tone.

The narrator of each of these stories is different, yet the precision of the wry, bitter, whip-smart language remains the same. Slaughter’s stories cut to the quick, yanking us up and out of the comfort we might look for in fiction and asking us to look at what we thought we knew about ourselves, about family, about love, and about desire.

This review originally appeared on Kete and is abridged with kind permission.