SHORT STORIES MY FIRST BOOK
by Honor Levy (Granta £12.99, 224pp)
Addled on the AdHd drug Adderall, overwhelmed by the onslaught of information on the internet and caught between scorn and sincerity, the American narrators in levy’s scattershot stories are the latest in a long line of lost generations.
In the best of the collection, her fast-paced, oddly poetic prose brilliantly captures that feeling of youthful angst and alienation; in other offerings, her whiplash vignettes veer from cutting social commentary to undercooked satire, overcrammed with cultural references
(Cancel Me). elsewhere, though, there’s a sad, strangely sweet feel to the bamboozling barrage of memes, as in love Story, where a faltering teen romance plays out online.
GHOSTROOTS by ’Pemi Aguda (Virago £16.99, 224pp)
THE eerie and the everyday are perfectly aligned in these 12 stories set in the hustle and bustle of lagos in Nigeria.
love is treacherous, motherhood malign and death stalks 24, Alhaji Williams Street. Here, a mysterious virus targets the male children of neighbouring families, and sets in motion a fever dream of hope and helplessness, as the locals fight to save their sons, but also incites a shocking vengeance on a woman and her daughters.
In The Hollow, it’s a building that houses the supernatural, as a young architect attempts to map the strangely shifting interior of Madam Oni’s place, and learns the histories of the menacing men entrapped in its ever-changing walls.
While in the spooky Manifest, an evil inheritance finds a home in the body of a sweetnatured woman who’s possessed by the abusive spirit of her malevolent grandmother.
excellently uncanny.
YOU LIKE IT DARKER by Stephen King (Hodder £25, 496pp)
FANS of King’s oeuvre will certainly know what to expect from these entertaining stories — his world is one where the familiar is tilted towards the fearsome, where unexpected encounters involve aliens (The Two Talented Bastids), chance meetings on Central Park benches turn murderous (The Fifth Step) and bad luck steps on the heels of the ever unfortunate Finn.
dropped on his head as a baby, almost struck by lightning, limbs broken in various accidents, he is kidnapped and tortured in a bad case of mistaken identity in King’s typical twisted imagination.
A similar tricky fate is inflicted on the hero of danny Coughlin’s Bad dream, as a flawed, but likeable, man finds himself searching for a dead body in an out- of- the- way place following a peculiarly vivid vision, and is then plunged into a nightmare scenario.