I came across the troll yesterday, quite by chance. I’d been clearing the loft, and there it was at the bottom of a tattered box containing miscellany from my youth, that impudent smile I hadn’t seen in many years. Finding it brought to mind a much larger troll, for want of a better word, an
It isn’t blind adrenaline or fury that drives her but a kind of flat blackness, a steady humming like the engine, somewhere deep in the gut. Nelly gurgles in the baby seat behind her and when she looks at her in the rear-view mirror she catches her own eye, black and swollen. The last time,
What you can be guaranteed with David Constantine is a fabulous story, masterfully told – and this can be said for his latest offering The Dressing-Up Box – which left me enraptured and stunned at the sheer brilliance on show. Comma Press are a publisher whom I love, they continue to churn out top quality
Choke Chain by Jason Donald has a long emotional reach. Set in 1980’s apartheid South Africa it narrates the Thorne’s dysfunctional family life with clarity and compassion. Domesticity, gender politics and inequality are explored kitchen-sink style in this simmering story where two brothers, Alex, aged twelve, and Kevin, eight, grow up in poverty with an
Youths today, eh? There’s nothing quite like the sight of a gang of pockmarked, track-suited youths gawping lethargically at their iPhones, babbling witlessly to one another and sucking up nitrous oxide from balloons that makes you feel like an old, cantankerous fuckwit. I used to be young, once. I remember it. I remember having a
