Daniel King’s short story collection cycles through the shadowy landscapes of death, gnarled relationships, the slippery side of human nature, even the contemporary lure of cosmetic surgery pushed to a surprising extreme.
Philosophically pointed with a surreal bite, the characters of these stories wrestle with existence and each other as profound questions scatter them.
King’s stories have been widely published and praised in Australia and overseas, and this compilation was Highly Commended in the 2010 IP Picks Award for Best Fiction.
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
What would happen if you could know, before you die, whether you were going to Heaven or to Hell? How would it change your relationships if you entered into a contract to feel the other person’s pains and pleasures? What if there were a “Venerean” equivalent to the Martial Arts, where victory meant that, rather than physically defeating the other person, you made them love you?
These are just a handful of the fascinating ideas Daniel King plays with in the 21 stories contained in this collection, which provides an excellent sampling from nearly 25 years of writing the form (and which includes the two prize-winners, “Nothing Contemplates Nothing” and “Heaven and/or Hell”). But this certainly isn’t to imply King’s fiction is only about playing with ideas. The ideas are employed rather like those brutal little knives you use to open oysters — one powerful but telling twist, and the all-too soft inner parts are suddenly laid bare. And here it is human relationships, with all their clashes of vulnerabilities and viewpoints, their subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) battles, that are the fare King lays before us.
Some of the stories remind me of the dry satire of J G Ballard at the height of his short story writing career, such as “A Dream Holiday”, in which a couple decide to spend their vacation in an airport. They find as many conveniences as any four-star hotel, and sights as exotic as any far-flung country. But at the end, the story takes a characteristic swerve into deeper territory, sidestepping from satire into a glimpse of the potential solipsism inherent in all human relationships. This confrontation of an almost Beckettian nihilism — a “Nothing”, an absence, or sometimes a felt-but-never-seen presence — haunts many of King’s tales. Sometimes dark, as in the final story, “Catenary” (guaranteed you get you desperately trying to refute its protagonist’s brutal yet twistedly compassionate logic), elsewhere more playful. In Daniel King’s hands, fiction itself becomes a metaphor for the human condition. Sometimes the characters come close to wondering if there is an author to their particular comedies and tragedies, at other times, they may have become characters in stories they themselves are in the process of writing.
Like all the best fiction, King asks the questions and leaves his readers to decide the answers. In a sense, his fiction occurs in the disquieting gap between the question being asked and the answer being given — as exemplified by, for instance, the short gem “Chat Room”, in which a bored housewife is increasingly frustrated by one of the fellow-users in an internet chat room, whose only aim seems to be to upset her with increasingly personal jibes. But this isn’t just another story about an an internet stalker — the ending opens the tale up with far more interesting implications. In a sense, she’s being targeted by the worst enemy she could ever have.
Sometimes surreal, sometimes humorous, often dark and always intriguing, these 21 short stories pack a real punch.
– Murray Ewing, a review posted on Amazon UK
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
The 21 short stories in this little collection investigate a world that crosses all the boundaries, sometimes even crossing from heaven to hell.
Transgression is the keynote as King experiments with both form and content, and in so doing challenges our preconceptions of narrative. The logic of torture, the relationship between author and reader, holidays in airports, the surrealism of supermarkets: all are closely observed for that single moment of revelation which makes the story into something more, an excursion into creative unreality.
The stories are quite short but they are condensed essays on the nature of humanity when it is balanced precariously on the line between the real and unreal, mouthing unanswered questions.
– Ian Nicholls, The West Australian