“Beautifully crafted and memorable.” Amazon UK reviewer. The mother who uses charity as a weapon. An invisible chef and his deadly mashed potato. The obsession that takes a man closer to the mysteries of the cosmos than he counted on. A man who can’t stop crying. The murderer who helps his victims escape death. The weekend break that becomes a journey to edges of sanity. And more. Eleven … more.
Eleven furiously original and off-centre stories that blend dark magical realism with gripping domestic drama to create tales that range from the hauntingly sinister to the downright bizarre.
“These stories were a really pleasant surprise. Highly recommended.” Amazon UK reviewer.
Influenced by JG Ballard, Iain Banks, Will Self, Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut to name a few, Sef Hughes writes stories that are dark, heartbreaking, funny, twisted, bleak and hopeful in unequal measure, that take his readers to the curious extremities of human relationships.
“Bloody brilliant read!” Amazon UK reviewer.
Start reading Salt Water today.
What readers say:
“The unspoken despair in Tap Tap and Noel Hardy is so painfully delicious.”
Like the literary fiction equivalent of a deep-tissue massage for someone who had no idea how tense they were. Ouch but aaaah. Good pain.”
“I found myself gripped and intrigued, tickled by the metaphors, and deeply touched by the characters.”
“I’ve just finished The Civil servant, finding it pretty hard to put down!”
“I loved them all! I found the writing full of ambition with some beautifully telling moments.”
“If forced to choose a favourite, I think I’d have to go for Salt Water – it was the one which had me feeling the most wrung out at the end. An utterly heartbreaking unsatisfying-but-satisfying ending.”
“So many great short films inside this anthology. Makes me wish I’d been to film school.”
Get your copy of Salt Water.
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This short story collection packs a punch that will leave you wrung to pieces, sad, and smiling. Like many short story anthologies, this one can be hard to typify so let me write that if you are interested in why people tick, the human condition, and what makes us human this book will fill all the check boxes.
In turn, haunting and funny, it slips between the pages of dark humor to showcase the reality of our relationships. An introspective and thoughtful read that often uses Magical Realism (not quite, but that is what folks are now calling magic in contemporary stories) to harpoon the heart.
In this dark collection, we have a reader’s late-night buffet of provocative stories concocted and served by a writer who has a unique mind and—for my money—a brilliant one. Certainly, his brilliance is a dark brilliance, but there are many veins of humor and humanity running through that darkness, tempering it. I’d describe this collection as a group of chess pieces sculpted out of highly polished black marble.
We begin with a portrait of a woman—more or less ordinary at first glance—as depicted by her neglected daughter, beginning in broad strokes, and then, as the pages quickly flip to the left, in finer and finer detail. In Mother Dear, we meet Mom, a human spider. Mom weaves a web for her clueless victim, spinning it from the substance of their tragic circumstances, and when, at last, the ensnared one comes to believe it is hopeless to try to escape her sickening kindness, her outlandish, disproportionate generosity, her suffocating largesse, Mom slowly lowers herself down, inch by inch, for the kill-with-kindness kill. And smiles beneficently. The author paints his incisive portrait with one insightful stroke after another, until the enigmatic final page.
The story that follows in Mom’s shadow, Tap Tap, was so startling to me, I read it three times in rapid succession. It’s compact enough to do that—the author knows how to trim fat as he dissects his beast, so there’s not an extra word to be found from start to finish. A man who is blatantly oblivious to his wife, his colleagues, his neighbors, his friends, and all else, pursues his obsession, which is dismissed by all as a mere hobby. And what might that hobby be? You won’t believe it when you read it. Taking a cue from the author’s practiced economy, the less said by me, a mere auditor, the better.
Once a Civil Servant is the type of story that I classify as a “Two Shoe”—a storytelling template perfected by the late Roald Dahl. It’s a tale with an unpleasant twist that a reader will see coming from the get-go. When that happens, an alarm goes off in the reader’s mind: Hold on, it’s too soon to guess the outcome! That’s the first shoe. It drops when you realize that the narrator is capable of anything, and that realization comes (at least for me) at the end of the fourth paragraph with these words: “I know how to cheat death.” From that point, I was intrigued to see if I had guessed the outcome correctly. I had. The author intended that. Because there was a second shoe to fall. It does.
We have many more diversions of varying lengths, making up a total of eleven. A particularly good one, rendered in dialogue only, concerns a pair of not-too-bright career criminals arranging a lethal escapade—an especially delightful twist caps this one off perfectly—the story ends with a humorous bang, something like a gunshot crossed with a popping champagne cork. The concluding voyage fantastique—the second in the book to touch upon the subject of “invisibility”—was deliciously engaging. It has a labyrinthian plot so well-constructed, every turn of events is another blind alley leading to delight and surprise. One really finds himself at the author’s mercy in this one, but that’s what makes great storytelling.
A book of shorts as accomplished as this (his first, too) gets my highest recommendation. There are at least two stories in this collection that could have/would have/should have won a competition prize. If you want to know which ones, read them and decide for yourself.