From Library Journal
Written over a 20-year period and showing enormous range, these stories feature characters who are either slightly or extravagantly ruined by drink, age, or an inability to see life clearly. Housewives, artists, teachers, mushroom plant workers, and tube station attendants of varying ages, genders, classes, and sexual preferences populate tales with disturbing themes and twisted endings. In "Family Service," as Helen Brigstock impatiently readies herself and her family for church, she nags and berates them while silently admonishing herself for her bad behavior. "All the Pubs in Soho," set in 1956, tells of a sensitive tomboy drawn to a gay couple who have aroused the curiosity and outrage of the local villagers. In the title story, a mystery writer on her way to a speaking engagement removes the wrong bag from the train and unearths memories of a violent past. Funny and strikingly written sentences leap out at the reader throughout this astonishingly accomplished collection. Recommended for most collections.
Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, OntarioCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This compendium of 31 brief, tantalizing stories, ranging from the silly to the very bizarre, will keep the reader absorbed right up until the very end. Loaded with
Twilight Zone-type spookiness, each story is concerned with seemingly normal existences that are slowly revealed to be anything but normal. While the distinctly British stories are also humorous, the reader will be aware of feeling vaguely uncomfortable as some of the more nightmarish stories unfold. In "Curry at the Laburnum's," morning rush-hour commuters anonymously push a fellow commuter off the platform, then are slowly poisoned by his wife at dinner. In "The Most Beautiful Dress in the World," a frazzled housewife murders a meter reader after a morning of frustrating occurrences. In "The Thirty-First of October," a mild-seeming neighbor plots the demise of two bratty neighborhood children. Mackay's command of language and use of clever plots make these stories captivating, amusing, and shocking.
Kathleen Hughes
