Customer Reviews

Never Trust A Rabbit: Stories With a Twist

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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Dyson has put together a collection of short stories on the verge of brilliance and maybe trying to be a bit to clever.The book kicks off in good form with "we who walk thru walls" with left you thinking wow I did not expect that,but with "love in the time of Molyneux" I had to re-read it cause I just missed the point. The darker side of the collection with "City Deep" which will give you a paranoid feeling everytime you ride the underground rail. An A-level art professor gets an underachieving new art student with very little talent but when the boy paints a picture of the story title "a slate roof in the rain" little does the Professor know how much he'll get to know the drawing. My favorite story was "the engine of desire" which happens to be the longest story of a mercenary hired by a prince who has a collection of oddities,to find a mechanical woman with the ability to satisfy sexually. This story was sheer genius.

On a lighter note "the cash oracle" was pretty funny.The story of a timid feeble man who is afraid to ask a beautiful woman out on a date,resorts to his ATM machine when he discovers that along with cash it also dispenses advice. This story made me laugh thinking of the people behind him cueing up to make a with draw and this nervous sweaty individual hogging the machine just to have the machine tell him what would happen tonight. Pretty funny stuff.

So all in all not a bad collection a couple fillers "the maze" and the last story in the novel are not worthy of a mention cause they were just dull. I would like to read a full novel from Dyson,for it seemed the longer the story the better. A good collection,I recomend it.

My girlfriend lent me this explaining that the author, Jeremy Dyson, was one of the writers for the cult English comedy series A League of Gentleman (not to be confused with Alan Moore's the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) and that I would really enjoy it. Being a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe and Phillip K Dick I am always on the look out for a good short story anthology which comes at the world from a strange oblique angle and this book certainly didn't disappointment.

From the opening tale "we who walk through walls" you get a very distinct feeling of Dyson's style of story telling. Almost all the protoganists are men struggling to overcome some insecurity, affliction or forget some past transgression. His characters are brilliantly human, well fleshed out and captivating.

All the stories seem to share a common setting not unlike Poe or Neil Gaiman or David Lynch, where seemingly mundane situations are approached with a sinister taint or twist and where drama is produced in the clash between what we expect and the ace that Dyson has hidden up his sleeve. You wouldn't go so far to call it fantasy or horror but definitely all the stories have that "something is not quite right here" feel to them.

The only story that I haven't liked so far was "At Last" as it didn't seem to deliver to strangeness that so characterises the other stories. I haven't finished reading the book yet but I would definitely recommend it to any fan of Neil Gaiman, Edgar Allan Poe and Roald Dahl's adult short stories.

This book is a great read especially if you are like me and generally don't get much time to read. It's a great book for the morning bus trip, train ride or commute to work. You can escape the mudanity of your journey be sinking you teeth into one of Dyson's tasty morsels.

With this twelve story collection of mostly unpublished short fiction, Dyson exhibits a decided bent for cosmic justice with a more than a twist of the supernatural. The closest comparison I can make is to some of Roald Dahl's short (adult) fiction, but with an added fantastical element. Dyson tackles primal themes of lust, sex, love, jealousy, temptation, and greed with a deft touch that is both poignant, ruthless, and like the rabbit on the cover, sinister. Many of the stories treat similar themes with slightly different approaches. In three of the stories, "A Slate Roof in the Rain," "The Engine of Desire," "All in the Telling", nasty exploitative men get their just deserts in almost revenge fantasy narratives. Two stories, "City Deep" and "The Maze," feature neurotically obsessive lone men who are consumed by their manias and disappear into the bowels of the earth. Another two stories, "We Who Walk Through Walls" and "Love In the Time of Molyneux," feature antagonists whose hubris is dealt with appropriately.

Almost every story is tinged with an element of sadness or despair that, on the whole, makes the book a bit gloomy-indeed half the stories end with their central figure either crying, dead, mad, or in total despair over their lives. It's possible Dyson (or his editor) recognized this cumulative weight, and purposely placed the one story with a conventionally happy ending ("The Cash Point Oracle") in the middle. In any event, anyone who enjoys short fiction should check out this promising debut collection.

It is clear upon reading this book that Jeremy Dyson has a genuine love of its subject matter. His knowledge springs from extensive research, yes, but is presented in a way which makes it clear that he enjoyed every minute of it. He summarises events amongst various film studios succinctly, yet includes very interesting in-depth information about the films themselves. True, objectivity was not a major issue here - Dyson's opinions are scattered throughout - but it only makes the read more interesting and encourages the reader to develop opinions of their own. All in all a very interesting and informative read for fans of the genre.