Unbecoming

by Mike O'Driscoll

In these 13 stories, Mike O'Driscoll plays with our imagination and expectations, subverting the horror genre whilst embracing its conventions. Dark, dangerous and sometimes downright dirty, the stories get under your skin and into your head.

246 pages, Paperback

First published July 18, 2006

About the author

Mike O'Driscoll writes tales of crime, horror and fantasy that do not rest easy within genre categories but rather roam freely across and in between the boundaries. He has worked in sales, recruitment, health and social care, education and mental health service provision. For a number of years he ran his own video rental business, a period he sees as crucial to his education and development as a writer.

His stories have appeared in many of the leading horror, science fiction and crime journals and anthologies, including volumes of Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Best New Horror, Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Black Static, Inferno, Crime Wave, Fear, Albedo One, Gathering the Bones, Lethal Kisses, The Dark and Black Feathers.

He has written on film and TV in his columns 'Night's Plutonian Shore', and 'Silver Bullets', which appeared in Interzone and Black Static. Essays on David Cronenberg and David Lynch appeared in The Third Alternative, and he has reviewed books extensively for The Fix, Third Alternative, Black Static & Ginger Nuts of Horror.

His story 'Sounds Like' was adapated and filmed by acclaimed horror director Brad Anderson, for the 2006 anthology TV series, Masters of Horror. Mike's first collection of stories, Unbecoming was published by Elastic Press in 2006, and his second collection, The Dream Operator, appeared in 2017 from Undertow. His novella, Eyepennies, was published in 2012 as the first in the series of critically acclaimed novellas from TTA Press.

Reviews

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story, like many of the stories in this book, has a definite ‘spirit of place’ and sinewily and satisfyingly prosed out for us. There is a long-lost (did it ever exist?) Lynch-like film that seems to change on each viewing and one of the story’s protagonists sort of becoming the message that was left on the film-print to ‘become’ the buried treasure yearned for by the person leaving the message there for later retrieval. Most intriguing. It is romantic and creepy … with feelings of hurt and grief working itself out by replacement therapy. One wonders, though, whether all happy endings ever stay like that. That’s what makes (I feel) all literature horror literature … or as I prefer to say: the Ominous Imagination. O’Minous O’Driscoll.

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[Franco · Rating 5 out of 5]

a superb collection of stories. i found them perfectly well written in the vague of poor Joel lane's style and settings,however trascending them in a sort of desperate jansenistic pity for the desperate human beings populating these tales. 5 stars!