Firelight

by John Morrissey

An imprisoned man with strange visions writes letters to his sister.

A controversial business tycoon leaves his daughter a mysterious inheritance.

A child is haunted by a green man with a message about the origins of their planet.

In this striking collection of stories, the award-winning John Morrissey investigates colonialism and identity without ever losing sight of his characters’ humanity. Brilliantly imagined and masterfully observed, Firelight marks the debut of a writer we will be reading for decades to come.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Indigenous, Australia

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2023

Reviews

[Text Publishing]

The following book reviews have been shared by Text Publishing – publisher of Firelight

‘Firelight introduces us to a young writer with a dedication to the craft of short fiction. Each of John Morrissey's stories is a gem, while the collection as a whole is superb.’
Tony Birch

‘Here is a sharp and compelling new voice in Australian fiction. Morrissey honours his characters, and his writing is at once lucid and poetic, meticulous and economical. I read Firelight breathlessly.’
Jennifer Down

‘Brilliant…This clever, genre-bending book constantly challenges the reader’s expectations…Prisoners, ghosts, strange green men, and mining tycoons populate the pages.’
Writing NSW

‘A beguiling, evocative delight…I would be happy to recommend this collection to any curious reader—regardless of their usual position as a speculative fiction lover or hater. There’s something about his confident, conversational writing style that allows Morrissey to encase very abnormal events in everyday settings in a way that feels completely believable.’
Readings

‘John Morrissey has produced a suite of short stories…that investigate colonialism and identity with a keen eye and uninhibited imagination…An elegant and unpretentious narrative style allows Morrissey to reach for outlandish or bizarre elements with the irreducible impact of a lucid dream. It’s a fable-like, and well-crafted collection.’
Age

‘Firelight is a mastery of craft. Each piece challenges narratives of colonialism with precision. Stories portray Indigenous characters from inside and outside perspectives—as observers and the observed—with a complexity that adds an incredible richness to the canon of Australian fiction. The writing is vivid and lush…It is a truly talented writer who can produce a collection that is both harrowing and exciting.’
Kill Your Darlings

‘Morrissey is showing his prowess in working in speculative fiction.’
Shannon Burns, ABC RN Bookshelf

‘An exemplary collection of Indigenous literary speculative fiction. [Firelight] engages with both a sense of wonderment and our innate capacity for compassion, wonderful and abstracted at turns, often simultaneously. Literary spec-fit is a genre to which Aboriginal people seem well suited, for a number of reasons; one of them is that Aboriginal literature is constantly and instinctively engaged with the fantastical. Morrissey’s stories, those of a new writer stretching his mind and experimenting with form, demonstrate that perfectly.’
Claire G. Coleman, Australian Book Review

‘Firelight is a highly original and compelling collection. In this debut, Morrissey cleverly uses tropes of familiar genres to explore different facets of contemporary Australian life, particularly the legacy and experience of colonialism.’
Conversation

‘It’s difficult to think of a time in Australia’s recent history where a book of short tales reflecting on ideas of colonialism and the Indigenous experience would hit harder…Brought together with provocative cover art by Aboriginal artist Gordon Hookey, this collection of superbly-written Australiana is unmissable, and couldn’t come at a more significant moment for Australian readers.’
Aurealis

‘One of my favourite reads this year—eerie and unsettling, with a slightly satirical bent…Tackles heavy topics such as resources mining, Indigenous dispossession and environmental ethics in surreal and unexpected ways.’
Maxine Beneba Clarke, Best Books of 2024, Spectrum

‘[The] use of speculative fiction suspends the reader between allegorical explorations of colonisation and an investment in the weird and beautiful…Firelight is even better and weirder than I could have imagined…The writing is elegant, the humour dry and subtle, the ideas fresh and absurd—this all makes for an exciting book…Part wish fulfilment and part nightmare, Firelight offers grim and lucid ways of seeing this colony through all times.’
Sydney Review of Books

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was deeply impressed by this debut work of fiction. There's a strong vein of science fiction and even in more 'realistic' stories there's an element of the uncanny. John's an exciting new talent on the Australian writing scene.

[elbow ☆ · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars (rounded up just to be nice)
unfortunately this didn't really work for me because i don't like science fiction 😭😭 but that's on me tbh. i did enjoy the last two stories (the last penny and tommy norli) but it wasn't realllly enough to redeem the whole book. :(

[Deb Chapman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probs 2.5? Uneven collection for me. I liked 5 mins, which I’d read before in You All Come Back Now, but Autodoc, which was a very long story (half the book?) , didn’t do it for me. Not very memorable stories overall, but some bits of very good writing in there I thought.

[Cal Samson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguing stories, economically told with great characters, and a strange intimate warmth throughout.

[Katg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories, magic realism/ sci

[Declan Fry]

This debut collection of short fiction from John Morrissey offers a sly, teasing narrative voice, elegantly staged dialogue and an eye for the absurdities and indignities of contemporary life.

At times recalling Will Self — both authors share a droll narrative voice, interest in office space and alternative timelines, fabulist narrative and colonisation — there are a number of highlights throughout the collection.

Autoc, a tale of future "alien" contact, invites the reader into all manner of sinister magic: the atmosphere of the 19th-century macabre, the question of imperialism, and an unnerving dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of the lecture hall scene in Dario Argento's Inferno. Five Minutes is a beautifully executed metafiction examining familial angst, bureaucracy and the probable outcomes of a giant centipede attack. Ivy mixes urban ennui with slacker wit, gradually transforming into a meditation on rapture.

Much of the wonder of these stories lies in their suggestiveness. Morrissey is capable of relating the bizarre with lucidity and a calmly sardonic touch. The narratives are elusive yet vividly realised, leaving their endings and implications to the reader's imagination.

They could be described as speculative fiction but, in truth, they are more firmly anchored to that genre's underlying fabric: ourselves, and our inescapable strangeness.
(https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-0...)

[Aimee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked: the story 'Five Minutes'. The awkward, realistic public service scenes and the weird centipede apocalypse which raises the question of 'whose land is it?'

Disliked: I wasn't sure what was going on in a lot of the stories but I found Mykaela Saunders' review helpful to get a better understanding.

"Weather like this inspires in me a vague yearning-for the past or for the future, or for the nectar of the present, I cannot say. When I was eighteen, twenty, this yearning was my chief delight and conciliation; now it sticks in me like a fish hook."

"Jane and I make awkward conversation on our way to the bar, as if reintroducing ourselves. It occurs to me that the real content of our relationships in converted in chemical signals over which we have no control; speech is only an afterthought, a false narrative imposed by the frontal lobe to justify its existence. So we recapitulate ground we covered earlier in the day, but everything is different, our chemicals have changed."

"I often wish the norms of bourgeois society were more rigidly enforced on the people who supposedly embody them."

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so cool! All the speculative stories had their own distinct pacing and witting style, but with characters that were very engaging and recognisable from their thoughts and actions. My favourite were Special Economic Zone and Autoc, and I recommended Five Minutes to be read in an Indigenous Studies Pop Culture class - the students all enjoyed it and I heard most were defending the actions of the character for something he said (read it to know LOL).

Look forward to reading more from this brilliant writer.

[Jeral · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first time I've read a book of this style that is spec fiction via short stories. The stories are out there. Most of them left me thinking, wtaf did I just read. As strange as the stories were, some really grabbed my interest and I would've liked if they were longer.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

with a 1/2.
For a debut this was an impressive start to hopefully a long and successful career.
The legacy of colonialism has been insightfully presented in this collection of short stories.

[John Roebuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly impressive. Couldn't put it down.

[Bronwen Heathfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting set of short stories. They each go somewhere you don’t expect. Many have a First Nations theme but not all. I particularly enjoyed Special Economic Zone which focuses on a son’s strange inheritance and The Rupture, experimentation that is disturbing. I couldn’t finish Autoc - just didn’t make sense to me.