Violent Solutions to Popular Problems

by M.J. Nicholls

Extracted from the maw of a resting shrew, these ten cankers reek of huff and qualm. A librarian teams up with a weeping bus-dweller to suppress a talentless writer. A man attempts a perfect equilibrium of pain and pleasure to forge a life of matchless keel. A triumvirate of Dans spiral into oblivion with operatic panache. Two sub-people struggle for ascension to the normal realm in a heckish caste system. Various narked sods explain the violent solutions to their popular problems in a tale that Butch Vig might call “titular”. Someone explains the complex sociological web of mayhem that is the modern coffeehouse. Postmodernism makes a shocking return in a classic postmodern tale about postmodernism shaking its postmodern bahookie. In future Texas, women attempting abortions are held captive and forced to whelp at gunpoint. And in a finale one Dutch arborist has called “a botched stew”, the world’s unwritten characters mingle in a bardo where their untold stories flex and throb in painful collocation. For the first time in his life, the unacclaimed novelist M.J. Nicholls has written a collection of prose fit for hexagonal man.

165 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 31, 2023

About the author

A man who wrote the novels A Postmodern Belch, The House of Writers, The Quiddity of Delusion, The 1002nd Book to Read Before You Die, Scotland Before the Bomb, Trimming England and Condemned to Cymru. He lives in Glasgow.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

Ten stories, squeezed from the nastiest nooks of my ailing noggin, spread awkwardly across 148 pages, next month.

[Lee Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

The inimitable MJ, now available in short form. Come for the phrases, stay for the phrases, leave bedazzled by phraseology -- it's not a phase he’s going through, he’s fully committed to the bit, but where does it leave us? Amused, befuddled, fulfilled.

[Black Glove · Rating 4 out of 5]

Above all else, I like the sardonic exuberance of the wordage.