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Death to Everyone
When Dublin loser Humphrey Hardly falls for a sexed teenager fifteen years his junior, he has reason to regret a suicidal bet made with a local villain. This bet: the year’s number of road fatalities will exceed the total from the previous year.
With December drawing to a close and the death toll on Ireland’s roads significantly down, Humphrey’s inventive drive to survive the bet unravels in an unexpected and troubling way.
With December drawing to a close and the death toll on Ireland’s roads significantly down, Humphrey’s inventive drive to survive the bet unravels in an unexpected and troubling way.
80 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2024
About the author
John Robbins
11 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: John Robbins
John Robbins has published comics and short stories in titles such as Emerald Eye: The Best Irish Imaginative Fiction (Aeon Press, 2005) and Ink Brick: A Journal of Comics Poetry. His graphic novella Unlucky Unlikely was released by Blackshapes Books in 2014, and a year later he published A Hand of Fingers, collecting a selection of his work from magazines and anthologies. More recently via Kindle Direct Publishing he let loose Death to Everyone, a novella. John lives mobile phone-free in Dublin, Ireland.
source: Amazon
Please see: John Robbins
John Robbins has published comics and short stories in titles such as Emerald Eye: The Best Irish Imaginative Fiction (Aeon Press, 2005) and Ink Brick: A Journal of Comics Poetry. His graphic novella Unlucky Unlikely was released by Blackshapes Books in 2014, and a year later he published A Hand of Fingers, collecting a selection of his work from magazines and anthologies. More recently via Kindle Direct Publishing he let loose Death to Everyone, a novella. John lives mobile phone-free in Dublin, Ireland.
source: Amazon
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 19, 2024
This horror-comedy is careful not to exploit the cruelty of its dicey theme, favouring consistent light wit over crash-bang punchlines.
The word count is economical in this adventure of key protagonist Humphrey Hardly, himself a masterclass in writing the outsider. The tortured soul is deftly contrasted in public settings and interactions, but author Robbins gives Humphrey no pass in showing his culpability with vulnerability. The character performs brutal acts yet for the most its meandering pondering and uncertain tangents and doubts creating an undue sympathy, and centrally, a desire for him to succeed in his villain's journey. Unsettling.
In a cast of wrong 'uns there's a danger-addict unprepared for normalising Humphrey, given she is his normal; a duo of sharp on menace and high on comedy enforcers; a looming big mob boss; a cluster of feral children, and a mouthy pub bore. Humphrey's parents round out the cast and offer (shaky) grounding. The characters run the story with a common familiarity leaving me wondering if the author isn't on real crime reporting here. Plenty of absurdity too. From home-life domestic to highway criminal, this here's a mad journey.
Having honed his craft over decades of short stories, Robbins gives us a high-powered novella. It's great to join him as he stretches his legs with longer-form prose. I'm left excited for the next thing.
The word count is economical in this adventure of key protagonist Humphrey Hardly, himself a masterclass in writing the outsider. The tortured soul is deftly contrasted in public settings and interactions, but author Robbins gives Humphrey no pass in showing his culpability with vulnerability. The character performs brutal acts yet for the most its meandering pondering and uncertain tangents and doubts creating an undue sympathy, and centrally, a desire for him to succeed in his villain's journey. Unsettling.
In a cast of wrong 'uns there's a danger-addict unprepared for normalising Humphrey, given she is his normal; a duo of sharp on menace and high on comedy enforcers; a looming big mob boss; a cluster of feral children, and a mouthy pub bore. Humphrey's parents round out the cast and offer (shaky) grounding. The characters run the story with a common familiarity leaving me wondering if the author isn't on real crime reporting here. Plenty of absurdity too. From home-life domestic to highway criminal, this here's a mad journey.
Having honed his craft over decades of short stories, Robbins gives us a high-powered novella. It's great to join him as he stretches his legs with longer-form prose. I'm left excited for the next thing.
February 6, 2024
This is satisfying as hell. There’s a little bit of Vonnegut and some Hunter S. Thompson yucks in here. Clever without looking at you long and hard in the eye and then winking, loudly.
Read
November 10, 2024DEATH TO EVERYONE by JOHN ROBBINS
It’s been too long a sabbatical since I’ve visited the works of John Robbins, and this novella finds him in potent form. Herein a plot with an inevitable destination, steers off course only to allow added characterisation of characters doomed from the start. Despite which, there are moments where you dream a little, with fingers crossed, that good things will happen along the way. They do, but they’re rare. Small rewards, in a small world.
Humphrey Hardly is a reluctant participant in a computer course forced upon him to offset his local job centre’s target figures. When the decidedly younger Andrea appears to have an uncommon interest in this non-entity it leads to the – also non-drinker - attending a Christmas pub gathering with his fellow students.
Somewhere between this introverted social intercourse he upsets a local bad lad, who it’s intimated has IRA affiliations (though I personally felt that a tall story meant to big him up). The upshot is, Humphrey bets this end-of-year’s road fatalities will exceed those of the one before. An odd wager to make, one that’s literally suicidal. But the deed is done.
When safe driving means the number of accidents actually goes down, things look bad, and something has to be done. A black comedy of dark absurdity then ensues, Humphrey and Andrea becoming partners-in-crime to ensure those fatalities rise, their cross-crossing relationship a car crash from the start we are but voyeurs from the back seat, entranced, unable to release the door and jump out.
A number of the principal players in this tale we find despicable from the outset, others our views are modified as we come to appreciate the social pressure life’s thrown at them. Do we like any of them? I’m not sure. Yet, somehow, still we care.
An addicted reader, since covid, I’ve found doing so problematic, the reasons assorted, but I really wanted to get back into hearing Robbins’ literary voice in my head as I read the book sat on my daughter’s settee while she packed suitcases ready to leave the apartment she’d called home for a year so she could return back to Brum and studying a masters’ degree in law. We digress, and that’s fine, for some say you can’t truly go home. And yet I sank right in, devouring John’s words.
Set in Tallaght, Dublin, where the author lives, oddly I found the sense of it being Irish to a lesser degree than many of his numerous short stories or comic strips. Were there less choice-phrases of dialect? I’m not sure. Enough to position and identify characters without any biased stereotypes certainly, maybe there was also something of me wanting to, and indeed finding myself, safe in the work of a writer I admire.
There was broad black humour, as expected, and even a little kink of a twist in the last paragraph or so that surprised and made me smile. There were also at least three brief sections where he expressed some mundane aspect of live, often about food as I recall, where he looked on it in such a novel new way. The length just right, it left me highly satisfied as I closed the back cover.
File loosely under crime fiction, slice-of-life, or urban black comedy, but don’t just file it away, give it a read.
It’s been too long a sabbatical since I’ve visited the works of John Robbins, and this novella finds him in potent form. Herein a plot with an inevitable destination, steers off course only to allow added characterisation of characters doomed from the start. Despite which, there are moments where you dream a little, with fingers crossed, that good things will happen along the way. They do, but they’re rare. Small rewards, in a small world.
Humphrey Hardly is a reluctant participant in a computer course forced upon him to offset his local job centre’s target figures. When the decidedly younger Andrea appears to have an uncommon interest in this non-entity it leads to the – also non-drinker - attending a Christmas pub gathering with his fellow students.
Somewhere between this introverted social intercourse he upsets a local bad lad, who it’s intimated has IRA affiliations (though I personally felt that a tall story meant to big him up). The upshot is, Humphrey bets this end-of-year’s road fatalities will exceed those of the one before. An odd wager to make, one that’s literally suicidal. But the deed is done.
When safe driving means the number of accidents actually goes down, things look bad, and something has to be done. A black comedy of dark absurdity then ensues, Humphrey and Andrea becoming partners-in-crime to ensure those fatalities rise, their cross-crossing relationship a car crash from the start we are but voyeurs from the back seat, entranced, unable to release the door and jump out.
A number of the principal players in this tale we find despicable from the outset, others our views are modified as we come to appreciate the social pressure life’s thrown at them. Do we like any of them? I’m not sure. Yet, somehow, still we care.
An addicted reader, since covid, I’ve found doing so problematic, the reasons assorted, but I really wanted to get back into hearing Robbins’ literary voice in my head as I read the book sat on my daughter’s settee while she packed suitcases ready to leave the apartment she’d called home for a year so she could return back to Brum and studying a masters’ degree in law. We digress, and that’s fine, for some say you can’t truly go home. And yet I sank right in, devouring John’s words.
Set in Tallaght, Dublin, where the author lives, oddly I found the sense of it being Irish to a lesser degree than many of his numerous short stories or comic strips. Were there less choice-phrases of dialect? I’m not sure. Enough to position and identify characters without any biased stereotypes certainly, maybe there was also something of me wanting to, and indeed finding myself, safe in the work of a writer I admire.
There was broad black humour, as expected, and even a little kink of a twist in the last paragraph or so that surprised and made me smile. There were also at least three brief sections where he expressed some mundane aspect of live, often about food as I recall, where he looked on it in such a novel new way. The length just right, it left me highly satisfied as I closed the back cover.
File loosely under crime fiction, slice-of-life, or urban black comedy, but don’t just file it away, give it a read.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews