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Mr Outside
During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he's been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to understand each other and let go.
Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces' distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, the limits of intimacy, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.
Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces' distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, the limits of intimacy, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.
267 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 16, 2025
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December 24, 2025
Mr Outside, he explained, was someone who lived to torment other people. He had nothing else going on in his life. He broke into Thomas’s house whenever he wanted to. He put horrible things on the shelf.
…
There were bolts on the doors, I told him. Both doors, front and back.
A laugh fountained from his head. The sound was the voice of someone who lives to torment other people.
‘Mr Outside laughs. He gets a kick out of causing me misery.’
The only people with keys to the house, I said, were me and Briar.
Caleb Klaces debut novel, Fatherhood, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and Mr Outside is Prototype Press’s entry for the 2026 edition of the prize, now rebranded as the Queen St Mary’s Small Press Fiction Prize.
Fatherhood, as the title suggests, was based around Klaces experience of becoming a parent; Mr Outside covers that another related rite-of-passage, that of being the child of an ageing parent.
Klaces own father died in 2022, having suffered from dementia and having entered full-time residential care a year earlier, funded by selling the family house. and this experience informs the novel.
The narrator’s father, Thomas, lives alone, is rather chaotic squalor, and is suffering from dementia. The novel is set over a long weekend in the Covid period, with the narrator, a poet and lecturer, visiting Thomas to help him pack to move to a residential care home. He also needs to let Thomas know that he is moving to Germany, as his wife has a new role there; he is not supposed to tell him that he and his wife are expecting a third child, as the first scan isn’t until the coming week; and he needs to let in an estate agent who is coming to value the house, although Thomas while aware of the care move is not aware of how it will be funded.
Klaces was, as still is, a published poet before his novels, and as with Fatherhood, this is a novel written in a poetic style, here fragmentary and circular (although with an underlying linear narrative) and infused with imagery and imagination, reflecting the nature of Thomas’s confused memories and his uneasy interaction with the realities of the present.
Thomas has also led a rich, if rather non-linear life, including being defrocked as a curate in 1969 after posing for naked photographs in his parish church.
I reached into the back and grabbed the Welcome Pack. There was the list of what he was allowed to bring. There was only space in his new room for one small bookcase, a suitcase of clothes, and a selection of photographs.
There was also a form I hadn’t noticed. It was designed like a child’s worksheet, with ‘MY LIFE STORY’ printed at the top. There were ten black lines on which to write his
life story. I flushed at the chance to do something well, a little smug with our shared proficiency.
But what kind of story could we agree on?
He grew up in Wales. He came of age in Essex. He was married. Then he wasn’t. He was a priest. Then he wasn’t. He was married a second time. Then he wasn’t. He worked. He didn’t. He was a poet. He decided not to publish any more. He had four children. He remained in contact with two of his children. I could barely state a fact I didn’t have to qualify or withdraw.
‘Tell them something more interesting than facts,’ he’d instructed me a few days before. The memory was vivid and uncanny, as though I was in two places at once. I’d had
to cut the phone call short because a child had pulled my trousers down around my ankles.
‘Tell your children about their grandfather.’ He made me promise to carry out his will. ‘You’re a poet. Make it an exciting story.’
A rich vein of the story concerns the narrator and Thomas's discussions, often frustrating, on what to take. With both father and son poets, the narrator assumes that their main task will be selecting a sub-section of Thomas's extensive book collection, but Thomas, in his current mental state, has other ideas e.g. the selection of cruise ship brochures he receives in the post each year. And he confidently tells his son he has already packed his suitcase:
I returned to the kitchen to get the cloth bag he claimed to have packed. I went back to the front room. I sat on the sofa and emptied the bag onto the cushion next to me. There was a single sock, a scrunch of tissue paper, a tin of mints, a few sheets of lined paper, a pen, a well-used A4 plastic folder, and the purple plastic presentation tray from a box of biscuits.
An additional element here to Klaces work comes from the, self-acknowledgedly Sebaldian (see link below), incorporation of photographs. The grainy reproductions of the black and white pictures highly effective in the context of a novel about fractured memories.
The backdrop of Covid also adds to the unanchored atmosphere which starts with the narrator’s own journey to see Thomas, his first since lockdown, one that involves fog, missed turns and seeming hallucinations:
What troubled me was the journey. I had no idea how everything had seemed so right and yet been so completely wrong. I had passed the tree, the abandoned church, the dandelions, all exactly where I’d seen them so many times before, on the familiar route. But I hadn’t taken the familiar route. I’d driven on a different road. There was no way I could have seen what I’d seen.
The creation of the Mr Outside figure effectively captures the suspicions of loved ones that can accomopany dementia, and the narrator is also honest about the frustrations of repetitive conversations and the self-justification than can accompany a decision to put a loved one in care:
It had all happened before. The loop around the park, the same exchange, the sympathy that was accusation. The care home would free them both from this repetition, it occurred to the younger man. If his dad was lucky, he would find a tenderness and acceptance from the carers quite different from anything he’d experienced before.
Mr Outside is a highly-effective and moving exploration of its subject matter, and personally resonant for me, and a brilliant complement to Fatherhood, if slightly more conventional than that work.
Background material
An essay by the author on dementia and fiction: https://thelondonmagazine.org/article...
The author on how he discovered novels that blend text and image via Sebald’s work:
https://lithub.com/what-the-picture-k...
The author reading the complete work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeOi...
Prototype Press
Founded in 2019 by Jess Chandler, Prototype is a publisher of fiction, poetry, anthologies and interdisciplinary projects. With an emphasis on producing unique and beautiful books, we are committed to championing the work of new voices in free-form contemporary literature.
Prototype is committed to creating new possibilities in the publishing of fiction and poetry through a flexible, interdisciplinary approach. Each publication is unique in its form and presentation, and the aesthetic of each object is considered critical to its production.
Through the discovery of high quality work across genres, Prototype strives to increase audiences for experimental writing, as the home for writers and artists whose work requires a creative vision not offered by mainstream literary publishers.
…
There were bolts on the doors, I told him. Both doors, front and back.
A laugh fountained from his head. The sound was the voice of someone who lives to torment other people.
‘Mr Outside laughs. He gets a kick out of causing me misery.’
The only people with keys to the house, I said, were me and Briar.
Caleb Klaces debut novel, Fatherhood, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and Mr Outside is Prototype Press’s entry for the 2026 edition of the prize, now rebranded as the Queen St Mary’s Small Press Fiction Prize.
Fatherhood, as the title suggests, was based around Klaces experience of becoming a parent; Mr Outside covers that another related rite-of-passage, that of being the child of an ageing parent.
Klaces own father died in 2022, having suffered from dementia and having entered full-time residential care a year earlier, funded by selling the family house. and this experience informs the novel.
The narrator’s father, Thomas, lives alone, is rather chaotic squalor, and is suffering from dementia. The novel is set over a long weekend in the Covid period, with the narrator, a poet and lecturer, visiting Thomas to help him pack to move to a residential care home. He also needs to let Thomas know that he is moving to Germany, as his wife has a new role there; he is not supposed to tell him that he and his wife are expecting a third child, as the first scan isn’t until the coming week; and he needs to let in an estate agent who is coming to value the house, although Thomas while aware of the care move is not aware of how it will be funded.
Klaces was, as still is, a published poet before his novels, and as with Fatherhood, this is a novel written in a poetic style, here fragmentary and circular (although with an underlying linear narrative) and infused with imagery and imagination, reflecting the nature of Thomas’s confused memories and his uneasy interaction with the realities of the present.
Thomas has also led a rich, if rather non-linear life, including being defrocked as a curate in 1969 after posing for naked photographs in his parish church.
I reached into the back and grabbed the Welcome Pack. There was the list of what he was allowed to bring. There was only space in his new room for one small bookcase, a suitcase of clothes, and a selection of photographs.
There was also a form I hadn’t noticed. It was designed like a child’s worksheet, with ‘MY LIFE STORY’ printed at the top. There were ten black lines on which to write his
life story. I flushed at the chance to do something well, a little smug with our shared proficiency.
But what kind of story could we agree on?
He grew up in Wales. He came of age in Essex. He was married. Then he wasn’t. He was a priest. Then he wasn’t. He was married a second time. Then he wasn’t. He worked. He didn’t. He was a poet. He decided not to publish any more. He had four children. He remained in contact with two of his children. I could barely state a fact I didn’t have to qualify or withdraw.
‘Tell them something more interesting than facts,’ he’d instructed me a few days before. The memory was vivid and uncanny, as though I was in two places at once. I’d had
to cut the phone call short because a child had pulled my trousers down around my ankles.
‘Tell your children about their grandfather.’ He made me promise to carry out his will. ‘You’re a poet. Make it an exciting story.’
A rich vein of the story concerns the narrator and Thomas's discussions, often frustrating, on what to take. With both father and son poets, the narrator assumes that their main task will be selecting a sub-section of Thomas's extensive book collection, but Thomas, in his current mental state, has other ideas e.g. the selection of cruise ship brochures he receives in the post each year. And he confidently tells his son he has already packed his suitcase:
I returned to the kitchen to get the cloth bag he claimed to have packed. I went back to the front room. I sat on the sofa and emptied the bag onto the cushion next to me. There was a single sock, a scrunch of tissue paper, a tin of mints, a few sheets of lined paper, a pen, a well-used A4 plastic folder, and the purple plastic presentation tray from a box of biscuits.
An additional element here to Klaces work comes from the, self-acknowledgedly Sebaldian (see link below), incorporation of photographs. The grainy reproductions of the black and white pictures highly effective in the context of a novel about fractured memories.
The backdrop of Covid also adds to the unanchored atmosphere which starts with the narrator’s own journey to see Thomas, his first since lockdown, one that involves fog, missed turns and seeming hallucinations:
What troubled me was the journey. I had no idea how everything had seemed so right and yet been so completely wrong. I had passed the tree, the abandoned church, the dandelions, all exactly where I’d seen them so many times before, on the familiar route. But I hadn’t taken the familiar route. I’d driven on a different road. There was no way I could have seen what I’d seen.
The creation of the Mr Outside figure effectively captures the suspicions of loved ones that can accomopany dementia, and the narrator is also honest about the frustrations of repetitive conversations and the self-justification than can accompany a decision to put a loved one in care:
It had all happened before. The loop around the park, the same exchange, the sympathy that was accusation. The care home would free them both from this repetition, it occurred to the younger man. If his dad was lucky, he would find a tenderness and acceptance from the carers quite different from anything he’d experienced before.
Mr Outside is a highly-effective and moving exploration of its subject matter, and personally resonant for me, and a brilliant complement to Fatherhood, if slightly more conventional than that work.
Background material
An essay by the author on dementia and fiction: https://thelondonmagazine.org/article...
The author on how he discovered novels that blend text and image via Sebald’s work:
https://lithub.com/what-the-picture-k...
The author reading the complete work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHeOi...
Prototype Press
Founded in 2019 by Jess Chandler, Prototype is a publisher of fiction, poetry, anthologies and interdisciplinary projects. With an emphasis on producing unique and beautiful books, we are committed to championing the work of new voices in free-form contemporary literature.
Prototype is committed to creating new possibilities in the publishing of fiction and poetry through a flexible, interdisciplinary approach. Each publication is unique in its form and presentation, and the aesthetic of each object is considered critical to its production.
Through the discovery of high quality work across genres, Prototype strives to increase audiences for experimental writing, as the home for writers and artists whose work requires a creative vision not offered by mainstream literary publishers.
November 11, 2025
This is a moving story beautifully told. In Mr Outside, the narrator details the difficulty of travelling, during lockdown, to his father's house in order to help him pack to move into a care home. Caleb Klaces captures perfectly the emotional challenge of this task, as well as the occasional flashes of deep connection, shared humour and new insight into the personality of someone the narrator will soon lose. Told with a balance of sadness and humour, this is a novel that will stay with me for a long time.
December 29, 2025
Ömsint och fint om föräldrarelation och förlust, samt om familjeberättelser. Och vad man vill att någon annan ska vara, kanske för att själv bli mer intressant
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews