Sick Dice

by David Mathew

David Mathew’s collection mixes slipstream with crime fiction to great effect. Sharply written and full of surprises. Gary Couzens, author of Out Stack and Other Places Mathew leads the reader into stories of calm and controlled prose, which contrasts with the unsettling way in which he turns our world slant and hallucinatory. Iain Rowan, author of One of Us Take a glass. Pour two shots of the gritty British workaday angst of the Angry Young Men. Pour a shot of the deep surrealism of China Miéville, add a soupçon of William S. Burroughs – then you have Sick Dice. No matter how you roll them, you come up with a grim world spangled with multi-chromatic psychedelic stars. Like the fate of one of David’s characters, after you read this collection, strange thoughts will ride you like a pony. Remember to take your amphetamines so you won’t commit any dreamcrimes. Highly recommended. Don Webb, author of Through Dark Angles Mathew toys with our perception of reason, understanding and human instinct. A fantastic compendium which somehow reconciles the everyday with the incomprehensible; the dream with reality; tipping fiction over the edge. Maggie Cameron, Artist Mathew is a master of subtle unease. His characters, inhabiting a world that is always an inch off-kilter, walk the margins of moral ambiguity in a selection of stories infused with sadness, surrealism and slow-burning mystery. Neil Williamson, author of The Moon King David Mathew has always had a talent for getting inside the heads of damaged criminal minds . . . you’ll be taken to some very disturbing places, in the borderland between the strange and the terrifyingly insane. It might just make you doubt the world around you. It might just make you doubt yourself. . . Keith Brooke, author of The Accord Dysfunctional characters whose lives may have been shattered by childhood abuse, identity confusion and submerged memories inhabit the boundaries between reality and fantasy in these psychological not for the faint-hearted. Lawrence Dyer, author of A Cottage on the Moss

390 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2016

Reviews

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

LAPSUS

“, it is no exaggeration to suggest that Thursday’s life revolves around classical music:”

The Man Called Thursday? And of many other names. He is one of this story’s prostitute’s clients who, during this her story, hires her full time, to the exclusion of other clients. He also toys with naming her Lamella or Katalina. But like all great classical music, one needs in one’s life the fullness of all unhappiness as part of life’s joy. To fulfil the gestalt. This is a SIGNIFICANT story for me, one also of loose cannon names that characters wish to give each other. The prostitute and the shrink, the composers who reside on the pages here, like Mahler and ‘Shost’ and Elgar and the eponymous Lapsus aberration of the composer Lassus (who wrote motets and much else in the 16th century and suffered from a sickness known as ‘melancholia hypocondriaca’). Meanwhile I have doubts about Thursday and his composing. Does he REALLY think Mahler wrote Don Giovanni?! Any “diced bananas”, notwithstanding.

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

CAVEAT: I was the first publisher of a story in this book.