Splendid in Ash

by Charles Wilkinson, John Howard (Introduction)

Charles Wilkinson's SPLENDID IN ASH contains seventeen previously uncollected stories from a writer whose seemingly effortless ability to turn the ordinary, the everyday, the outwardly mundane volte-face into regions of feverish weirdness is unrivalled.

The full contents are as follows...

Introduction by John Howard
In the Frame
The Ground of the Circuit
Slimikins
Boxing the Breakable
The White Kisses
The Lengthsman
Absolute Possession
Mr Kitchell Says Thank You
Drawing Above the Breath
Aficionado of the Cold Places
Catapedamania
The Solitary Truth
His Theory of Fridays
An Absent Member
Might be Mordiford
Legs & Chair
The Floaters

The book has 256 pages; is a lithographically printed, sewn hardback with colour endpapers. It is limited to just 300 copies.

Genres: Fiction, Weird Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2018

About the author

A Birmingham-born poet and short-story writer, Charles Wilkinson attended school in a small town on the Welsh Marches, later studying at the University of Lancaster, the University of East Anglia and Trinity College, Dublin. His publications include The Snowman and Other Poems (Iron Press, 1987) and The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions, 2000). A Border Poet member, Ag & Au, a pamphlet of poems, appeared from Flarestack Poets in 2013. Today, he lives in Powys, Wales.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Splendid in Ash - a high quality Egaeus Press publication of more than a dozen pieces of weird fiction by contemporary British author Charles Wilkinson.

At one point in his Introduction to this collection, John Howard characterizes Charles Wilkinson's weird fiction: "Hard reality, bodied-out in lists of normal everyday objects defined and surrounded by light, can be transformed from the mundane and magnified and distorted. Commonplace actions become significant and sinister, ominous."

Although I myself am not overly familiar with what is termed weird fiction, I concur. And I'll add an additional observation: by my reading, the tales within Splendid in Ash possess a unique quality I'll term weird impressionism. What I mean here is a tale can move from one sinister, ominous scene to the next without linear, logical progression - the main character is faced with the bizarre over here and then walks down a dark lane and suddenly comes face to face with a second, much different bit of freakiness.

Again, as a relative newcomer to weird fiction, rather than making general, overarching judgements about the stories or the author's place within the tradition, I'll shift focus to the lead story, In the Frame. I was especially taken by this tale since much of the subject matter revolves around art and painting.

IN THE FRAME
We follow Luke walking downhill at dusk towards a railway station on the lookout for the Golden Age Art Gallery where he will meet up with his friend Callum who speaks in glowing terms of the current exhibit on display: “It’ll be amazing. Like a total synaesthetic experience: words, pictures, lights, ambient sounds. It’s not just some old guy’s easel paintings. Patachandra’s an incredible all-round artist.”

Luke knows he should have brought his phone or directions but he actually enjoys getting lost and exploring by instinct. But, darn, since he’s wearing his usual – Trilby hat, tweed jacket, jeans – none of the people in this remote area of town are dressed remotely like himself, making him feel like a complete outsider.

Luke spots a supermarket but there’s no sign of any art gallery. He asks a cab driver by the railroad station the whereabouts of Golden Age Art Gallery, to which the cabbie replies with a smirk, “Sorry mate. You won’t find no art galleries. Not round here.”

Undaunted, Luke continues making his way down a narrow path. The air smells dank as mud and his shoes begin to slip on what feels like fallen leaves. He has an eerie feeling about all this and tells himself it would be wise to turn back but just then he glimpses a low wooden building with a porch in a puddle of yellow light. He approaches two men who look like nightclub bouncers standing on the porch - on closer inspection both have large flat faces with their mouth, eyes and nose buried in a mountain of flesh. The sign on the building reads The Albion Bowling Club in spindly, dendritic letters.

Luke enters and observes numerous bowling lanes, a few bowlers and a bar where the bartender is a thin, pale woman with “eyes, agog with wonder – or fear.” When Luke asks about the gallery, she tells him flatly and in a loud voice that she knows nothing. Just then, at the far end of the bar by a ramp, Luke catches sight of words on a blackboard chalked in a wavering hand: Exhibition Open.

How peculiar. I couldn’t imagine a less likely location for an art exhibition than at a bowling alley. Anyway, as if our main man hasn’t encountered enough creepiness so far, when he steps up the ramp and enters the exhibit, he’s surprised there’s no catalogue or any information about the paintings. However, in the next room, a number of typical middle-aged, provincial gallery goers are staring at what appears to be blank white canvases.

Where’s Callum? Bringing to mind his friend prompts Luke to reflect on the suicide of Callum’s sister on the London Underground three months after his breakup with her. And to think, he repeatedly made his views clear: he had nothing but contempt for those who inconvenience others by throwing themselves in front of a train. Fortunately, she left no suicide note but he reckons her motive was, in part, a desire to cure him of his contempt.

Ah, finally, there's Callum. Luke taps him on the shoulder but when he turns, whoops, Luke realizes he's made a mistake - the man is not Callum. However, in their ensuing conversation, Luke learns the exhibit he’s been viewing is not part of the Golden Age Art Gallery; rather, the stranger informs him this is a private viewing for members of the Gogmagog Group where group members collaborated in creating the paintings to be placed on exhibit anonymously.

Luke then moves on to the last room where the canvases are larger and the lines are more definite, forming landscapes. “But picture by picture the valleys, crests, and summits suggest the folds of bedclothes and crinkled sheets; then the shape of a giant sleeping under a counterpane of ice. Only the last painting implies an awakening: the snow feathery, except on a crag shaped like the hand of a colossus, reaching upwards, as if to drag some vast body through the blankets of sleep.”

In his Introduction, John Howard remarks that when a reader encounters a Charles Wilkinson story, it is like looking at a painting by an artist such as John Nash or Eric Ravilious. Curiously, by my eye, I detect similarities in the below Eric Ravilious landscape and Luke's description of the artwork in the last room.



The story continues with many more wrinkles, including reference to the legend of Ancient Britons overcoming a race of giants and Callum eventually turning up but with a larger, rougher face atop a body considerably taller then Luke remembers. Added to this, the story's title, In the Frame, takes on multiple meanings, among their number: the frame of a painting, the frame of perception, a body frame and a bowling frame.

With each rereading of this remarkable Charles Wilkinson tale, I came away with a deeper appreciation for the author's precision of language and placement of image. I consider myself fortunate in owning a copy of this beautiful Egaeus Press limited edition. If you can put your hands on a copy, I'm confident you will likewise enjoy.

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's always a trap: a trap in the mind, a trap by design, a trap that betrays, or that leads astray, traps that transform, traps that are destiny. Pity the poor human and the traps they lay for others - or for themselves; pity the poor human whose path leads to a trap - or who trods on a path that is the trap itself. Alas, the surly sullen bell tolls for trapper and trapped alike! And no one shall heed its warning sound.

Charles Wilkinson is a beautiful writer. Of the Aickman school, as has been frequently noted. His is an elastic style, suitable for mordantly humorous tales as well as for more bleak and dire affairs. Stylisation, subtlety, cruelty, tunnel-visioned characters, slow slides and sudden plunges into the surreal are some of his key hallmarks. You shall know him by his fruits, and those that Wilkinson displays are prickly-skinned and not quite ripe, bitter seeds and sour flavors and, sadly, sometimes hollow centers. But even his lesser offerings are all carefully and skillfully written. I do wish this collection were more consistently satisfying (I felt similarly about his prior collection), but his sterling prose is always a pleasure to consume. Along with Damian Murphy & Louis Marvick & Michael Cisco, he is a favorite writer in this strange new-weird subgenre that I love so much.

I thought the strongest stories were all in the first half of the book. "In the Frame" and "The Ground of the Circuit" and "Slimikins" all portray highly disagreeable protagonists receiving their just desserts, whether due to pretensions or thoughtlessness or toxicity, and via transformations or visitation. "Boxing the Breakable" grounds its bizarre reconfigurations in the prosaic realities of the aging mind and the broken body. "The White Kisses" is a tale of paranoia and surveillance that refuses to root its story in anything like a familiar reality. "Absolute Possession" moves from contemplation of the idea of 'ownership' to the realization that everything is owned by nature, and that the natural trajectory for earthly things like property, like bodies, is earthward, back into nature's embrace.

My favorite stories were the strikingly sinister "The Lengthsman" and the surprisingly fun "Mr. Kitchell Says Thank You". The former is a haunting coming of age tale - or rather, coming of death. The latter is chock-full of things I like to read about: a haughty protagonist getting his due, an urbane (and community-minded!) occultist getting his revenge, an eerie hotel set within an even eerier landscape, and of course a mammoth elephant from the Ice Age reborn to bring some just desserts. Both are impeccably written, per usual for this fine author.

[Karl]

One of 300 copies.

Contents:

009 - Introduction by John Howard
013 - "In the Frame"
026 - "The Ground of the Circuit"
040 - "Slimikins"
056 - "Boxing the Breakable"
069 - "The White Kisses"
085 - "The Lengthsman"
094 - "Absolute Possession"
111 - "Mr Kitchell Says Thank You"
130 - "Drawing Above the Breath"
144 - "Aficionado of the Cold Places"
157 - "Catapedamania"
172 -"The Solitary Truth"
183 - "His Theory of Fridays"
198 - "An Absent Member"
214 - "Might be Mordiford"
229 - "Legs & Chair"
230 - "The Floaters"
253 - Acknowledgements

Cover and end papers taken from Pieter Bruegel the Elders "Children's Games"

[Forrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charle Wilkinson's sophomore outing with the elegant and accomplished Egaeus Press is less of a novelty to me than his first Egaeus book, A Twist in the Eye. My earlier "discovery" of Wilkinson was startling and swept me off my feet. Now that I've become more familiar with his work, it feels more . . . well, familiar. And that's not a bad thing. The ebbs and flows of a reader with "his" author can become a sort of cat-and-mouse game, where some maneuvers lose their surprise and others add a whole new dimension to the readerly relationship that would otherwise not emerge. We grow, taste changes, the author's voice ages, and yet, there is, inevitably an element of wonder amidst the familiarity. Here is my "dance" with the text of Splendid In Ash:

The title of the first story in Wilkinson's second collection. "In the Frame," is a triple entendre: one for art, one for being set up, and one for ten pin bowling. The one that is most horrific is not the one you're thinking of! Deftly written, as usual, this story will send your expectations into a tailspin in a fit of readerly vertigo.

"The Ground of the Circuit" is a strange admixture of folk horror and technological terror. The ending reminds me of Aickman - one is left wondering what has already happened, while seeing clearly what is coming, and it's not going to turn out well for the man who was a husband. The disjointedness of rurality and modernity, combined with the short circuited thoughts of both pro- and antagonist, frame it all well.

Did I predict the ending of "Slimikins" well before it came? Sort of. The overall event on which it ended, I saw coming. But I did not see the exquisite detail forthcoming. Wilkinson has an eye for details and, in this case, that meant absolutely plunging the reader into the final moments of a story. Yes, it was inevitable. But by "shoving your face in it," so to speak, the story is raised to an unexpected pitch!

One part David Lynch, one part Robert Aickman, one part Brian Evenson
Limn rim with Charles Wilkinson bitter and salt
Stir quickly
Stir the other direction, quickly!
Shake vigorously
Voila! "Boxing the Breakable"

And though the influences are apparent, this drink is undiluted Wilkinson. Bitter, salty, with a lingering aftertaste, intriguing, and altogether unpleasant.

A marvelous weird cocktail. Bottoms up!

The elements of "The White Kisses" were just a touch too ephemeral for me. I like open-ended stories that don't have to explain themselves, but I prefer a story that is thematically tighter. Don't explain everything, but explain something, please. Anything. Or at least "hang" all the elements together. Sorry, but this one just dissipates into wisps for me. There's potential, but I felt this one too easily forgotten. One needs a few touchpoints, and "The White Kisses" didn't press hard enough for me.

"The Lengthsman" is a tale that bubbles with meaning underneath. You can sense the horror rising from below, surfacing as a bubble whose surface tension expands the dread. Wilkinson does well to let that tension grow, but leaves it to the reader's imagination to pop! The cultural underpinnings are also redolent with alienation and hints of barbarism. An outstanding tale that shimmers with an earthy darkness.

"Absolute Possession" does nothing to slake my thirst to revisit Wales. Quite the contrary. Again, Wilkinson subverts expectations by thrusting the reader even deeper into the weird than expected. Here, nature itself, the land itself, is the realm of the weird. The issues of ownership, free agency, and self are questioned here in the most fundamental of ways. Is it a marvelous escape, or a trap? Or both?

I might note there that a few other stories in the volume are set in Wales (unsurprisingly, given that this is where Wilkinson lives). When I visited the booktown of Hay-On-Wye in summer of 2019, I was a bit saddened that I didn't see Wilkinson's work in any of the bookstores there. Someone has to rectify this! Come to think of it, I had a hard time finding a Machen book there, which is downright criminal and unpatriotic, though I did eventually find a copy of The Hill of Dreams. Anyway, I digress. I'd like to digress permanently to Wales, but my wife won't have it. Oh well.

"Mr. Kitchell Says Thank You" is . . . scattered. Like it's trying to be too many things at once. There are intriguing elements - an occult master, motive for revenge, academic intrigues. And while there is a thematic continuity of . . . elephants . . . the theme isn't strong enough to tie it all together. It's a decent enough story, but I'm not nearly as compelled to love it as I was with other tales herein.

I found "Drawing Above the Breath" a fine story, but also uncompelling. There's a very slight twist on the vampire and fountain of youth myth, a fine point, if you will, on the canon. While the subtlety of the idea is interesting and the writing gorgeous, at times, I can't view the story as anything other than minor, given the context of a volume with so many excellent stories. And, truth be told, I'm just not a fan of vampire stories. Bauhaus did me in on that front. The Count is dead, long (un)live The Count.

"Aficionado of the Cold Places" is a thematically-solid tale whose banal title belies a deeply-fantastical weird, even borderline-surreal story of yearning and the haunting past. The understated use of the word "Aficionado" for such a life-preserving need gives this very serious tale a bitter (I use the word intentionally) twist. Stark beauty pervades the setting, the characters, and the mood. Wonderfully chilling.

Sometimes you pick the perfect soundtrack for reading. This was the case as I listened to Paysage d'Hiver while reading "Catapedamania," thus far, and by far, the most outright disturbing tale in this volume. Bizarre and forlorn with a touch of schizophrenia, just like the musical accompaniment.

In lesser, more rudimentary hands, I would call "The Solitary Truth" a clever story. But Wilkinson's facile handling of language and character make this story not just clever, but intelligent, even cunning. There is a certain dark manipulation happening here that sneaks up and taps you on the shoulder when you least expect it. It could be a sad story, or not, depending on whom you believe. The story is a kind of Rorschach Test with no pass or fail.

"His Theory of Fridays" is an ethereal, yet altogether satisfying story of four siblings, one of whom has a theory . . . of Fridays. The theory isn't mentioned and, in fact, cannot be, according to the narrator, as there are no words to form it. Yet it is a reality, unwritten, unspoken, possibly even unformed. A ghostly-wisp of a story, this is, in a way that "The White Kisses" was not, vanishing, yet fulsome.

"An Absent Member" is the most classically-surreal of the stories in this volume. Ribald, if a bit silly, I found the story enjoyable in its farce, especially in the way it never took itself seriously, even if the narrator did. A nice little change-of-pace story that would normally upset the "flow" of a collection, but seems to appear at just the right point here. I don't know if that was Wilkinson's choice or that of the editor, but it was well-played.

With a heavy does of Brian Evanson-esque matter-of-fact irreality, "Might be Mordiford" shows a glimpse of a bureaucratic hell that would torment even Franz Kafka. Stultifying consequence is not so easy to shake when even memory loss is no excuse for paying the price of one's misdeeds.

"Legs & Chair" (the ampersand is important!) is a science fiction story (so far as I can tell) in the mold of the New Wave (now old) of Science Fiction, tinged with an extra dose of Philip K. Dick. A good story, strange and heartfelt, and a different voice for Wilkinson. Not a fully dystopian vision of the future, but definitely a view of a dysfunctional future society.

The collection ends powerfully with "The Floaters," a post-apocalyptic tale of the erosion of the land and relationships and the crumbling of language itself. The tight narrative speaks volumes more than its word-count. And, in the end, it really is about words and how they are tied to our reality. When one disintegrates, so does the other. As above, so below, but only in a hopeless sense. Grim, grey, awe-inspiring. Reading this could be a way to ease in to Beckett's Molloy trilo- no, who am I kidding? Nothing can prepare you for that.

You will note that I drop the names of several authors throughout this review. While I disagree with at least one review that stops just short of calling Wilkinson's work a wholly derivative mishmash of weird fiction, the influences are apparent, at times. This happens with all writers. I've done my share of channeling other writers myself, even to the point where I have a 100K page manuscript of a science fiction novel that I will have to rewrite, oh, say 90K pages of to make it mine (I was channeling Alastair Reynolds, if you must know). So, maybe I'm remiss in looking past that to some extent. Wilkinson is his own man. And this is his own collection. But, if you like Aickman and Evenson as much as I do, you're going to want to get a copy of this and see what he brings to the table!

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lovely book to own - a very desirable physical object and further proof that the publisher produces some of the nicest books around. I'm less impressed by the contents, however. This is because:
a) a lot of the stories play the familiar weird fiction game of giving you lots of realist detail and then leaving you to ponder whether it has any significance - literal, allegorical, or symbolic. In one story, a character sells military memorabilia online. This has little obvious bearing on the story, so why is it there? To give us a sense of his character? To further ironise his passivity? Lots of weird writers tease you with such details, with Robert Aickman and Reggie Oliver being classic users of the technique. But even Aickman can't always get away with it, and Wilkinson is no Aickman.
b) there's a fondness for the ending which suddenly leaps off into the miraculous/fantastical and/or horrific. It doesn't always arise organically from what's gone before, and can sound like a jarring key change in a piece of music.
c) yet again, a male weird writer who really struggles with female characters (and the representation of marriage).
d) lastly, and most seriously, the stories here are often attractively written but they are generally very derivative. The collection is dedicated to Joel Lane, making me wonder if the opening tale is a middling pastiche of his style (compare some of the stories in 'Where Furnaces Burn'). Elsewhere, there are deafening echoes of Aickman, Oliver, Nigel Kneale, Ligotti, Watt and other weirdoes from the last six decades. I don't get much sense of an original presence or vision in this collection, though it has good moments and occasionally appealing ideas. To take one example, 'Mr Kitchell Says Thank You', a pot-pourri (or olla putrida) of weird writers. It kicks off like an episode of 'The League of Gentlemen' in a ridiculous seaside hotel. Then there's a lot of Aickmanish 'is that important?' detail, before we gradually get to a deeply unconvincing backstory about academic rivalry (a bit like updated MR James, though to very different ends). The story ambles around for a while and then lurches into the mystical/magical/miraculous in a final page worthy of Charles Williams. It's quite good fun, but no one would ever compare the writers I've listed to Wilkinson. The Duke of Wellington's postman once told the Duke he was always being mistaken for him. 'Funny,' said Wellington. 'No one ever mistakes me for you.'
All in all then, I'm glad I've read it but as I went through the stories here, I became increasingly motivated by a desire to guess which writers were being pastiched or imitated. is this deliberate, or is it inevitable if you work in this kind of terrain? All I'll say is that John Howard and Mark Valentine are far superior and that one disadvantage of small press stuff is that it rarely gets thorough (even interventionist) editing. The proofing and typesetting are good but the stories needed a thorough polish.

[Tom]

The obvious precursor to Charles Wilkinson’s style here is Aickman. The strangeness comes from the perspective of a narrator for whom something is going terribly wrong. The narrators present themselves as perfectly rational, almost detached observers. You very quickly get the feeling, however, that their version of events cannot be relied upon.

Wilkinson’s speciality is pushing that style into more dreamlike, surreal territory than Aickman usually does. There’s occasionally a moment in the weirder Aickman stories (I’m thinking particularly of ‘No Time is Passing’) where sense becomes completely untethered and the abstract overtakes the ordinary, concrete world of the character. The best stories in this are those in which Wilkinson prolongs this moment and ratchets up the tension for the characters that are naturally unequipped to deal with the dream logic which starts to dominate.

As with most collections that contain a substantial number of stories, there were some which I found less successful; these were mainly the ones that drifted into the more traditional or predictable. The best of them were both unsettling and compelling.

[Yórgos St. · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of the few books that I have to abandon (for now at least). The stories in here are not working out for me and I liked (sort of) only one. I appreciate mostly the physical aspect of the book and not the essence of it. The stories do not make any sense and they appear to be cryptic just for the sake of it.

[SARDON · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5 stars)

What the reviewers who characterize Charles Wilkinson as a poor man's Aickman fail to realize is how he has streamlined the strange tale\modern ghost story. Still using the familiar technique of couching strangeness in thick cushions of intentionally dull realism, Wilkinson's average story, being roughly one-third the length of his famed predecessor's average story, is so symbolically charged and compact as to seem authentically pervaded with a sense of the numinous. If Aickman tends to send the reader through laborious halls of leaden, mannered prose in search of the one or two kernels of dark allure hidden in so much dullness, then Wilkinson heightens the same psychologically dislocating effects by virtue of his almost poetically compressed narratives.

Though not necessarily the best stories, "The Ground of the Circuit" and "Absolute Possession" display powerful, thematic continuities, especially considering that this is not a collection of linked pieces. Both stories being narratives with novel takes on the otherwise dull topic of land law, their strong sense of place derives from far greater depths than the obvious wealth of evocative descriptions. In each piece, Wilkinson demonstrates a deep understanding of Poe's aesthetic principle, "the unity of effect," whereby the merest object becomes a possible vessel for the given genius loci.

"The Ground of the Circuit" involves a middle-aged couple's cohabitation with a "resident in perpetuity"; though the vaguely druidic, old man merely seems to be a waste of space, his connection to the property, which includes an episode of electrically charged levitation and, later, erotic experimentations, becomes an increasingly strange and sinister fact when the younger, newer residents begin to suspect the perpetual resident's true age.

"Absolute Possession" starts with banal legality and ends in the grim ecstasy of egoic annihilation, but not before the bumbling, college-educated protagonist learns just enough to know that he--and his deceased parents--have lived on grounds more terribly holy than their little human minds ever could have known; the land's true sovereign power being "a force, immanent within nature, an unknowable site of absolute possession." Like the atmosphere pervading "The Ground of the Circuit," this story nearly implodes with an omnipresent sense of pantheistic omnipotence, which, nevertheless, spares us the leafy crowns and naked dancing too often found in fiction of Pan-inspired worship. And if the sheer numinosity of Wilkinson's imagination weren't enough, the reader is treated to his more amusingly acerbic side when describing the protagonist's recent unemployment: "He'd resigned from a career in legal publishing when his obstinacy was no longer mistaken for intellectual rigour."

With the recent publication of Aickman's 'Compulsory Games,' it's very clear that the much-celebrated pioneer of the strange tale is a fairly weak practitioner of any form shorter than a novelette. However, in 'Splendid in Ash,' we have an author who achieves the same elegantly unnerving disruptions of human realities in far more concise and lucid narratives. Save your accusations of a "discounted Aickman" for James Everington or Lynda E Rucker; Charles Wilkinson firmly rests at the pinnacle of the strange tale's current potentiality.

[Vultural · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wilkinson, Charles - Splendid In Ash

Wilkinson can be a troublesome author, utterly baffling at times.
Splendid In Ash, for me, is a collection of disorienting examples.

Luke has been invited to a gallery exhibition. “In The Frame” follows his uncertain journey through an undesirable neighborhood. Near the end of the lane, the point of view shifts, as does our perception of Luke.
This is what Wilkinson does; loosens the moorings, thereby eroding conceptions.

“Absolute Possession” catches the unhappy aftermath of a successful gold-digger. The victim, her husband. Discarded. His victories seem those of empty principles. Worse, he has found himself stranded in a new shire, where principles have neither meaning nor value.

“Drawing Upon The Breath” is a darker tale. Newcomers have taken up residence in the village. Secretive and taciturn, they make no attempts to ingratiate themselves. Rather, in their wake, outlanders snap up houses, to the misfortune of those clutching the lower rungs.

“The Absent Member” is a missing colleague of the gentlemen’s club. An explorers guild. The one who most notices his absence, and possibly related infuriating changes, is a tiresome wannabee. This, like so many of the stories, reveals a sardonic sense of humor, as Wilkinson springs a multi-folded joke at the end.

“Might Be Mordiford” is a fresh take on the heist, the caper, and the aftermath. The anxieties of seclusion, of lying low. And yet, do you really want to hide out above the post office? Where a stream of transients and faded men mutter a dribble of meaningless words. Half hints that you strain to connect. Until too late, the significance uncoils in a malicious reveal.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE THEORY OF FRIDAYS
…which leads me to my theory of Wilkinson. But first, I can tell you this is an increasingly crackbrained portrait of the narrator’s elder brother, and the relationship of both of them with their two sisters, a battle of inheritance and the sororal scorn for both brothers’ behaviour, I sense, even though the narrator brother maintains a level of self-perceived sanity, a sanity that I question. Who to believe? Do we in fact believe that the elder brother takes some outlandish ‘mad scientist’ type equipment on a trolley to funerals? Why does that elder brother have a theory of Fridays, stemming from their importance in various religions, a theory of both finitude and escape? Why has the younger narrator brother migrated to nowhere off the edge of the North Sea? Or did I misunderstand that? And why do most Wilkinson stories have a similar length? Because he has to finish them by the end of each Thursday, I suggest.
“Never say anything about your work until you’ve completed it. You’ll find that a very useful rule of thumb.”

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