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Am I in the Right Place?
From the extraordinary mind of debut writer Ben Pester comes a book of stories in which the everyday – work, parents, friends – is not quite what it should be. Taken together, it forms a collection of things we are doing right now, in this lost and terrifying world we are gamely attempting to inhabit. Things like worshipping an imaginary being while trying to be productive; or slowly dying and having nothing to say about it except how tiring it was building the kitchen extension; or having hot martinis with the ambassador in a hotel that ought not to be there. Unsettling, original and occasionally monstrous, these are stories that light the contours of the ordinary world with a shimmering unreality.
269 pages, Paperback
Published May 6, 2021
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May 17, 2025
Longlisted for the 2022 Edge Hill Prize
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve had the weirdest day.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said the porter. ‘Some things happen that just don’t make any sense. But afterwards, everything carries on.’
Ben Pester's Am I In The Right Place, is the latest publication from Boiler House Press:
This book certainly meets that aim. It is a collection of 11 delightfully off-kilter short stories (typically c20 pages). Several centre around office life, but with elements of the bizarre and magical mixed in with the mundane.
The first story, 'Orientation' has our narrator being orientated on his first day in a new role by a rather weirdly intense colleague called, appropriately, Graham:
‘This is the water for washing up. This one here is for making coffee. It’s attached to a boiler, see? It’s always hot, so be careful because you might burn yourself if you try to use this for washing up.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ you say.
The tap Graham is referring to has a massive sign on it that says, Do not use for washing up, and has a hand-drawn figure covered in burning liquid. The figure is visibly screaming. The eyes are wide with horror and agonising pain.
‘Please familiarise yourself with the safety message on the hot water tap, and the boiler more generally,’ Graham says.
Aside from the hand-made sign, the boiler is a normal boiler. A white box with a large ugly dial on it. There is a dirty mark where someone has peeled away a sticker. A long thin pipe with a tap pokes out of the bottom. You have been looking at it now for well over twenty seconds. It’s a fairly depressing object.
Graham is still watching you. ‘Do you want to try it?’ He says.
‘You mean the tap? I guess I could. Sure.’
You reach out a hand to turn the tap on the boiler, but Graham stops you.
‘No,’ he says sharply. ‘Don’t actually touch it. It’s best if you simply enact the process. You can just improvise. No need to waste water.’
‘You want me to just pretend?’
‘Improvise, yes. Or enact.’
You approach the sink and pretend to wash up an imaginary cup using the water boiler, then pretending to realise the danger of using boiling water to wash up with, you stop and pretend to wash up using the correct tap.
You look at Graham. ‘Like that?’
‘I’d say you’re about fifty percent of the way there.’ Graham gestures towards the draining board.
You place the imaginary cup onto the washing up rack on the draining board and flick imaginary water off your hands. You do the water flicking as a kind of joke.
‘I’d use a cloth to dry your hands, usually,’ Graham says. ‘Too much flicked water can cause slippages.’
and from there the tour and the narrator's day gets increasingly more surreal.
'😊 If yes, then please explain your answer 😊' has office life increasingly dominated by the arrival of an egg:
An egg arrives one day. The egg is about the size of an unused roll of kitchen roll. It is Manuel who brings the egg into the office.
When I ask Manuel about the egg, he says it was delivered to his home address with instructions to bring it in to work. There was no name or address for the sender, he says.
The egg instantly changes the atmosphere in the office. Our individual preoccupations dissipate. The lingering dispute about how to label the portfolio wall is forgotten. The political differences between the Product and Commerce teams are put on ice.
and the egg eventually hatches into an odd type of animal - Tritty is small, about the size of a young Labrador, but of course with two gorgeous human male legs, and with a torso covered in glittering golden feathers. Tritty does not have a beak, but rather a stubby, somewhat crocodilian muzzle, crushed up into a stub.
Tritty gives each worker a talisman, a motto and a mood ('Children at play in the yard no longer haunt your sweet aunt'), and productivity increases, but office life and even the physical form of the narrator changes.
Apart from my new physical state, life continues as usual. I make contact with my family. They say they understand. My children say they do not miss me too badly.
'Mother's day card from a wooden object' is, as the title suggests, a mother's day card from an inanimate wooden object, that doesn't even particularly resemble a human, to the woman who has adopted it as her child:
I see you reading through old school reports, which people had indulgently written for you, to humour you, you have always assumed, with news of the progress of your entirely wood-based child. For example:
'We really feel as if he is grasping the finer details of the Tudor age.'
Or,
'His intended coursework is above average, if a little ambitious.'
'Sheba' is narrated by a cat after holes appearing in people's houses have gradually swallowed up all the humans, and a similar Hole appears in the rather disturbing 'How I loved him'. And several of the stories are too off-beat for me to easily summarise, although the reviews below give further details.
Overall a distinctive and stimulating collection - a contender for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Other reviews:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2021/0...
Earlier versions of some of the stories:
Orientation https://granta.com/orientation/
Rachel reaches out https://granta.com/rachel-reaches-out/
All silky and wonderful https://granta.com/all-silky-and-wond...
'If yes, then please explain your answer' https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Ben-Pester
Mother's day card from a wooden object https://fivedials.com/fiction/mothers...
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve had the weirdest day.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said the porter. ‘Some things happen that just don’t make any sense. But afterwards, everything carries on.’
Ben Pester's Am I In The Right Place, is the latest publication from Boiler House Press:
Boiler House Press is a new publisher of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and everything in-between.
We are based at the University of East Anglia, home of the world-renowned Creative Writing MA, and a burgeoning world centre for creative-critical writing studies.
We are passionate about writing that breaks a mould; that surprises; that plays with-and-between the creative and the critical. We want to open and excite your mind.
This book certainly meets that aim. It is a collection of 11 delightfully off-kilter short stories (typically c20 pages). Several centre around office life, but with elements of the bizarre and magical mixed in with the mundane.
The first story, 'Orientation' has our narrator being orientated on his first day in a new role by a rather weirdly intense colleague called, appropriately, Graham:
‘This is the water for washing up. This one here is for making coffee. It’s attached to a boiler, see? It’s always hot, so be careful because you might burn yourself if you try to use this for washing up.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ you say.
The tap Graham is referring to has a massive sign on it that says, Do not use for washing up, and has a hand-drawn figure covered in burning liquid. The figure is visibly screaming. The eyes are wide with horror and agonising pain.
‘Please familiarise yourself with the safety message on the hot water tap, and the boiler more generally,’ Graham says.
Aside from the hand-made sign, the boiler is a normal boiler. A white box with a large ugly dial on it. There is a dirty mark where someone has peeled away a sticker. A long thin pipe with a tap pokes out of the bottom. You have been looking at it now for well over twenty seconds. It’s a fairly depressing object.
Graham is still watching you. ‘Do you want to try it?’ He says.
‘You mean the tap? I guess I could. Sure.’
You reach out a hand to turn the tap on the boiler, but Graham stops you.
‘No,’ he says sharply. ‘Don’t actually touch it. It’s best if you simply enact the process. You can just improvise. No need to waste water.’
‘You want me to just pretend?’
‘Improvise, yes. Or enact.’
You approach the sink and pretend to wash up an imaginary cup using the water boiler, then pretending to realise the danger of using boiling water to wash up with, you stop and pretend to wash up using the correct tap.
You look at Graham. ‘Like that?’
‘I’d say you’re about fifty percent of the way there.’ Graham gestures towards the draining board.
You place the imaginary cup onto the washing up rack on the draining board and flick imaginary water off your hands. You do the water flicking as a kind of joke.
‘I’d use a cloth to dry your hands, usually,’ Graham says. ‘Too much flicked water can cause slippages.’
and from there the tour and the narrator's day gets increasingly more surreal.
'😊 If yes, then please explain your answer 😊' has office life increasingly dominated by the arrival of an egg:
An egg arrives one day. The egg is about the size of an unused roll of kitchen roll. It is Manuel who brings the egg into the office.
When I ask Manuel about the egg, he says it was delivered to his home address with instructions to bring it in to work. There was no name or address for the sender, he says.
The egg instantly changes the atmosphere in the office. Our individual preoccupations dissipate. The lingering dispute about how to label the portfolio wall is forgotten. The political differences between the Product and Commerce teams are put on ice.
and the egg eventually hatches into an odd type of animal - Tritty is small, about the size of a young Labrador, but of course with two gorgeous human male legs, and with a torso covered in glittering golden feathers. Tritty does not have a beak, but rather a stubby, somewhat crocodilian muzzle, crushed up into a stub.
Tritty gives each worker a talisman, a motto and a mood ('Children at play in the yard no longer haunt your sweet aunt'), and productivity increases, but office life and even the physical form of the narrator changes.
Apart from my new physical state, life continues as usual. I make contact with my family. They say they understand. My children say they do not miss me too badly.
'Mother's day card from a wooden object' is, as the title suggests, a mother's day card from an inanimate wooden object, that doesn't even particularly resemble a human, to the woman who has adopted it as her child:
I see you reading through old school reports, which people had indulgently written for you, to humour you, you have always assumed, with news of the progress of your entirely wood-based child. For example:
'We really feel as if he is grasping the finer details of the Tudor age.'
Or,
'His intended coursework is above average, if a little ambitious.'
'Sheba' is narrated by a cat after holes appearing in people's houses have gradually swallowed up all the humans, and a similar Hole appears in the rather disturbing 'How I loved him'. And several of the stories are too off-beat for me to easily summarise, although the reviews below give further details.
Overall a distinctive and stimulating collection - a contender for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Other reviews:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2021/0...
Earlier versions of some of the stories:
Orientation https://granta.com/orientation/
Rachel reaches out https://granta.com/rachel-reaches-out/
All silky and wonderful https://granta.com/all-silky-and-wond...
'If yes, then please explain your answer' https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Ben-Pester
Mother's day card from a wooden object https://fivedials.com/fiction/mothers...
October 18, 2023
Am I in the Right Place? by Ben Pester
'Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think, this is just how we are - nothing is real. Our memories are just delicate little lies'
A debut collection of eleven trippy short stories. Thank-you to Boilerhouse Press for the copy.
These stories are hilariously weird, placing everyday situations at odds with reality, and delving into memory, loss and time.
The opener 'Orientation' is about an overzealous induction for a new job. The typical and familiar banality of the tour of the office: "please familiarise yourself with the safety message on the hot water tap". Yet the overwhelmingly ordinariness of the induction soon turns eerie, as memory begins to blur with the present, and reality obscures with illusion.
In the title story, a 35-year-old male is meeting up with his dad in a restaurant who he sees sparingly, having left the family when he was younger. After visiting the toilet, when he returns to the table he is gone, and time begins to blur again. It closes with an oven hidden in the wall of his Dad's old bedsit containing visions from his childhood.
'Mother's Day Card from a Wooden Object' is a bizarre tale of an inanimate object being raised by a human. 'All Silky and Wonderful' is the story of a hotel containing secrets of the past: 'Some things happen that just don't make any sense. But afterwards, everything carries on'.
'Lifelong Learning' is a fantastical jaunt into a parallel universe through a kitchen cupboard, and 'If Yes, Please Explain your Answer' is the curious tale of an egg that infatuates a workplace office.
These stories are nostalgic and playful, revealing just how much we are eaten by petty trivialities. How our memories fade and are rewritten, the dangers of nostalgia and attachments, and how love ultimately conquers all.
'Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think, this is just how we are - nothing is real. Our memories are just delicate little lies'
A debut collection of eleven trippy short stories. Thank-you to Boilerhouse Press for the copy.
These stories are hilariously weird, placing everyday situations at odds with reality, and delving into memory, loss and time.
The opener 'Orientation' is about an overzealous induction for a new job. The typical and familiar banality of the tour of the office: "please familiarise yourself with the safety message on the hot water tap". Yet the overwhelmingly ordinariness of the induction soon turns eerie, as memory begins to blur with the present, and reality obscures with illusion.
In the title story, a 35-year-old male is meeting up with his dad in a restaurant who he sees sparingly, having left the family when he was younger. After visiting the toilet, when he returns to the table he is gone, and time begins to blur again. It closes with an oven hidden in the wall of his Dad's old bedsit containing visions from his childhood.
'Mother's Day Card from a Wooden Object' is a bizarre tale of an inanimate object being raised by a human. 'All Silky and Wonderful' is the story of a hotel containing secrets of the past: 'Some things happen that just don't make any sense. But afterwards, everything carries on'.
'Lifelong Learning' is a fantastical jaunt into a parallel universe through a kitchen cupboard, and 'If Yes, Please Explain your Answer' is the curious tale of an egg that infatuates a workplace office.
These stories are nostalgic and playful, revealing just how much we are eaten by petty trivialities. How our memories fade and are rewritten, the dangers of nostalgia and attachments, and how love ultimately conquers all.
July 29, 2021
Jolly good stuff. Weird in a good way
August 8, 2021
It is impossible to really explain how much I enjoyed this book, so much so that it felt like it was written personally for me.
Each story seems to describe the incompatibility of a distinctly British upbeat suburban optimism with the world we have created and that is collapsing around us. They peel back the outer skin to reveal a horrifying, gloopy mesh underneath, as monsters we have created and that are creating us emerge from dimensions that we wilfully ignore. Imagine David Cronenberg building a creature that is part George Saunders, part JG Ballard, part Adam Marek and part Charlie Kaufman, that limps and wheezes and apologises as it barfs up ungodly truths. That’s the best I can really do.
It’s incredibly funny and engaging throughout, with a brilliant turn of phrase and masterful pacing. Many of the stories feel like they are about to end, quite satisfyingly, before suddenly revealing a fourth act that opens up like a chasm beneath you.
Am I in the Right Place? could easily be described as deranged or quirky or dystopian but I personally defy every one of those definitions. For me it comprises a detailed map of a communal consciousness at this time, casting the superficially normal and banal (and our enthusiastic obedience and worship of them) in a better, clearer light – one that casts long, disturbing shadows. Shadows that were always there if you knew where to look which – Ben Pester clearly does.
When things get really weird down the line, which I’m certain they will, I’m following Ben. He obviously has a nose for the approaching terrain.
Each story seems to describe the incompatibility of a distinctly British upbeat suburban optimism with the world we have created and that is collapsing around us. They peel back the outer skin to reveal a horrifying, gloopy mesh underneath, as monsters we have created and that are creating us emerge from dimensions that we wilfully ignore. Imagine David Cronenberg building a creature that is part George Saunders, part JG Ballard, part Adam Marek and part Charlie Kaufman, that limps and wheezes and apologises as it barfs up ungodly truths. That’s the best I can really do.
It’s incredibly funny and engaging throughout, with a brilliant turn of phrase and masterful pacing. Many of the stories feel like they are about to end, quite satisfyingly, before suddenly revealing a fourth act that opens up like a chasm beneath you.
Am I in the Right Place? could easily be described as deranged or quirky or dystopian but I personally defy every one of those definitions. For me it comprises a detailed map of a communal consciousness at this time, casting the superficially normal and banal (and our enthusiastic obedience and worship of them) in a better, clearer light – one that casts long, disturbing shadows. Shadows that were always there if you knew where to look which – Ben Pester clearly does.
When things get really weird down the line, which I’m certain they will, I’m following Ben. He obviously has a nose for the approaching terrain.
July 18, 2021
Some of the most engrossing and weird and trippy and silly and creative short stories I have ever read. Will be thinking about this collection for a long time.
August 13, 2021
Hilarious and weird. Rooted in the every day - mainly workplaces, offices, industrial estates or commuting - each story takes an unexpected twist into more dreamlike territory.
More later...
More later...
February 8, 2023
absolutely loved it! think it captured how utterly bleak but also bizarre office life is! The opening story ‘orientation’ made me laugh more than any book has in a while, something about the description of the health and safety guy imitating a train slowing down really got me, as did the employees sitting in silence watching someone fry their stodgy stir fry in the office microwave for 10 minutes
All of the stories were found a good balance between playful & unsettling, just brilliant - you have a sense the worlds the characters live in are sort of fraying and glitching at the edges & there are lots of holes sucking people into house and office walls.. I don’t have lots of coherent thoughts yet but if any pals read this book too please lmk bc I want to discuss it!!
All of the stories were found a good balance between playful & unsettling, just brilliant - you have a sense the worlds the characters live in are sort of fraying and glitching at the edges & there are lots of holes sucking people into house and office walls.. I don’t have lots of coherent thoughts yet but if any pals read this book too please lmk bc I want to discuss it!!
July 16, 2021
Suspiciously good. I think this man has been conversing with the Hole
June 11, 2021
Creepy, claustrophobic and unnerving. Also bleakly funny.
July 10, 2023
Genuinely exceptional. I initially noticed a strong George Saunders influence but this gives way to Pester's very own singular style which incorporates body horror, pitch black irony and absurdist metaphor. I'm really looking forward to whatever comes next.
August 3, 2021
“… the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytic register – if we are not who we think we are, what are we? – but they also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” – Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
Just over half of the stories in Am In In The Right Place? take place in an office. In Orientation, a character is chastised for not having read all 657 pages of a PDF called “Finding Your Feet” (he has, so far, covered the sections entitled Overview ● Introduction ● Welcome ● Getting Started ● Here You Are ● Hi There!), but insists that he is eager to push on with the onboarding process. “Have you interrupt you there,” says Graham – a mysterious interlocutor whose job role remains unclear throughout the story – “The onboarding process begins after your orientation.” For anyone who has worked in a corporate environment, these events fall into an immediately recognisable category of the eerie, as outlined by Fisher - information as obfuscation, repetition and synonym employed to create a vertiginous déjà vu (didn’t I just read that? is this new information?), and a hierarchy like mixed-up Matryoshka dolls (please visit internal reception where one of our assistant assistants can refer you to a cluster leader), all supporting an infernal, invisible infrastructure that, nonetheless, you are told, is of the utmost importance. And then there’s the time-collapsing cupboard in the kitchen that can return you to your worst childhood nightmare.
The genius of Ben Pester’s stories is that he doesn’t need to lean into Lovecraftian horror or Kafkaesque displacement to make them scary, because his evocation of the everyday eerie has such verisimilitude as to be more horrifying than most horror. But when he does tilt the axis, ever so slightly, so that the everyday eerie is suddenly folded into the transubstantial or oneiric, it feels like a natural extension of the Real – we could all trip through that portal, or be eaten by that hole, or else go to the loo and return to an alternate timeline. It’s the way in which he flattens out the eerie - that of Capital, and that of Consciousness – and intermingles the Real (albeit absurd) with the Unreal (absurdly logical, in the way most nightmares can be linked to real incident or trauma), that makes each story so unforgettable. When the eerie appears it occurs not as an interruption to reality, but a continuation into deeper reality, only perceptible when the subject has been fully dehumanized by Capital. This, it seems to me, is an entirely new location in which the eerie can exist, and a new contribution to the genre. I’ve never read anything quite like this.
Other stories, those not set in workplaces, appear within the more familiar framework of the surreal - Mother’s Day card from a Wooden Object is, if you can believe it, exactly what it sounds like: a deeply moving reflection, from a piece of wood, on the lifetime spent with his adoptive human mother; and Sheba, which is narrated by a domestic moggy in a world where all humans have been eaten by giant holes in the floor (these holes, incidentally, seem to emerge throughout the collection as a subtle connecting thread). They may sound absurd, almost like writerly exercises where the author “does something” just to see if he can, but they’re actually terrific - Sheba is particularly great on anthropomorphism, mobs, and groupthink. My least favourite story, How They Loved Him, is still pretty good, and has a level of nuance about secret desires in public life, questioning how well we can ever really know anyone.
An astonishing debut from one of the most promising authors I’ve encountered in a long time. This collection is published by Boiler House Press, a new project based at UEA. I think they’ll be worth keeping an eye on too…
Just over half of the stories in Am In In The Right Place? take place in an office. In Orientation, a character is chastised for not having read all 657 pages of a PDF called “Finding Your Feet” (he has, so far, covered the sections entitled Overview ● Introduction ● Welcome ● Getting Started ● Here You Are ● Hi There!), but insists that he is eager to push on with the onboarding process. “Have you interrupt you there,” says Graham – a mysterious interlocutor whose job role remains unclear throughout the story – “The onboarding process begins after your orientation.” For anyone who has worked in a corporate environment, these events fall into an immediately recognisable category of the eerie, as outlined by Fisher - information as obfuscation, repetition and synonym employed to create a vertiginous déjà vu (didn’t I just read that? is this new information?), and a hierarchy like mixed-up Matryoshka dolls (please visit internal reception where one of our assistant assistants can refer you to a cluster leader), all supporting an infernal, invisible infrastructure that, nonetheless, you are told, is of the utmost importance. And then there’s the time-collapsing cupboard in the kitchen that can return you to your worst childhood nightmare.
The genius of Ben Pester’s stories is that he doesn’t need to lean into Lovecraftian horror or Kafkaesque displacement to make them scary, because his evocation of the everyday eerie has such verisimilitude as to be more horrifying than most horror. But when he does tilt the axis, ever so slightly, so that the everyday eerie is suddenly folded into the transubstantial or oneiric, it feels like a natural extension of the Real – we could all trip through that portal, or be eaten by that hole, or else go to the loo and return to an alternate timeline. It’s the way in which he flattens out the eerie - that of Capital, and that of Consciousness – and intermingles the Real (albeit absurd) with the Unreal (absurdly logical, in the way most nightmares can be linked to real incident or trauma), that makes each story so unforgettable. When the eerie appears it occurs not as an interruption to reality, but a continuation into deeper reality, only perceptible when the subject has been fully dehumanized by Capital. This, it seems to me, is an entirely new location in which the eerie can exist, and a new contribution to the genre. I’ve never read anything quite like this.
Other stories, those not set in workplaces, appear within the more familiar framework of the surreal - Mother’s Day card from a Wooden Object is, if you can believe it, exactly what it sounds like: a deeply moving reflection, from a piece of wood, on the lifetime spent with his adoptive human mother; and Sheba, which is narrated by a domestic moggy in a world where all humans have been eaten by giant holes in the floor (these holes, incidentally, seem to emerge throughout the collection as a subtle connecting thread). They may sound absurd, almost like writerly exercises where the author “does something” just to see if he can, but they’re actually terrific - Sheba is particularly great on anthropomorphism, mobs, and groupthink. My least favourite story, How They Loved Him, is still pretty good, and has a level of nuance about secret desires in public life, questioning how well we can ever really know anyone.
An astonishing debut from one of the most promising authors I’ve encountered in a long time. This collection is published by Boiler House Press, a new project based at UEA. I think they’ll be worth keeping an eye on too…
November 16, 2022
➡️ Introduction
This debut collection from Ben Pester gives us a variety of strange tales in which the surreal seeps its way into the ordinary. The book successfully manages to walk a line between entertaining and thought-provoking with stories of misfired work emails, sex with random handymen, black holes in living rooms and wooden objects as stand-ins for children.
✅ Positives
A drop of the surreal
Am I In The Right Place? presents a world that is familiar to most of us, made odd by a drop of surrealism that seeps into every page. The workplace and the home, family and friends offer familiar setups, but each of these stories contains wormholes to the weird. Sometimes literally. These stories are filled with holes that appear in living rooms. Ovens and cupboards lead into different worlds. Spaces shift and move with characters sometimes...
Visit that short fiction site to read the full review.
This debut collection from Ben Pester gives us a variety of strange tales in which the surreal seeps its way into the ordinary. The book successfully manages to walk a line between entertaining and thought-provoking with stories of misfired work emails, sex with random handymen, black holes in living rooms and wooden objects as stand-ins for children.
✅ Positives
A drop of the surreal
Am I In The Right Place? presents a world that is familiar to most of us, made odd by a drop of surrealism that seeps into every page. The workplace and the home, family and friends offer familiar setups, but each of these stories contains wormholes to the weird. Sometimes literally. These stories are filled with holes that appear in living rooms. Ovens and cupboards lead into different worlds. Spaces shift and move with characters sometimes...
Visit that short fiction site to read the full review.
April 23, 2022
Absolutely loved the first story in this collection (Orientation), and the final two (The Siege, and Sheba). Some of the others didn't really gel with me, the dream-like quality and off kilter narratives don't always completely work, but I will definitely look for more by this author in the future.
May 23, 2022
Really enjoyed this one.
Written in. very singular way, it is definitely very original. I love how Pester makes bizarre things feel mundane and mundane things feel bizarre. Definitely a talented writer.
Written in. very singular way, it is definitely very original. I love how Pester makes bizarre things feel mundane and mundane things feel bizarre. Definitely a talented writer.
January 25, 2022
Really fun, playful, surreal and moving. I loved this collection.
November 17, 2023
straight wack shit. kinda into it tho
July 4, 2021
Between hilariously mundane, to dark and surreal this book highlights Pester's talent for captivating storytelling.
January 15, 2025
“You always said I had a tendency to catastrophise everything; / I’ve decided to escape from myself.” In Mona Arshi’s debut poetry collection, Small Hands, an unbearable ocean of grief is dredged up with beauty and care by a writer totally in tune with every facet of her work: the structure and form of each poem, how it flows into the next poem, how each and every stanza, line, word and punctuation mark falls into place to create the whole. From poems like ‘Bad Day in the Office’, which offers up darkly chaotic visions of a palpable domestic hell, to poems like ‘Hummingbird’, gorgeous in its imagery and its simplicity, Arshi delivers so much range in such a short collection, such a brief span of time. And she is constantly experimenting with form: there are some knotty prose poems, for instance, as well as a pair of ‘Ghazal’ poems, which play with repeated refrains at the starts/ends of couplets. The work is immediate and beautifully accessible, and yet so tightly controlled and dutifully crafted, layered with the illusion of minimalism. ‘Cousin Migrant’ is a particular standout: “Someone long ago taught her to listen but not with her ears. / She is the sum of all her parts”, Arshi writes; and “She can define emptiness for me in less than ten syllables.” The poems at this collection’s core, which grieve the death of Arshi’s brother, are also deeply moving, with so much weight in the unsaid; “Last night I dreamt of our childhood / home, filled with spectral figured / only the furniture was vivid, and you.” The fractured, heavy feel of ‘Notes Towards an Elegy’ is also deeply affecting. A final highlight comes from the book’s closing poem, ‘Ballad of the Small-boned Daughter’, as violence and tragedy are juxtaposed with striking images, a musical rhythm, and a simple ABCB rhyme scheme. In all, Small Hands is a poignant, glorious, melancholy read.
October 28, 2022
This book exists in liminal time.
It’s packed with hauntological stories that have shimmering neo-real qualities.
Personal messages of confusion and loss.
A deep sadness pervades…the sadness of knowing that we cannot get back what we have lost.
The sadness of realising we maybe never had it anyway.
It’s one of those books that leaves you in a strange place. Like a dream can.
Or maybe field-music…where things simultaneously make sense and no sense.
There’s nothing to learn here particularly…but that’s not a bad thing.
It’s more about mood, sense, space.
The book is well written; you can be reading another dreary paragraph and then a single word will jump out in its incongruity and wake you up.
Little touches, stinking smears of suggested dread appear where they shouldn’t, like a fat glass of milk forgotten in a hot midday garden.
I bought it because it had a fancy cover, and I’m pleased I did.
3/5
It’s packed with hauntological stories that have shimmering neo-real qualities.
Personal messages of confusion and loss.
A deep sadness pervades…the sadness of knowing that we cannot get back what we have lost.
The sadness of realising we maybe never had it anyway.
It’s one of those books that leaves you in a strange place. Like a dream can.
Or maybe field-music…where things simultaneously make sense and no sense.
There’s nothing to learn here particularly…but that’s not a bad thing.
It’s more about mood, sense, space.
The book is well written; you can be reading another dreary paragraph and then a single word will jump out in its incongruity and wake you up.
Little touches, stinking smears of suggested dread appear where they shouldn’t, like a fat glass of milk forgotten in a hot midday garden.
I bought it because it had a fancy cover, and I’m pleased I did.
3/5
February 24, 2022
Genuinely weird, occasionally grotesque, often funny short stories frequently set in an identifiably mundane, very accurately banal contemporary English milieu. I loved the ways in which the mood and tone rapidly shifted.
Also, absolutely lovely cover/typesetting/design. Definitely worth following Boiler House Press.
Also, absolutely lovely cover/typesetting/design. Definitely worth following Boiler House Press.
August 17, 2022
Haven't read a bunch of short stories quite so bizarre since Miranda Julys 'No One Belongs Here More Than You'. Refreshing in their silliness but occasionally a bit exhausting in their openness to interpretation and lack of direction or theme. Love the last one which is told from the perspective of a cat who is confronted with a giant human-eating hole in the kitchen.
September 29, 2023
Enjoyable short bursts of surrealism. I will shelve next to 'The Gospel According to Blindboy'
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...
January 24, 2024
A bizarre mix of mundane and this sort of uncomfortable acceptance of cosmic horror as quotidian. Highly enjoyable if you like feeling discomfort and thinking about the gray spaces in between what we think of as “normal” in our day to day lives.
December 24, 2021
It's been awhile since I read for fun, now that I think about it. And man, this was sure an enjoyable, thrilling, absurdly satisfying ride indeed.
January 13, 2022
Just plain wonderful. I highly recommend.
November 3, 2022
Any collection that opens a short story with a baked potato has my approval.
August 3, 2025
prosa aburrida, lugares comunes (extrañeza estándar) y maqueta mal justificada
September 14, 2025
Absolute Genius.
December 17, 2025
What a delightfully bizarre read. Loved it.
July 20, 2024
Like The Office by David Lynch. Biting and observant contemporary satire. Outstandingly original voice, but after several stories you kind of want him to evolve a bit. Perhaps it's just the selections here, but I wanted the collection to go somewhere not just repeat itself.
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