David Mathew creates a world that’s familiar but seen through a deviant lens. There are shades of Clive Barker and JG Ballard in these stories – fiction that’s all the more unsettling for having its roots in the everyday – but Mathew has his own voice and vision for the twenty-first century.
Julie Travis, Author of We Are All Falling Towards the Centre of the Earth
Characters’ messy lives intersect with danger in this nervy, gritty,warped collection from David Mathew. These tales feature aphrodisiac bombs, illegal tritium deals, giant hedgehogs, dream angels, and the impending anxiety of parenthood. The urban sprawl and rural dystopia reflect the sordid emotional and inner world of the characters who are fighting, sometimes for their lives,sometimes to be understood, or sometimes for just a pint. Panic Soup is best served with shots, in a noisy neighbourhood pub where all the patrons are insane.
Stephen Scott Whitaker, National Book Critics Circle,Managing Editor of The Broadkill Review
If you love stories with bite, brutality, wit and wonder, you will love Panic Soup. As the title suggests, there is dread here, warmth,trepidation, a multitude of flavours. Drink deep.
Paul Meloy, Author of Adornments of the Storm
David Mathew has an eye for nudging characters from the every day to the disturbing.
“Watching me watching myself,” Flynn explained. “Taking the pieces of my past — my real past — and twisting them into dramas for you. Including this: right now.”
As if I am the book that I am gestalt reviewing, the book that is me, but reading it for the first time in real-time. An amazing work, perhaps worth as much as WORTH, about the eponymous Irishman forced aka gratuitous serial killer of the woman in a pet shop who dodges his bullets by becoming his daughter. All for an audience watching through the implant in his eye. But it is even more disorientating, and I wonder who watched the watcher watching himself, who was tattooed to fix the identity of whom, who dyed the manthew.
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 published or collaborated on one or two stories in this book.