Darker with the lights on

the long version

The 20 stories in this debut collection from David Hayden are strange, uncomfortable fables of memory, metamorphosis, time, disassociation and death: hard to fathom, but impossible to ignore. An undercurrent of primal violence runs through the tales. In the first story, "Egress", a man steps out from a high ledge on his office building, to fall "with fresh delight" and keeps on falling, somehow outside the laws of gravity and time. Another story, "The Bread that was Broken," records the mannered conversation at a glittering dinner party where the centrepiece is a blackened, smoking corpse.