The Exploding Boy and Other Tiny Tales by Nick Parker

There are pieces here which bend the language of advertising and texting into poetic new shapes and though Nick Parker's voice is enjoyably arch, there's none of the smirking self-consciousness that can trip up po-mo experiments in form. These are small but perfectly formed tales and the sentences are so carefully polished that if you tip them one way they're drily surreal tip them the other way and they become menacingly suggestive of quiet apocalypse. There are dogs on chat shows, birds with their own rarefied notions of meaning, discrete satires on love and consumerism, the re-branding of fire and in closing story 'The Museum of the Sea' (it will feature very little to do with the sea) a crafty question is posed (I think) about what constitutes storytelling at all. 'The Field of Ladders' chronicles a mysterious quest for something which may or may not be unreachable. In 'The Interview' a job candidate talks about something he can't talk about. So what's going on? The title story describes Ticking Boy's graduation to human bomb. Nothing here clocks in at more than five or six pages, but the sheer inventiveness, the comic compression and the sense of something darkly significant unfolding in the margins make this a far meatier volume than its slimness suggests. He's not joking when he calls 'em 'tiny', either. (Which made him feel pretty smug, as you can probably imagine.)įorty-three brilliantly strange - and strangely brilliant - stories by Nick Parker make up this extremely funny, quietly surreal and sometimes worryingly sinister collection which doesn't quite slot into any literary category at all.

a tremendous collection which sets the bar extremely high.' Bookmunch These forty two short, funny and sometimes strange short stories ask the questions that are on everybody's lips: Why did the national anthem turn out rubbish? Why has the supply teacher blacked out all the windows? Why have the islanders run amok like that? Where do those ladders go, anyway? And what, exactly, is up with all the walruses? Parker's brilliantly bizarre stories have been compared to George Saunders, Magnus Mills, Edward Gorey, Tim Burton, Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan. 'Creepily brilliant' The Mail on Sunday 'Fit to rub shoulders with the likes of Richard Brautigan. Just what the form is for.' John Mitchinson, author of QI: The Book of General Ignorance. 'I bloody LOVE these stories: short, clever, oblique.

Proof that the short story is still a public good.' Ian Sansom, The Guardian. forty two short, swift, crowd-pleasing stories.

The Exploding Boy and Other Tiny Tales by Nick Parker