In this collection of stories, Dan Rhodes follows his widely praised debut, 'Anthropology And A Hundred Other Stories', with another revelation of the surreal mysteries of love, its knots of emotional complexity and shards of sudden anguish. Erotic, passionate, tragic or doomed, love is above all a game of allusiveness and nuance, of fabulous grotesques and intimate loathings. This new collection takes fables and spins them into suburban romances, twists domestic cosiness into mythical combat.
Love for a Vietnamese cellist drives a man to transform himself into her cello; love is found on a council refuse site between an unnamed narrator and the ghostly Maria; the love of The Artist for his female muse consumes him, the search party sent to find him, the villagers who discover his mouldering body - all eaten by the small creatures of the forest.
Against a backdrop reminiscent of Angela Carter with a sense of the emotionally horrid that would quieten even Will Self, Dan Rhodes has produced a spellbinding, haunting collection of timeless tales.
