This is the first full collection of fiction from Gareth E Rees, a selection of short stories that are funny, tragic and portentous in equal measure.
Like much of Rees’s other writing, the stories lead in two different directions – some deal with the pathologies of modern life, mixing magic and the mundane to great effect, and some deal with the chaos yet to come.
Of the former are stories like a Dream Life of Hackney Marshes, in which a new Dad does all he can to escape his homelife and falls in love with an electricity pylon; Bin Day, when the inner-anger of a suburban home owner over recycling bins is gradually revealed to be more sinister than first appears; Themar Space, where a woman who collects trolleys in a supermarket carpark becomes convinced that a world-changing mystical event is going to occur in the carpark; and My Father, the Motorway Bridge, in which someone whose Dad is absent convinces themselves that the solid, ever-present bridge over the M25 is his.
Alongside tragedy and absurd humour, what these stories have in common is a sense that modern life is driving us mad. The relentlessness of daily living, the bureaucracy, the constant drive for money and entertainment and status, the always-present feeling of being on the outside of what everyone else seems to enjoy – it all conspires to create people who just crack. In the end these stories of the everyday eschews the magical explanations for the psychological or societal ones – the inanimate objects are stand-ins dreamed up by the protagonists, the magical supermarket event is in the end just the character’s wish for something – anything – of significance to happen to her.
The other theme some of the stories deal with is the chaos of a human future ruined by climate change and human greed. When Nature Calls, is a heart-warming but ultimately sad story in which two former squatters living on the coast see the land eroding and their house about to fall into the sea; the opening story We are the Disease is a future in which scientists on a ship in the middle of nowhere are gradually driven mad by an unknown manmade disease; or The Slime Factory, where a technology entrepreneur has finally created conscious vehicles from organic matter which, it become clear, are shaped from human bodies.
Funny and strange, these more speculative short stories have a common thread running through them too: that we’re screwed! Climate change is happening and Rees imagines a world where we’ve not changed or adapted, but left it too late and are desperately searching for last-ditch solutions or just burying our heads in the sand.
It’s nicely summed up by these sentences in We are the Disease:
“Science was a desperate affair these days. I felt sorry for the experts on board, clutching at straws, but this was paid work and it was good to be out in Earth’s last clean air.”
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