Monday, August 01, 2022

The Country Pub by David Gaffney

 0488362C-6F83-4847-8FDF-3B87EF2EC1F6

NIGHTJAR PRESS 2022 (my previous reviews of this publisher HERE)

“; the sandwich would be a bowl of liquid and the soup a block of compressed radish gel or something.”

I take my hat off to this story. And as with the man HERE in yesterday’s Nightjar, and now when freeze-framed we don’t really know if he’s dissolving or undissolving. This is a brilliantly sinister and often counterintuitively amusing  evocation of a man’s visit with his girl friend to Kendal to launch his graphic novel at a comic book festival, where things become wholly against the expectations  of treating themselves to uncustomary posher cuisine  and countrified inns with log fires — even the countryside itself is nightmarishly countrified! And so much more that happens after the frame’s margin  or a text’s semi-colon, with the subtle or unsubtle clue by sleight of writerly hand of ‘Einstein’ relativity inserted somewhere in the text alongside the static hugging of hello or of goodbye being as ambiguous as a non-existent ‘candlelit snug’! 

My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/david-gaffney/

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