An Unquiet Calm. This is a story about a Passenger gig, right? A Passenger gig with dead crows.
I think it’s meant more in the sense of a growing sense of unease, but you go with whatever feels good for you.
So what’s this all about?
It’s a short story collection, so by its very nature it’s about a lot of things. In this collection this is perhaps even more true than usual, since three of the five stories have already been published. Despite that, the stories still hang together fairly well. There’s a running theme of the otherworldly, ranging from the very grounded and possibly-coincidental in Some Secrets to the dangerously potent in An Unquiet Calm itself.
That’s cool, I like me a bit of twisted fiction. So, were the stories any good?
I liked them. There’s five stories here, and while as with any short story collection some will be better than others, they all entertain.
‘Some will be better than others’. That always rings alarm bells for me.
Don’t worry about it. The quality’s good throughout. Where you can tell the difference is between the longer stories and the shorter ones. Washed Clean and Blossom are both around 1,000 words long, and the small space leaves them feeling a bit constricted. All the stories are worth reading, but Dave’s prose works far better when he spreads his wings a bit and gives his characters more room to breathe.
I find characterisation can often be a problem in short stories.
I know, right? A lot of people seem to think the form means they can get away with using ciphers. Blossom maybe falls into that trap a bit, but in general the characters here are all well-drawn. The narrator in Some Secrets is particularly good: I came away from that story with an incredibly clear picture of her, despite the fact she’s never actually described.
What’s that story about?
Some Secrets is the most whimsical of the lot, and was my favourite of them. It follows the narrator’s attempts to woo a possibly psychic regular at the cafe she works at, and also her misadventures with lunch. While it wasn’t explicitly stated, I found myself imagining the cafe as the Boston Tea Party in Bristol, where both me and Dave used to live.
Whimsical lunch misadventures feels like a bit of a jack-knife from a story with dead crows.
It is, but that’s one of the things I like about this collection. There’s a lot of variety on offer. Thieves In The Night deals with conspiracies in an unusual post-apocalypse; Washed Clean is a medieval horror-cum-character-study of Seimunda, who may or may not be falsely accused of being a witch by frightened villagers; Blossom puts a lover-gone-to-war story in a fantasy setting, and An Unquiet Calm takes us on an Edwardian police investigation with a Lovecraftian twist.
That definitely covers a lot of ground. Which one has the dead crows?
That’ll be part of the Lovecraftian twist.
So would you recommend it?
If you like your stories with a hint of the other about them, yes I would.
Kindle ahoy, then.
As of a couple of days ago, it’s out in paperback as well. Possibly I’m biased from my own recent misadventures, but I’m quite keen on self-pub authors who take the trouble to make a print version as well. It shows love.
Also, books are cool.
Absolutely. It’s here, should you want to check it out for yourself:
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