Craig Cormick’s collection of 6 short stories have a superficial sense of playfulness, humour and vivacity, as well as a fertile inventiveness, that seems the most powerful and fitting Australian response to the contemporary age of terror. Certainly, these are not stories that could come from any other country. Although we are thrust almost recklessly into the modern milieu of air hijacks, terrorists and fanaticism, the narrative voice keeps creating a curious counterpoint with the ordinary, the everyday and the strange pathos of the colloquial. Many of the stories are about travel, trippers, people displaced from their normal surroundings. These are stories very much of our world, but it is a world as discomforting as it is recklessly hilarious. It is very frightening. Craig Cormick knows how to twist the knife, and even in the funny bits, we feel the edge.