Riffs

The short stories in this volume are conceived as riffs - memorable patterns of music and conversation that will fall like blessings on the inner ear. The stories embrace a wide range of human experience from memories of childhood to a first encounter with musical harmony (and dissonance).

But they are not all sweetness and light. They reach into dark corners of obsessive bureaucracy, gender confusion in the world of sports, tragedy and loss, brutal hierarchies, abuse of power in a nursing home and a TV station, sexual harassment and rape on campus.

A number of stories stretch into quirky areas such as Munchausen’s Syndrome (with a twist), the usurpation of human contact by technology, and the strange effects of parallel universes.

A panoptic fly which features in one story, buzzes everywhere and sees all things in the human sphere.

The cleverness in each story is in the way it turns. These are not all good people, but they are credible and they fight, sometimes most curiously, for what they want. They pivot their world to what they believe they need, sometimes with method, sometimes in chaos, sometimes disastrously. These are highly engaging stories built around the lone or clashing perspectives of stubborn people in a recalcitrant world.

-Peter FitzGerald