Murray Middleton is a writer unafraid to depict life at its grittiest. His 2015 Vogel-winning short-story collection When There’s Nowhere Else to Run revealed characters at moments of great distress and emotional unravelling. His 2023 novel No Church in the Wild ratcheted up the tension another notch, with a visceral tale of violence and racial profiling set in Melbourne’s inner west. So it is no surprise that his new short-story collection, U Want It Darker, focusing on the lives of artists, is every bit as real, raw and unflinching.

The book’s title, referencing a Leonard Cohen song, alludes to the general mood. You won’t find poets penning odes to their muses, painters enraptured by sunsets or the gauzy ‘myth of the artist’ here. Instead, these are stories of flawed and broken individuals who have built their lives around artistic work.

We meet a musician mother who loses access to her child, a radicalised puppeteer who commits an act of heinous violence, and a once-promising young photographer now confined to a jail cell. A consummate storyteller, Middleton often chooses not to make the artist the protagonist, instead offering the perspective of a child, an erstwhile artistic collaborator or a former lover. In one particularly memorable story, ‘House with white fence’, the entire narrative unfolds via a series of posts left on a Yelp-style internet message board. In so doing, the artist’s story is told with all the romance, glamour, and self-justifying rhetoric stripped away.

Like a series of modern-day fables for the creatively inclined, U Want It Darker points a paint-splattered finger toward the pitfalls of artistic life. Think long and hard about whether this is the path you seek, Middleton’s stories seem to suggest, because some days will get very dark indeed.