Short Stories, Crimes, Cults and Curious Cats

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Beware tin cats offering invitations, psychopathic chemists with a turret full of collectable porcelain, priests pursuing satanic cults, and evil entities living in windmills.Better to listen to the green spirit peering over your shoulder, the ghost of a young man with no heart, and Victorian palaeontologist who has unearthed the face of God.Review by Waverley:Worth the money for the cover alone (a stunning combination of colours enhancing an intricate design), but there's more on offer than just a nice cover. The alliterative title gives the clue to the content, although I had the sense that the curious cats were slightly tacked on as an afterthought to the crimes and the cults. Jonathan Day writes sharply and amusingly, with a nice line in wry/snide social comment that will raise more than the occasional smile, but he's also a gifted story-teller - almost too gifted, really, for the chosen format, because so many of these stories feel as if they could (perhaps should) have been developed further - most contain enough material for a novella, if not a full-length novel. Although the style of writing is light and humorous, some of the stories have serious subtexts (on occasion, the subtexts threaten to subvert the actual narrative, as in "Behold, the Face of God", even though the twist in this, possibly one of the less convincing stories, is cleverly managed). The author's art and achievement is to combine fast-moving and entertaining narrative with thought-provoking reflection about a world (or worlds) that can prove to be nastier places than we'd ideally like them to be.