June Caldwell, Room Little Darker, Head of Zeus, 2018.
From one of Ireland's most grindingly authentic and radically original talents, Room Little Darker explores the clandestine aspects of modern life through jagged, visceral tales of wanton sex, broken relationships and futuristic nightmares.
An abusive father haunts his daughter and wife from the confines of a nursing home; a couple with an appetite for S&M discover their escapades have led them into something unimaginably bleak; a desperate addict scours the depths of degradation in a nightmare Dublin; an unborn foetus narrates her torturous experience of the Irish legal system; a paedophile acquires a robotic little boy as part of his sex therapy.
At once hilarious and profoundly moving, Caldwell's stories probe sexuality and disturbing psychology, and the darkess and light that lives within us all.
The roar of fury and clarity that Irish fiction has been needing. You haven’t read anything like this before . . . Just brilliant.’ – Belinda McKeon
‘There is a seriously charged imagination at work here . . . Caldwell brings a dangerous new voltage to the Irish short story.’ – Mike McCormack
‘Savagely inventive, full-throttle snapshots of the creepy, pitiable world it seems we all now have to live in. If the ghost of Angela Carter and a hungover George Saunders ever got together, they might turn out tales as full of the righteous ire and strychnine wit as these uproarious stories.’– Colin Barrett
‘June Caldwell’s writing is audacious, wicked and profoundly funny; her prose cracks and sizzles. These stories are literary electrical storms.’– Nuala O’Connor
‘Caldwell’s first collection is a mark-maker … This is an unflinching collection which thuds with life and kicks with horror.’ – The Sunday Times
‘Caldwell’s stories are ferocious beasts, kicking and screaming in rabid, frothing rage…although there are moments of tenderness, too…If you like your fiction raw and angry, smeared in bodily fluids – and solids – then Room Little Darker is for you.’ – Sunday Independent
‘A remarkable collection, and unlike anything you will have read from her Irish peers…Room Little Darker heralds a major new Irish literary talent. Caldwell is a savage, audacious and brilliant new female voice.’ – Hot Press
‘There is no better writer of soul-stopping, confrontational prose working in the English language today.’ – The London Economic
‘If these stories are dark, they are also linguistically dextrous. The writing is full of surprises, bold and yet reined in, being bereft of platitudes and the consoling comfort of white lies. This startling debut will linger long in the memory.’ – Sunday Business Post
Room Little Darker by June Caldwell, a glitteringly dark collection of short stories, is this month’s Irish Times Book Club selection. First published to acclaim last year by New Island, it is the first of their titles to be released in Britain by Head of Zeus under their recent deal.
Over the next four weeks, we shall be publishing a story from the collection and articles by the author and fellow writers Joanna Walsh, Maighread Medbh, Alan McMonagle, Michael Harding, Justine-Delaney Wilson, Elske Rahill and Frankie Gaffney. The month will culminate with a podcast of an interview with Caldwell by Irish Times Books Editor Martin Doyle, which was to have been recorded today at the Ennis Book Club Festival but has been cancelled because of the bad weather. Details of its rescheduling will be published as soon as this is confirmed.
Reviewing Room Little Darker in The Irish Times, Sarah Gilmartin wrote:
“Robot boys that rehabilitate paedophiles, sex-change clinics, demoralising orgies, alpha submissives caged in a Leitrim farmhouse and ogled by rubber clad gimps – June Caldwell’s debut collection of short stories makes Fifty Shades of Grey seem like a Disney movie.
“Room Little Darker is a fiercely inventive collection with a strong social slant. Caldwell, a former journalist, laments the current state of Irish society and seeks to rip up the rule book. The 11 stories in her challenging collection sometimes go so far into the surreal that they lose the plot.
“Caldwell’s modernist style and tendency to switch forms never let the reader rest. Each of her stories announces itself with a bang. The outrageous ideas for the most part have a realistic undertone, grounding Room Little Darker in a world that is oddly, awfully, familiar.
“Room Little Darker has similarities with Claire Louise Bennett’s debut Pond. Short story writers like Diane Cook, Kirsty Logan and Northern Ireland’s Jan Carson also come to mind in the collection’s preoccupations with the surreal, sex, reproduction and gender inequality.”
Currently living in Dublin, Caldwell has an MA in creative writing from Queen’s University Belfast. She won the Moth International Short Story Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award, the Lorian Hemingway Prize, and the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize.
Ian Sansom in the Guardian wrote: “The shape and conception of the stories are often shocking enough, but Caldwell’s linguistic verve is what keeps you paying attention, fascinated and appalled ... The book amounts to an unsparing portrait of a city and a nation, with a singular voice heard throughout, lost in grief and longing, interrogating every motive and intention. It is banshee bold.”
Dermot Bolger in the Sunday Business Post wrote: “If these stories are dark, they are also linguistically dextrous. The writing is full of surprises, bold and yet reined in, being bereft of platitudes or the consoling comfort of white lies. This startling debut will linger long in the memory.”
The Irish Independent, likening Caldwell to Irvine Welsh and Hubert Selby jr, said: “Where some writers favour the lilt of poeticism, the cadence of beautiful prose, Caldwell has stirred up a bitches’ brew of anger, spiky rage and deft humour. She has captured the fetid air of Catholic Ireland, the pedestrian grey despair of the old folks’ home and the cloying stillness of suburbia. Yet the stories themselves are neither pedestrian, nor fetid. Each crackles with writing that doesn’t so much bristle the reader as approach them with a roaring chainsaw.
“Despite being a relative newcomer, Caldwell’s writing bristles with chaos and confidence. Her characters don’t always have the most charitable or charming worldviews, but they’re all the better for it. It’s clear there’s a strong, salty, swaggering writer behind such prose: better still, she has the literary nous to make her views on everything from dementia to contraception pulsate.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/room-little-darker-by-june-caldwell-is-march-s-irish-times-book-club-choice-1.3412763As Leonard Cohen asked: you want it darker? How about a story about a couple kept as sex slaves in a farmhouse in Leitrim, their desperate antics livestreamed to an audience of perverts worldwide? Or a junkie who gets a beating and a shoehorn “scoopslide right in and up on over” his “stink tunnel”? A story narrated by a foetus? The tale of a paedophile who is enrolled on a “dynamic new domestic-environment therapy with 100 per cent effectiveness demonstrated in trials across twelve countries on three continents”, which involves him adopting his own boy robot that he can abuse in the comfort and privacy of his own home? Room Little Darker, June Caldwell’s debut collection, couldn’t get much blacker. It reads like boiling tar.
As Irish fiction once again awakens to its true power and potential, Caldwell emerges as one of those giving the tradition a good old-fashioned shaking. (To name just a few others: Sara Baume, Lisa McInerney, Kevin Barry, Colin Barrett.) In the words of the narrator of “Dubstopia”, “Come out of charity, Come dance with me in Ireland, that cunt Yeats said in the book by their mattress. But he didn’t know fuck all about the skank or fiddlers like Carol, all thumbs and kettledrums, sucking off ghosts at the window in the Old Bank on Doyle’s Corner.” If you prefer your Irish fiction sweet, ponderous and full to the brim with twinkles and craic – horseman, pass by.
In “Upcycle: An Account of Some Strange Happenings on Botanic Road”, a woman renovating her parents’ home in Dublin finds that her dead father is haunting her. The story is pure north Dublin gothic, the house “mischievous and corrupt”. The narrator is reduced to horrible inaction:
There are days when I crumple on the couch giving in to endless interlude, boom-box of Jeremy Kyle, mini flask of vodka, crows crying their lamps out in the chest-hair back garden. Slow Joe next door moving his furniture around to nothing but his own sound. Eventually I’ll squirm up to bed when I know I’ve successfully folded enough hours of the day into the next so that neither is in much of a shape to be useful. Even then I cannot escape the watching. That his eyes are stuck on me and me alone, I am completely sure.
Paranoia and fantasy mix and merge throughout the book.
The whole collection is an account – in the words of the narrator of the Poe-inspired story “Imp of the Perverse” – of “so much ugly craving”. The shape and conception of the stories are often shocking enough, but Caldwell’s linguistic verve is what keeps you paying attention, fascinated and appalled. A woman cooks a poisoned stew for her husband, toiling over it like a “schitzy witch”; a man’s head “had begun thoroughly to scoff itself”; letters to a husband expressing difficult emotions are thrown in the fire because “it wouldn’t be fair to expect a man like that to take on all manner of female fragmentary”. Caldwell forever has her eye on language, stalking it everywhere, through the demotic, the street slang and on towards the realms of the sinister sublime: “In the garden I watch the guests through the heat of amber eyes. Grasses bristle and jostle. I stretch forward to lie flat in the flimsy sunshine of early evening. The clouds are hungry and my mouth waters.”
The book amounts to an unsparing portrait of a city and a nation, with a singular voice heard throughout, lost in grief and longing, interrogating every motive and intention. It is banshee bold. “People belonging to me have passed on. Others are refusing to. […] We learn best from when we mess up most. The humanity in that. Think about that. How do I explain that?” It begins with the story about a reviled dead father but ends with a piece about a beloved dead brother, a small masterpiece of grief. “Cadaverus Moves” shifts continually from past to present, from childhood memories to undying love and pain, “zipping across the chaos”. In the words of the narrator of “Upcycle”, “Even in retelling the story, I find I’m just as upset and confused as when I lived through it. I cannot be absolutely sure of what occurred, of the timeline.” A work more attentive to – and understanding of – the terrible derangements of simply being alive I have not read in a long time.
It is perhaps difficult to imagine where Caldwell might go next, having gone all the way and far over the top in this collection; but then presumably it was difficult to imagine what William Burroughs or Kathy Acker or Irvine Welsh might do next. In a recent interview, she said she imagines that “one day someone will say: ‘Yer one, she was a difficult narky character alright, but she could string a sentence together OK.’ That to me, would be a life well lived.” Job done. - Ian Sansom
www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/12/room-little-darker-june-caldwell-gothic-irish-short-stories
Robot boys that rehabilitate
paedophiles, sex-change clinics, demoralising orgies, alpha
submissives caged in a Leitrim farmhouse and ogled by rubber clad
gimps – June Caldwell’s debut collection of short stories makes
Fifty Shades of Grey seem like a Disney movie.
Room Little Darker is a fiercely
inventive collection with a strong social slant. Caldwell, a former
journalist, laments the current state of Irish society and seeks to
rip up the rule book. The 11 stories in her challenging collection
sometimes go so far into the surreal that they lose the plot.
Caldwell’s modernist style and
tendency to switch forms never let the reader rest. Each of her
stories announces itself with a bang. The outrageous ideas for the
most part have a realistic undertone, grounding Room Little Darker in
a world that is oddly, awfully, familiar.
The opening story, Upcycle: an account
of some strange happenings on Botanic Road, concerns a former
tyrannical father who haunts his wife and daughter when he dies. To
the daughter he appears as “a ferret slinking in and out of the bed
bars at my feet, leaving drops of sweat and other depositions for me
to see in the mornings”. That this is perhaps the most conventional
story in the collection says plenty about what is to follow.
Graphic sex links the next three
stories, from the “pain so excessive and profound, I pass out cold”
that the alpha submissive experiences in Leitrim Flip, to the drug
addict in Dubstopia who wants “to bang the nurse in the Mater who
took his bloods”, to the animalistic sex in a doorway that a
student has with her lecturer in Imp of the Perverse.
Behind the explicit detail, everyone is
hurting. The nurse that Gonzo wants to bang wants to know if his
girlfriend Carol “took mushrooms when breastfeeding the day the
baby died”. It is a grimly evocative story, a powerful portrait of
the pain and debasement of addiction that has echoes of Jon
McGregor’s Even the Dogs.
The Glens of Antrim sees two former
lovers remember their smutty sex life with a nostalgia that turns
bitter. BoyBot, arguably the most subversive story in a collection
that thrives on destabilisation, sees a convicted paedophile writing
to his former lover about a new robot that’s designed to satisfy
paedophiles’ sexual wants but also rein them in when they get too
perverse.
Another interesting take on sex and
betrayal sees a woman undergo a futuristic sex-change in The Implant.
“This shouldn’t hurt,” goes the foreboding opening line,
delivered by a doctor “from one of those Eastern bloc countries
with no wallpaper, where teenage girls are pushed into steel shipping
containers”. The woman, or “subject”, undergoes the operation
to punish herself for her partner’s infidelity.
Maligned females are a recurring theme,
strikingly in SOMAT, which was first published in Sinéad Gleeson’s
anthology of Irish women writers, The Long Gaze Back. Centred on a
decision by male doctors about euthanising a female patient who is
pregnant and brain dead after a stroke, there are strong overtones of
the pressing social issue concerning women’s reproductive rights in
Ireland.
Husband Peter Papadoo looks for “an
in-the-know, big league doctor, an expert, an un-doer of crummy
miracles”. The doctors, meanwhile, think of their tee times. Head
honcho Falvey acknowledges that the right to life is a complex issue,
“without being sure exactly. Sometimes that’s how complex
complexity is.” Caldwell’s fury at the injustice jumps from the
page.
With its modernist style, Room Little
Darker has similarities with Claire Louise Bennett’s debut Pond.
Short story writers like Diane Cook, Kirsty Logan and Northern
Ireland’s Jan Carson also come to mind in the collection’s
preoccupations with the surreal, sex, reproduction and gender
inequality.
Currently living in Dublin, Caldwell
has an MA in creative writing from Queen’s University Belfast. She
has won the Moth International Short Story Prize, and has been
shortlisted for the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Colm
Tóibín International Short Story Award, the Lorian Hemingway Prize,
and the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize.
In a collection loaded with arresting
imagery, some of the analogies overreach. A drug dealer is a “grade
A psycho who’d snap your fingers off quicker than a fat kid at the
zoo smashes a Kit Kat”.
But there are countless others that do
work: “the grubby suitcase inside his head”; eyes that are
“yellow as a frog’s belly”; a taxi driver who’s just learned
about dating apps, “a kind of Hailo for getting your hole”.
For all its shock factor, the
collection can also be deeply moving at times, as with the final
story, Cadaverus Moves, that charts in vivid scenes a sister’s
relationship with a beloved brother who is terminally ill. Flitting
from the grim present day back to childhood, it offers a snapshot of
a life in reverse lived to extreme. In Caldwell’s worlds there is
no other way. - Sarah Gilmartin
Room Little Darker will excite S&M enthusiasts. Not only by virtue of the lewd and lascivious descriptions of their fetishes therein – but also because the experience of reading the book is like being trapped somewhere between pleasure and horror, all the while being relentlessly pummelled by a brutal master.
As an author, June Caldwell is a pitiless dom, sparing the reader no blushes while hammering home remorselessly all the natural and unnatural shocks that flesh is heir to. But it is no blunt paddle the author hits you with, it is instead a sharp crop – a precise silk switch fashioned of sleek similes, sophisticated metaphors, and sly metonymy.
The language is as lecherous as luxurious, and the subject matter intensely shocking. The elegant (if profane) prose incongruously illustrates disgusting scenarios. This creates a jarring disjunct, startling the reader on average not once per story, or even once per page, but in many passages once per sentence. No mean feat. A woman clumsily spreading her legs is “a faulty mussel shell”, a fella’s cock is functionally wanked off like “a boat part I’d no interest in but had to rough house to get on with the holiday”, and a woman’s perspective of fellatio during bondage – “ . . . having to chomp on it interminably until he shot a bad-diet load down my gullet” – subtly but inescapably calls to mind a trapped, force-fed foie gras goose.
Yet there are moments of startlingly unpretentious beauty here too, such as when snow turns streets “to collapsible soft meringue”. It is nonetheless an exhausting experience, precisely because of this linguistic lavishness. Caldwell is not a creature of habit when it comes to methodology, deftly employing a disparate variety of formulations to achieve her aims.
Joycean compound coinage when a woman looks “brothel-weary”, the compelling simile when an over-confident man talks too much on a car journey (“the lyricism of his voice swinging around his Adam’s apple like a Satanic hammock”), and refreshingly irreverent literary allusion as a busy idiot flies around “in a Dickensian mania – Mr Bumblefuck”.
It is perhaps such irreverence that makes this book so important. In this age of intense anxiety about the hordes of keyboard critics waiting to pounce on a hint of transgression, a new set of constantly evolving standards is being unilaterally installed. Despite the fact these rules are near-impossible to abide by (the call-out kings and queens are cannibalistic, turning on their own as often as anyone else), many fields of media have become trepidatious about transgression, afraid to fall foul of the mob.
Although the new puritans are ostensibly concerned with “equality”, in their vicious focus on superficial language policing they betray the traditional bourgeois concern with empty etiquette – style over substance (and indeed over sustenance). Caldwell’s complete lack of concern for such sensibilities makes for a truly refreshing aesthetic. With enthusiastic and gleeful abandon she smashes the stultifying atmosphere of false piety that has seen a new Legion of Mary try to replace the Catholic Church as Ireland’s self-appointed moral arbiters of culture.
Caldwell is certainly egalitarian in her task – nobody is spared her savage eye: men, women, the elderly, the stupid, the clever, the weak, the strong, the lumpen proles, the bourgeoisie, immigrants, racists – in short the variety of people who compose our society. What could be interpreted as misandry is counterposed by what would be almost certainly classed as misogyny if she were a male writer (her blunt Houllebecqian honesty about the female body, for example).
Yet there is an unmistakeable and inextinguishable flame of kindness throughout the collection that recognises the shared humanity of even the most wretched. It is from this the true horror of the book stems, as the misery and suffering people inflict on themselves and each other is all the more horrifying where their sentience and intelligence is so emphasised.
There’s a healthy dose of creative vernacular too, with novel verbs like to “fuckarse about”, condensed ejaculations like “getouttameway”, and lurid local descriptions, such as “Henry Street’s orgy of phone shops”. It is not only these signs of origin that sets the collection so firmly in Dublin, but also its relation to that other great short-story collection, Joyce’s Dubliners.
If Dubliners was a realist masterpiece, Room Little Darker is its hyper-realist counterpart, applying Joyce’s stated rubric of “scrupulous meanness” to the city’s contemporary inhabitants, and a future that’s approaching all too fast. As such, one story in particular could have provided an alternative title for the collection, the appropriately Joycean portmanteau of “Dubstopia”. - Frankie Gaffney
Although ostensibly outrageous in theme, the stories in Room Little Darker are all rooted in the grimness of materiality, where trauma lives in the plaster walls and our bleeding, shitting, wanting bodies are our most stifling prison. The collection delves into extremes – fetishism, states of non-living, and chemically-modified sexuality – but, at core, these are the tales of everyday heartbreak.
Leitrim Flip chronicles the fate of a master-submissive pair who find themselves trapped in a cage in the back-of-beyond with no escape in sight, routinely ordered to perform as the bitch and dog for a genuinely abusive couple and their “rubber gimp” guests. As in many of these stories, fetish is characterised by a coldness seeking its inverse. Sex drive and death drive; omnipotence and abjection fantasies collide, and our narrator takes us on a tour of self-degradation and immurement that is slowly, subtly and expertly revealed as an attempt at sublimation:
“After it’s all over we’ll curl tightly together, snuggling into well-deserved sleep. Free to run at breakneck speed along the most beautiful sweep of beach. Tearing up lumpy dips of sand so relentlessly our tails stop wagging and our legs collapse under the weight of yummy ecstasy. Running, scampering, sprinting, until nothing we’ve ever been through before matters.”
The collection has been described as erotic, but there is no titillation here; no sexy sex scenes or arousing hints; nor are there lofty theories or pretty metaphysics. Rather, Caldwell brings an ultraviolet gaze to bear on the grubbiness of human hurt and the cruelty of desire.
In Dubstopia – a story of a once-in-love couple destroyed by poverty and addiction – the “two lezzers on the couch” are all too real: “One of them, skinny as rashers, was pretending to grate her tongue. ‘Yewer fucken gas,’ her bird said, bending over for a sludgy on the cake hole. Both wearing dolphin necklaces, glitter leggings, squeegees of burnt yellow hair in bobbles of teapot spouts.”
Most of these stories are narrated in the stark, bigoted and unapologetically impressionistic voices of Dublin’s quietest – a paedophile, an addict, a delusional stalker and even a foetus kept growing in a brain-dead host. Caldwell has something of Des Hogan’s forensic eye and the kind of freely-associated imagery that works by instinct, but is hard to unpick:
“Out past the squiggle of purposeless shops and homeless men who nudge their heads up like broken birds from splintered eggs in the basement of the church.”
Clamouring with anomalous analogies, piles of adjectives, an indulgence of simile and warring imagery, the prose may at times seem to lose the run of itself, bamboozling the reader into retreat – “The droplights buzzed like a circle of certifiable bluebottles… Then quick as weather in February, they were gone…” More often than not, however, the manic prose fits the situation, and, the payoff is there in the deep-dug sense of a city teeming with soon-to-be forgotten lives: “Up Henry Street with its orgy of phone shops and factory leggings and onto wet brush Moore Street. Last of the stallholders manically plying for trade outside the Euroscoff supermarkets that had colonised the gaff. On by Ballsy Bingo where his Ma used to take him long ago. All those mad bitches with Rothmans-stained chins…” - Elske Rahill
I first came across Caldwell in Sinead Gleeson’s edited collection of Irish women’s writing, The Long Gaze Back: Caldwell’s ‘SOMAT’ was one of that book’s (many) high points, detailing the enforced gestation of a foetus after a woman suffers a fatal stroke and the doctors ignore her family’s wishes and keep her body on life-support so that the pregnancy can continue. If you think that sounds intense, you wouldn’t be wrong, and its daring brutality sets the tone for the rest of Caldwell’s debut collection, Room Little Darker, a book that’s as graphic, confrontational and daring as they come (but funny on top of it, so don’t worry). And if Caldwell’s subject matter is bold – abortion, dementia, paedophilia, sex-bots, drug abuse and more – then her style is even bolder: the stories are densely voiced, laden with colloquialisms and allusions that make them seem, perhaps, difficult, at times, to penetrate, but it’s a difficulty that generally pays off, because to stick with these characters is to be fully submersed in their worlds, and these are each worlds as well imagined as those of any five hundred page epic; Caldwell doesn’t do anything by halves.
‘SOMAT’ aside, top marks go also to ‘Leitrim Flip’ (after a breakup, the narrator embarks on an S&M fling to explore the far reaches of her sexuality, but it goes very wrong when the couple get imprisoned by a demented couple someplace off the N4), ‘Dubstopia’ (a junkie who’s lost all his kids gets into trouble trying to score gear for his wife), and ‘Cadaverous Moves’ (a woman’s faced with the dead body of her brother and recedes into memories of their childhood – there’s not a sappy or nostalgic word in sight, so don’t stress). Caldwell’s cities, particularly Dublin, are manic: her streets are filthy, sexy and bloody, and her characters hold nothing back. But there’s a bawdy humour alongside the politics and the horror: she’s not writing polemics or entertainment pieces – her characters and their situations, however apparently extreme, ring true, which means the stories carry a weight that isn’t to be underestimated: she’s a writer to watch.If we were to quibble, it is occasionally a little too hard to parse (a quick Google throws up a couple of wildly differing interpretations of the plot of ‘The Implant’) and there’s a touch of the gimmick now and then – ‘Natterbean’ is a great snapshot of a taxi-driver’s night, but the repeated slang loses some impact after a while, and the plot of ‘BoyBot’ would still have as much impact if the Oryx and Crake style sci-fi was toned down. But ‘quibbling’ is the word: it’s a madly impressive debut. It’s feminist, pro-choice and sex-positive, and it’s about as far from the polite clean world of stereotypical middle class literary fiction as you’re likely to get outside a Dennis Cooper novel.
Any Cop?: Thumbs up if you like it good and sordid. - Valerie O’Riordan
https://bookmunch.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/as-graphic-confrontational-and-daring-as-they-come-room-little-darker-by-june-caldwell/
“It is hardly worth telling, this story of mine, or at least in a modern context, because so many people go through the same these days and feel it too dull and inconsequential to mention.” These are the first tongue-in-cheek words of June Caldwell’s debut collection, and never an untruer word was written. These stories are anything but standard fare; dull and inconsequential they certainly are not. There is a dark surrealism ripping through these pieces, with strange and magical inflections. And yet the Dublin evoked is instantly familiar and tangible, a world of dingy flats, brown stockings, packs of Amber Leaf tobacco, the “winter sun bouncing off the river in solid shards of light, turning the faces of pedestrians to warm plastic”.
Emotional and social vulnerability, supernatural and psychological phenomena, sexual deviance and degradation, wildly inappropriate desires, substance abuse and physical violence abound. In ‘Upcycle’, the narrator’s ailing father, having spent a lifetime terrorising his family, comes to haunt the family home, “crawling around the wall like a crazed lizard”, his body “partially flattened . . . his neck bent as if it had been snapped and yanked back into place with a heap of loose skin sewn back on roughly”. ‘Leitrim Flip’ is the tale of an alpha submissive and her partner who are kidnapped and held captive in a cage by a couple, Lord Canine and Mrs Mutt, while spectators in gimp masks look on. In ‘Imp of the Perverse’, we witness the disastrous trajectory of a lecturer/student relationship, ending in the student’s pregnancy, dismissal from university and mental decline/transformation into a werewolf. ‘SOMAT’ chronicles the hideous, science-fiction-turned-reality of a brain-dead woman kept alive as an incubator for the 14-week-old foetus inside her: the grisly story here is narrated by the foetus. And ‘Boybot™’ is the story of a falsely convicted paedophile in rehabilitative treatment involving Conor, a sex robot built to resemble a “blonde muscular ivory innocent” teenage boy.
The subject matter is as dark as it comes, graphic and violent, but the treatment is the surprising thing. Caldwell never lets her readers stand on easy ground, and the stories shift delightfully, moving and writhing in unpredictable, electrically charged directions. Their true power resides in an uncanny combination of the familiar and the outlandish – this is the real world, alright, but through a lens unlike any other. And this reality rings true, preventing the shocking content from feeling like it is there for shock value alone. For all its swagger and guts, there is a tender humanity at the heart of this collection, a deep understanding of pain, and a righteous fury – these stories matter, they demand to be told, and to be read. This reviewer’s advice is to obey and read them. I for one will be sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for whatever June Caldwell publishes next. (Warning: I have been having some very strange dreams over the last few days while reading this book: the two things may or may not be related). - Liza Cox
https://www.totallydublin.ie/more/print/book-review-room-little-darker-june-caldwell/
June Caldwell: ‘I wanted to write about complex families, messy sex, the pulsating f**k-up of NOW’
June Caldwell, In Love with a Mad Dog, Gill Books, 2006.
What happens when a woman who falls in love with one of the world's most infamous terrorists? Jackie McKinley tells the story of how her affair with Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair changed her life irrevocably. This honest, revealing and frank memoir is an intimate glimpse into a world normally hidden from public gaze.
Author June Caldwell: 'My book on Johnny Adair's mistress caused a storm'
Natterbean, a short story by June Caldwell
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