Forensic Songs
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Mike McCormack's new novel Solar Bones is longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
In his second collection of short stories, Mike McCormack joins head and heart in a series of tales which weave a fluid vision of a world morphing between the real and the hyperreal.
Amid much hollow laughter a prisoner is drawn from his cell in the middle of the night to play a video game; two rural guards ponder the security threat posed by the only man in Ireland not to have written his memoirs; a child tries to offset his destiny as a serial killer by petitioning his father for a beating; a late night American cop show becomes a savage analysis of a faltering marriage in the west of Ireland; two men turn up at the door of a slacker to give him news of his death and recruit him to some mysterious surveillance mission; an older brother worries about the health of his younger sibling; the prodigal son returns to reveal the fear and hypocrisy which lies at the heart of his brothers life.
In twelve stories McCormack’s characters find themselves trying to hold onto their identities in a world where love is too often and too easily obscured.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The dark comedy of life plays out for a series of men and women in McCormack's second short story collection (after Getting It in the Head). Staid realists, the characters in McCormack's stories find themselves coping with hardscrabble circumstances tinted by the author's signature irony: a woman's near-death experience annoys her friends; brothers content in their lives stare down inevitable heart disease; a man's long-missing uncle returns home, only to be swiftly diagnosed with a terminal illness. These stories range from the grim to the bizarre in "There Is a Game Out There," a wrongfully convicted prisoner discovers he is the victim of a massive conspiracy that results, in part, in his being asked to play and critique a video game based on his life ("These are the times," a game representative tells him. "There is no principle or sacrifice that cannot be commoditized"). In "The Man from God Knows Where," a character asks his brother to drive him into town so he can buy his own coffin. In "These Two Men," a man is visited by secret agents who attempt to recruit him before getting sidetracked by an argument over college soccer. In the book's title story, a grisly murder scene reveals itself to be the evening television fare of a tea-sipping couple. McCormack's wry minitragedies punch above their weight, and when he combines the funny with the bleak, the stories are worth savoring.
