A locked room. A brutal murder. And a killer who can unwind time… Ooh, what a fabulous premise. I was sure I would love this before I even read the blurb, and I was right. Part myth, part mystery and completely compelling, ‘Black Lake Manor’ is a cleverly crafted tale with a satisfying ending. What’s […]
No, I haven’t branched out into reviewing erotica. The title of Tsutsui’s collection is apt, however, as it features stories which are always bizarre and frequently feature sexual deviance. Of course, normality and sexual propriety are cultural constructs, and Tsutsui delights in tearing these apart to examine them. Amongst this apparently wanton destruction, the reader […]
“This isn’t a movie. It’s a short story.” In fact, it’s twenty of them, all written by popular Japanese author, Yasutaka Tsutsui, and selected from a career spanning over fifty years, which he admits is now coming to a close. “The ideas aren’t coming anymore,” he told Andrew Driver, translator of this rather miscellaneous, but […]
If you could make yourself smarter, would you? What if your only option to achieve this was by allowing doctors to operate on your brain? And what if those same doctors openly admitted that this was an experimental technique and might not work? What might the consequences be, for your health, your sense of self […]
If you kiss your spouse’s double, is it cheating? If you met your quantum double, would you like them? And most pressingly of all, how on earth would you find your way back to your own home in your own universe? In Vitali Vitaliev’s new novel, his confused characters, Viktor and Katherine Petroff, and Victor […]