Review: Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman

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Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is one of the best single-author story collections I've read in a long time. It's certainly one of the most consistently good - a lot of single-author collections have one or two really fantastic stories, some good ones, and one or two that seem like they're there to make up the word count. Every story in Tiny Deaths feels like it belongs there, and while I like some stories better than others, there are no real clunkers.

Most of the stories in Tiny Deaths are fantasy, generally the sort of fantasy that starts off in what is recognizably our world and then veers into strangeness, sometimes gradually and sometimes with a sharp turn into surrealism. As the title punningly suggests, death and love are major themes. There's a story about a man who goes to Hell only to discover that his roommate is Adolf Hitler's pet dog; there's a story in which a woman gives birth to a Chesterfield sofa. One story manages to weave a tale of an old man whose television is breaking down into an incredibly poignant tale about aging and losing one's connection to a world in which everything seems increasingly disposable. (Honestly, I am not normally the sort of person to be moved near to tears by the plight of a television.)

One of the things I love the most about Rob Shearman's writing is his ability to encapsulate opposite extremes of emotion in a single story. Most of these stories are simultaneously funny and sad, or horrible and sweet, or terribly mundane and yet spectacularly weird.

If you would like to read some quirky, funny, scary, sad, poignant fiction, pick up this book.

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