Manchester-based indie publisher Confingo publishes beautiful books, and this volume is the latest in their series of collaborations between authors and artists. It’s a slim little flapped paperback (13 x 16 cm) with quality white pages and full colour illustrations between the five stories.
Elizabeth wrote a super novel, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books, called Astral Travel, I quote from my review here:
How often do we discover that our siblings or older relatives have a different view on events to how we personally recall them. This is what Jo discovers when she decides to write a novel about her family history ten years after the death of her father, unearthing buried secrets, consulting with her mother and sister.
This book is beautifully constructed. As Jo’s novel within the novel progresses, like the increasing clarity in her conversations with her mother in particular, we feel that we are beginning to approach the truth and Jo’s writing takes on a more biographical (and reliable) feel. Although, she doesn’t repeat stories, the elements of revision in Jo’s writing as new versions come to light echo the novel writing and research process.
This is relevant to these short stories, as Elizabeth told me they are developed from a mixed-genre idea she had for Astral Travel but had to abandon as it got too complicated. The characters are loosely based on those in her novel, although names have been changed as they say! This set of five linked short stories thus allowed her to do that experiment with genre, so there’s a ghost story, a love story, crime, science fiction and something a bit postmodern – “reflecting the different effects of the experience on the characters, and the way that, while they have shared it, it has isolated them from each other.”
Because these are linked short stories, I’m loath to give a lot more details, but if you were to read them, you’d realise how they do tie together. As for the genre experiments, they work well, and the final shortest one is certainly quite postmodern, the rest are more conventionally of their intended genre. Laura Scott’s art is elliptical, being abstract collages of body parts with blocks and smudges of other colour that you could imagine as bloodstains or a target perhaps… the interpretation is up to you. I do love the combination of writing with the art though. The stories are perfectly standalone, yet if you’ve read the novel, it’ll add another dimension when you think about the characters’ different experiences.
Source: Review copy – Thank you! Confingo Publishing – 71 pages, illus. BUY direct from the publisher Confingo.
