Goodreads and Amazon reviews
This is a brilliant and quirky collection, with some real gems – I particularly enjoyed ‘Attack of the Killer Slugs’, ‘Adventure Time in Mr Brian May’s Hair’ and ‘The Centring of the Olives’. Several are laugh-out-loud funny and the humour is deliciously dark. It is easy to see why so many of the stories were shortlisted for prizes (and some at least probably should have won!). I would read more by this writer.
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I am quite in awe of the variety of worlds – if not always pleasant but often hilarious – that Michele Sheldon invites us to inhabit in Homecoming Queen and Other Twisted Tales. Finely crafted and quietly subversive each of these terrific stories gets under the skin with a potency and quirkiness that etches into the mind and, like a tickle of laughter then a scratch from the sinister and gruesome, might not easily go away!
Often macabre but never maudlin and always atmospheric, these sharp but fluid narratives seem effortlessly to take leaps from the everyday into the surprising or nightmarish. Convincingly they stretch the boundaries of the feasible with a deceptive lightness of touch and amusing turns of phrase; give startling or subtle conclusions as well as fleshing out characters with a humour that stops far short of caricature.
All this and more make this wonderfully clever and imaginatively playful collection a compulsive and ‘must read’ read! But I’m not going to tell you which is my favourite; besides that keeps changing each time I finish a new one.
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