This is not likely to be a useful or interesting review.
Sorry, that was a brutal beginning, so brutal in fact that I
didn’t manage to get a customary disclaimer in first. It was total brutal.
Where was I? Oh yes, being boring and unhelpful. Well, it
all stems from the fact that I read Freaks
because it was free for Kindle and someone or other keeps talking about
Caroline Smailes in such glowing terms that it’s hard to ignore. Also, DarrenCraske has been suitably up-bigged by Scott Pack of The Friday Project, via
blogs, social media and give-aways that his formerly nose-turned-up-at works
have inveigled their way into what I almost casually term my throw-away
collection. It was inevitable in that respect I suppose.
I don't know who Nik Perring is.
 |
| Short and... well, short. |
However, it was read over a particularly stressful Christmas
period, and in snatches lasting only a few moments (not normally an issue for
this book I suspect as it is basically X number of very tiny short stories, of
the oft-labelled micro-fiction variety) so very little was properly absorbed*.
I remember bits being rather amusing, lots of bits being rather disturbing**,
and quite a few interesting seeds of stories which had probably been collected and
published in this way to preserve their latent story-worthiness, rather than
cultivated only to eventually wither and die being too leggy and stringy to
survive the editors’ secateurs. Hmm, sounds like I’m projecting somewhat, eh?
Still, there were enough cute angles and interesting twists to these stories,
each prefaced with the super-power that the main character displays, to keep
the pages flapping, and Craske’s appealing if overly Nintendo-esque (i.e. smiley
egg as opposed to Playstation-like genocidal alien) illustrations did not
detract anything and in some cases, added value. If it’s still free to download
I would recommend it as mental chewing gum, and even if not, worth shelling out
on up to but not exceeding the value of £1.99 or thereabouts. In my own personal
hierarchy of micro-fiction read and filed away, it probably lags some way behind
Dan Rhodes’ Anthropology and Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, but if you’re
a Joss Whedon fan you’ll probably love it and hate me.
Nerd.
*In retrospect, not normally an issue either, as I tend to
consume books in a covering-the-ground sort of way, relentlessly feeding them
into the eyes and more often than not simply adding the title to the “READ”
list and ejecting the contents onto the compost heap of the Memory Palace. One
might compare me to an enthusiastic but ultimately untalented footballer, or
indeed a child.
**Again in retrospect, in that fashion where I know I
probably should be disturbed but
thanks to a kind of cultural exhaustion that I feel most of the time, and with
it an insensitivity to pretty much everything, it wasn’t at all.
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