Frags To Riches

We interrupt our regular coverage of Irish crime writing to bring you a review of Dave Lordan’s FIRST BOOK OF FRAGS, in part because said Dave Lordan was the man who, live on radio, once described ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL as ‘the Blazing Saddles of crime fiction’. For which I will always be grateful.
  Anyway, on with the FRAGS:

“First Book of Frags is a gallery of cosmic and psychic perversion and violence. Punctuated by moments of intense, incandescent writing, it gives us a marriage of heaven and hell, good and evil, repressive force and hopeless sex. Whether it shows us the success of suicide towns, the unrecorded victims of the Titanic, revolutions in housing estates, cornerboys, destructors, accomplices, violent fire bombings, stew and shit stirrers, animals and porn stars, writers under attack, the people who live permanently in Swedish-based furniture stores, or women speaking to the dead, it is always, allegorically and literally, concerned with an Ireland, a Europe, and a humanity which has lost its way and wandered into nightmare dead ends only partially of its own making. The contemporary resonances of these strange and brief short stories, with their weird and uncanny narrators, equals the political bite of Lordan’s best poetry.” -- Graham Allen.

  For more in the same vein, clickety-click here.