Veering between the straightforward and the bizarre • 9 August 2006 • The SnowBlog

Veering between the straightforward and the bizarre

          The Edgier Waters is picking up some fine reviews from some excellent critics (of course, we would say that, but hey: judge for yourselves...):

In the August 2006 issue of The Hastings Trawler (out next week, GBP3.00 inc. p+p), John Barker discusses the various contributions, particularly enjoying "HP Tinker's The Morrissey Exhibition which, with a light touch has the singer's miserabilism and fame set out as any other exhibition in which a new exhibit will be "the small earthquake experienced personally by Morrissey himself on 3rd July 2002" and which says more about celebrity -- the capitalist version of the Cult of the Personality -- than a whole genre of novels with this theme. It's a real achievement to make something of satire which nowadays is so easily soggy. Better still is the sharpness under the apparent whimsy of Ben Myers' The Missing Kidney." You can read the whole review over at 3:AM.

Meanwhile, over at the peerless Bookmunch, Peter Wild writes: "It's rare, a book like Edgier Waters... Just ask yourself how many books you've bought and read this year that suffer from a surfeit of ideas. Not too many I'll warrant. This is the kind of book we should cherish. This is the kind of book we should all have on our shelves, to show the world that we're not afraid of being challenged, not afraid of thinking. In point of fact, I feel sorry for the average reader, the he or she who can't deal with a book that reads like a thrilling magazine (and you have to ask yourself how they deal with life and all the things that life throws at them, if their tiny brains can't deal with the shift between a story and a poem and a piece of non-fiction). Theyre missing out. They're missing out on so much. But most of all they're missing out on Edgier Waters..." Full review here.

Can't say fairer than that, really.