UGLY STORIES FOR BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE by JAMES BURR
Corsega Press paperback, 271pp, £11.99

This is a collection of short stories that steadfastly refuses to be shoehorned into any genre niche, though those who enjoy horror will assuredly find much of what they like within its pages. If you pinned me down and asked for a writer James Burr is similar to, my answer would be Russell Hoban, though even that may be stretching a point, with perhaps a hint of the early Vonnegut. Though he has some notable credits, Burr seems to have slipped through the nets cast by Elastic, Pendragon, Gray Friar et al, and my suspicion is that Ugly Stories for Beautiful People is self-published (I can find no website for Corsega Press, or evidence for its existence independent of Burr), but while often a sign of poor quality that isn’t the case here. These stories deserve to reach a wider audience.

And, while avoiding the perils of pigeon holing, Ugly Stories does conform to one venerable horror genre clich?© in offering us thirteen stories, though perhaps that‚Äôs not strictly true as the two ‚ÄòBob and Jane‚Äô episodes which book end the collection (tales of a couple whose love is so intense they end up melding) might be seen as only one story.

‚ÄòFoetal Attraction‚Äô is a story told from the viewpoint of a pregnancy testing kit, the mute witness to the breakdown of a troubled marriage. The story is a bittersweet and elegiac account of two people, a competitive wife and put upon husband, gradually driving each other away, the whole redolent with sitcom clich?©s, but managing to rise above the material to deliver something of genuine humanity. Kate, the protagonist of ‚ÄòBlue‚Äô, one of the stories that should appeal most to horror aficionados, is abandoned by her boyfriend. On her own in Barcelona she makes strange friends and finds herself drawn into the activities of a tattooed gang who are seeking to address the world‚Äôs inequalities, but doing so in a manner she finds frightening and repulsive. Kate‚Äôs nemesis, the fearsome Ash, with his philosophy of violence in the service of good, is an intriguing creation, a modern day Robin Hood with a touch of Pinhead in the mix, but the crux of the story is Kate‚Äôs own struggle to find a moral centre, to resist the allure of the gang, even though it offers an end to her angst and loneliness, the hope of a place where she will belong.

Humour is never far away in these stories, Burr constantly changing the mood to keep the reader off balance, which leads me to the deliciously tongue in cheek ‘It’. The story comes with an audacious premise, that the nation is gripped by a condition which sees pseudo-intellectuals and all who spout gibberish in the name of criticism (ahem!) disappearing up their own backsides. It’s up to plain speaking Tom Paulin to save the day. And yet, delightful as the humour is, there is something serious going on here, as Burr addresses the nature and necessity of criticism.

‘Life’s What You Make It’ put me in mind of the film Sliding Doors, only the protagonist Amanda is aware of the two lives which she flits between, one in which she is rich, successful and happy, and the other in which her life has turned out entirely differently. The sense of dislocation in one’s own life comes over well here, as Amanda slowly gets a grip on what is happening to her, Burr skilfully jumping from one reality to another, and at the story’s heart is an awareness of how arbitrary some of the choices we make are and that there is often nothing more than luck to credit for the way our lives turn out.

John, the lover of Kate from ‚ÄòBlue‚Äô, gets to tell his own story in ‚ÄòM?©nage a Beaucoup‚Äô. A chance encounter has him revealing his situation to a complete stranger, that he has become obsessed with his old lover, seeing her everywhere, every woman turning into her, even the woman who arrives to meet the stranger. Ironically it is this very omnipresence of Kate in his life that undermines any chance of actually getting back with her. The story can be seen as a metaphor for the way in which a loved one comes to dominate our existence, but Burr seems to want to stretch the implications a bit further than that, with the impact on the stranger pivotal, his realisation that perhaps we are all trying to recapture that first, perfect love. And so to the black comedy of ‚ÄòMutton Pie‚Äô, in which a young man is hit on by an elderly woman in a pub, at first experiencing repulsion and a wish that she act her age, but then finding compassion and a commonality of experience, a willingness to indulge the delusions about ourselves that we all hold dear.

‘The Dada Relationship Police’ send a man notes telling him that his relationship is over, and thus contribute to the very situation they predict as he gives in to feelings of paranoia and insecurity. Despite the playfulness suggested by the title there is a serious side to this story, a riff on the frailty of emotional alliances, that they can be so easily undermined. In ‘Blot’ a violent criminal sees innocuous images in a set of Rorschach cards, while the psychiatrist administering the tests gives them a much darker interpretation, eventually becoming infected with the other’s perverse sexuality in a story that casts a wary eye over the blurred line between sanity and madness, and asks if constant exposure to dubious material can desensitise or worse, the effect enhanced by some clever typographical tricks in the text. There’s a similar slant to ‘Bernie Does Camberwell’, whose eponymous hero discovers that his life has been transformed into a porn movie of which he’s the undoubted star. Contiguous with this is the story of a genuine porn star with no qualms about what she does on camera who finds that she is now disgusted by her former self and unable to deliver the money shots. The narrative veers madly between the two plot strands with hilarious results, explicit and amusing but also addressing the dichotomy of love and sex, as poor Bernie finds himself on the receiving end of the ultimate male fantasy and curiously unfulfilled.

The book’s title is something of a red herring. These stories are not ugly, though they often touch on aspects of life that are, and you don’t need to have model girl/boy looks to read them, just an open mind and a willingness to embrace a young writer whose work is that little bit off the wall, but refreshingly so.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go disappear up my own backside.

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