This is the book blurb on Amazon...
Unsettling premonitions, fortune-telling cashpoints and disappearing mazes all converge in Jeremy Dyson's first book - a collection of short stories that established him as a formidable storyteller.
Jeremy Dyson was born in Leeds, studied Philosophy at Leeds and has an MA in screenwriting. He is the co-writer of the Bafta award-winning TV series The League of Gentleman.
So, you have until the end of March 2012 to grab/buy/borrow/download a copy, read the book and post your review here on this forum. Whether you loved it, hated it or only skimmed the first few chapters before giving up, we want to hear from you.
The review we like best scoops £20 in book vouchers. So get reading!
And don't forget to add your suggestions for future book club reads in this forum thread.
(5 votes)
Comments
The name ‘Never a trust a rabbit’ symbolizes the stories in the book. Rabbits look like cuddly toys but aren’t. This collection apparently contains bizarre and strange stories with twists. ‘We who walk through walls’ finds our hero, Jonathan entrapped into helping a magician. Who claims to have worldly powers but is using Jonathan as a body double to pull off a magnificent trick of walking through a wall. Sounds interesting? Well reading it wasn’t. The story was bland, I had to skim read passages because it was padded out with soo much useless mundane information. Reading the first line of each paragraph was enough. The next story is about a teacher who is mesmerized by a painting. Turns out he is murdered and the scene is that painting. The author has basically written all the stories in the same way. Each story is soo bland, dull and boring you can barely make it to the end for that twist. No wonder my library didn’t stock this book. No wonder I had to get it from Amazon (whoever was fooled into buying it, was getting rid of it) I’m just wondering what I’m going to do with it: dump it at Oxfam or just bin it.
Never Trust a Rabbit is a collection of short stories that all touch on the unusual or bizarre. Having just read the collection of Saki's short stories for a local book group, I found these refreshingly different. Saki's are full of humour and very enjoyable, but are all very much the same. These, in contrast are very different one from another. Each one has an unexpected twist.
I partivularly liked 'A Visit from Val Koran' about a man who 'stole' a girl from his friend; he has kidded himself for years that he coudn't live without her. Koran tracks him down & gives him a drug which allows hin to remember the absolute truth - he is desolate to realise that he took the girl just because he could. As so often with short stories, it is not just the story itself but how it puts a truth before us about the way we sometimes behave.
'The Cash Point Oracle' annoyed me - it might have been a deliberate bloke-ish style, but I didn't appreciate it. 'The Engine of Desire' about the pursuit of some very unusual automata, in particular one that will give a man amazing pleasure, is bizarre but fascinating. The traps lying in wait for anyone who tracks down this last are gruesome. This author certainly has a vivid imagination!
I would say that this is a collection worth reading, but you have to suspend disbelief to enjoy them.
Great reviews from both of you - so a £10 Waterstones voucher goes to each of you :0) Well done!
And here's the May/June 2012 Book Club Review Choice... enjoy!