Book review: Mayhem & Death, by Helen McClory

If there’s a problem with Helen McClory’s new book, Mayhem & Death, it’s this: that the concluding 60-odd page novella, “Powdered Milk”, is so utterly absorbing and searingly memorable that it casts the various short (and very short) stories that precede it into the shade. That’s a shame, because there are some real gems in the book’s opening section, notably “Lore”, a deliciously sinister flash fiction about a haunted hunting party, “This Place Is Mine”, which reads like the intriguing first few paragraphs of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, and “A Silent Documentary Through A Terrible Place”, in which the author draws on her considerable powers of description to produce something that’s not so much a story as a single, slowly panning camera shot. Evidently McClory isn’t afraid of the dark, but there are lighter moments too: “Jeff Goldblum”, for example, in which the actor is variously imagined “walking shoeless into a house made of cats”, “singing a lullaby to a room full of newborn babies” and “in a Santa beard, throwing bricks at a woollen mill shop”, is gloriously silly.