I don’t recall if I saw my first gunman in my childhood nightmares or on my childhood streets.There were plenty in both and they looked very much like each other.So begins Reggie Chamberlain-King’s introduction to The Black Dreams, a thrilling and compelling collection of specially commissioned stories that explore the emotional geography of growing up and living in Northern Ireland.The fourteen stories gathered here criss-cross coast, bor...

To hear Paul Reverb tell it, he's fine.Sure, he's been caught in a compromising situation by his window cleaner and failed to prevent daylight robbery, and yes, he no longer tells people he was born the day Sergeant Pepper was released, as, to his horror, people no longer know what a Sergeant Pepper is.Fine.But Paul isn't fine. He hates his job and he's not fond of his friends. He sits in his dead parents' flat surrounded by his c...

John Patrick Higgins has been told he's spineless for as long as he can remember. But if that's true, why is he obliged to leave an armchair with the nervous trepidation of someone dipping a toe into a piranha tank?John has a bad back. His skeleton's turned on him like an angry dog denied, ironically, a bone.As he embarks on a six-week course of Pilates to iron out his kinks—years of Freudian analysis having not even touched the sides—he finds himself in a world of Lycra-cl...

Teeth, like a weeping father at a wedding, give you away. Like St Peter, they will betray you three times: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Teeth are a memento mori, a sudden glimpse of the naked skull beneath the skin.John Patrick Higgins has had bad teeth for as long as he can remember and you might expect him, being English, not to notice. But he has noticed, and he's doing something about it.This book recounts his journey from a mouthful of moist gravel to...