Until then, we had the chance to encounter the spicy and supernaturally tinged prose of Jan Carson in large formats (The Fire Throwers and the collision of two tense fathers during a scorching summer; The Raptures and its epidemic decimating kids determined to still have a voice – from beyond the grave – in the chapter).
To discover her as a short story writer is to plunge your hand into a package of sixteen even more cruelly funny treats, tangy with her keen sense of observation and a taste for urban legends or twisted characters (like Victor Soda). Some children we meet (like Caroline de Caravanconvinced that after a little summer work, she will have a space of her own) are those who will come back to haunt Ballylack (fictional town) in the author’s second novel.
If the dead gelatinous creatures invade the garden of the narrator of Jellyfishthey are above all the palpable and sticky sign of the mourning that his couple is going through, weighed down by guilt. We will also long remember the Andrew of Free-for-allfather for once forced to take his two little boys to an over-stimulating theme park and who, in the whirlwind of a slide incident, ends up regretting having agreed – to satisfy his wife – to raise his offspring in these lands which he considers ferocious, rather than in London.
In People usually just throw brickshere we are in the net of prejudices about Northern Ireland from a not very ethical journalist, who came to investigate the photo of a baby on fire during a riot. An added assurance that both short and long, Jan Carson masters the point of incandescence wonderfully.
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