Chris McQueer - Hings Short Stories 'N That

I really enjoyed the ambience of these stories.  It’s lovely to read Scottish words and pronunciations in a longer form than tweets or memes and some of the phrases in the book are absolute belters!  There are a lot of characters that I feel familiar with but rarely encounter in most of the books I read.  In this sense, the book has a distinctive voice but also a recognisable one.  The characters are archetypes of people everyone who lives in Scotland would have encountered but might not come across in many novels.  The scenes of drinking and drug taking, office drudgery and youthful high jinx are well observed and often very funny.  The book takes stories and people you might meet at the pub or the football and gives them a place and voice in literature, which I thought was great.

The longest story, ‘Bowls’, was one of the most successful for me as it allowed the characters space to develop.  The narrative also had more time to expand and the results of this were a bit mixed for me as some aspects of it felt overblown and lurid.  I felt it might have been more successful if the storyline had stayed recognisable and quotidian, like the characters, rather than straying into the sensational.  Nonetheless, the scenes from the bowling club, the larger than life Angie and the dour, conniving, misogynistic bully Phillip are all fantastic.

I really liked the surrealist aspects of the book too.  The club that opens in someone’s shed for three nights in ‘Alan’s Shed’, the office workers in ‘The Universe Factory’  and the writing bird in ‘Budgie’ all mixed the everyday with the fantastical in pleasing proportions.  The ideas are inventive and witty, giving the stories satisfying new perspectives.  More everyday stories like ‘Top Boy’, ‘Sammy’s Bag of Whelks’ and ‘Pat’ are equally good even though the twists they contain are more prosaic.  ‘Pat’ might have been my favourite along with ‘Bowls’ because it points beyond itself to a wider issue.  In the case of ‘Pat’, the relationship between unemployment, drugs and mental illness, and in ‘Bowls’ the issue of domestic abuse.  

Along with the tendency for some of the plots to get a bit extravagant, I felt that some of the stories and prose would have benefited from tighter editing.  In ‘Is it Art?’ the posh guy’s wallet gets stolen twice, once by the son and once by the father, in a confusing and nonsensical twist.  Equally, punching someone as the title suggests in ‘A Fistful of Coppers’ might result in breaking your own hand as well as hurting the victim.  There were also a fair number of typos, which should have been picked up.

Overall, I found this collection fun and witty.  In some places the narrative was a bit fancy.  Several of the stories had rough edges or were quite limited in their scope.  The best stories pointed beyond themselves and allowed the characters to develop.  I would be very interested to see if these positive aspects could be enhanced in a longer format with more complexity and depth.