Review: Dirty Work, Chris Farnell

Quick confession time: I hate screen reading.

If you're wondering why I tend to review only physical substance books bought in bricks and mortar book shops - and can persuade me not to mumble unconvincingly about aesthetics and supporting local businesses - it comes down to two things: an eye condition called scotopic sensitivity syndrome and the fact that I do most of my editing (and beta-ing for others) on an e-reader. Basically, ebook technology makes me a fussy bitch with a migraine.

But, as short stories are less likely to give me eye-burn and this was recommended to me, I found that dipping in and out of this over about a week wasn't enough to send me running for the ibuprofen and a smoke coloured transparent overlay. So, here is the spoiler free premise of Dirty Work by Chris Farnell.

Eight stories linked by the rather tenuous theme of 'jobs' within an generally SF/F set up, we have post-apocalyptic soldiers in a war against no-I'm-not-telling-you, dystopian futures of advertising narratives, and someone who felt a bit like a dodgy financial advisor who specialises in Faustian pacts. Suffice to say that even the blurb was enough to call up a giggle.

I think what sold me on it was the way that there was clearly the mind of tinkerer at work, a writer willing to take a worn premise and giving it a fresh little kick to bring it to life. While bleak and occasionally horrifying , there is a real playfulness to these stories. They read like shaggy dog tales told by a skilled comedian, not afraid to indulge in genuine human emotion but always willing to throw in the laugh.

Farnell's prose is snappy, idiosyncratic and light. These are stories you can enjoy over a cup of tea and a biscuit while you're pretending to reply to a very important text message - just be careful not to laugh too much. Although the plots are at times convoluted, the cleanness of style and the general 'flash fiction' quality of the collection keeps things simple and easy to follow.

On the downside, I had a bit of a gripe with the way that most of the stories opened. The first page or so or narrative felt somewhat perfunctory, as though character and style were being set up before the real business of the tale commenced. 'Flipped', for instance, starts with something of an info-dump before the second page drops what could have been a killer hook. Still, if you have the patience for a slow beginning (and you won't need to wait long. As I said, flash fiction) then it quickly kicks off to something compelling, amusing and just a little bit scary.

So, if you want something light to read midweek and enjoy your SF/F, then Dirty Work is well worth it's very modest cover price.

Knowing Jack: The Ripper crimes and the Gothic imagination.

The first time I realised that the Internet could provide any information I might care to find I was in year 8, in the IT labs at school. Drunk on my new powers of limitless knowledge, I did what any self-respecting, blood-thirsty little toe-rag would do and typed the title of a very famous murderer into the Lycos(!) search bar along with the word 'photographs'.

You get one guess as to series of murders to which I refer.

I was a nasty minded little horror junkie, innocent in my fixation on the gruesome details, the theories, the hyperbole. I was keyed up on blood and thunder. I'm still ashamed at what I did that day.

And what I found? Grainy, morgue photographs, violence in all its tragedy, the human body rendered frail and somehow obscene. My prurience seeped away. No splatter-fest with Hollywood lighting, no gruesome and intriguing details, just the images of five women stripped of human dignity, of life. That afternoon, September-hot and staring at old, thick screened monitor, I lost any interest I had in serial killers.

Don't get me wrong, I was still as morbid as hell, still a nascent Goth with a fevered imagination. I still am. But I draw the line at real crimes, real people, real tragedy. I can't look at it any more and see a mystery, see the puzzle for a autumn afternoon. I can't care about justice, or sleuthing or conspiracy theories. I don't want the perpetrator blazoned on my imagination like some byword for Victorian fog and squalor, a set-piece of the Gothic. I rather not be giving these things any further house-room.

All of which makes my attitude to the Ripper crimes somewhat conflicted. We're at that season, after all, as my Gothically inclined Twitter-feed subjects me to a run of speculation, of recreation. And, one glance at my bookshelves hammers the message home, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, Brian Talbot's Alice in Sunderland, Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, Paul Cornell's The Severed Streets. Why are we so obsessed with Jack the Ripper? Why do even I keep returning to it?

Yet all of these writers are ambivalent about the legacy at which they pick, the tragedy real and human, the murderer co-opted, played out, lionised or demonised until its power far transcends the cruel and ultimately petty act of murder. As Moore say, the crimes don't tell us anything about themselves, simply about us, our fears and obsessions. Newman tells the story of tragic madman, co-opted and exploited to a political end, Talbot of the bitter moral it doles out upon female sexuality. Cornell, ah, Cornell...

I won't be spoiling that for you.

Books aside, though, the focus is always on the killer. Whose names, or aliases, live on in our consciouness? The victims pushed aside, ignored, erased or sensationalised. Killers post manifestos on YouTube, hoping to gain some scrap of Jack's immortality, or at least a passing fame.

Sometimes they succeed. There are crimes, sometimes, that capture the zeitgeist of the time that they were committed. I can think of a few that have happened in recent years, but their memory fades as the society that birthed them dies. Interest in the wanes to the few people who have long memories, and those whose interest in the macabre stretches as far as reality (and there is nothing wrong with that.) But the Ripper crimes are as much part of our historical consciousness as the work of Conan Doyle, Shelley, or Stoker. We have all let this one inside us, even if we turn from these things.

But they are not feats of Frankenstein science, not Sherlock Holmes mysteries, or Dracula-seductions. They, and the hyperbole surrounding them, were moments of exploitation, of xenophobia, poverty and misogyny. They are symbolic of their age, all its conflicts, all its failings.

And yet we still tell these stories among ourselves, brood over them, gloat, create ever more elaborate theories and retellings. Even I do it, still, and I try to stop myself.

What does that say about the age we live in now? How far, really, have we come?€