Black Juice

Lanagan's spare sentences and arresting metaphors conjure up tales of worlds similar but subtly different to our own, often set in unspecified pasts and futures.

Like close-up photographs, her writing makes the ordinary extraordinary; she camouflages everyday objects until she is ready to reveal them to us with the simplest of sentences.

Many of these stories explore the transition between childhood and adolescence in an almost mythical, fairy-tale way. Her characters are young people who strain for freedom against the chain of responsibility, or are pushed reluctantly into adulthood in the face of circumstance.

A boy considered useless by his mother is sent up a mountain in the place of his infirm brother to yell into the wind the words that will usher in the spring; a bride-to-be gets lost on her way to church; a group of lads experience the forces conjured up by a Traveller with special powers; a young man escapes from the cult community he has grown up in, returning years later with his worldly friends.

The other stories, however, fall into no easily definable categories. A faithful servant comes to an understanding with his Lord’s beautiful but disdainful wife; a herd of elephants goes in search of its kidnapped keeper; two assassins shoot circus performers; and, in the very moving first story, a family gathers around a convicted girl as she sinks to her death in a tar pit.

This is an extraordinary book of short stories, surprising, breathtaking and beautiful by turn.