An Awkward Age

When An Awkward Age was still in manuscript, it won its then 26-year-old author the Russian National Book Award. Reading Hugh Alpin's excellent translation for Hesperus Press, it's not hard to see why. Weighing in at only six stories over a hundred and fifty-odd pages, this is one of the most stunning debuts to come out of Russia since Victor Pelevin: hip, funny, angry, and dark as hell.

Everything in Starobinets' stories smacks of the sinister and perverse. An unnamed narrator assuages loneliness with a companion grown from mould, until the horrific smell alerts the authorities; a luckless journalist wakes up to find himself biologically dead, and has to face the bureaucratic nightmare of registering his demise, his funeral, and the division of his possessions; a mysterious Agency exacts unspeakably horrible revenge on whoever its clients wish to destroy. In the title story, a parable of adolescent metamorphosis that updates Kafka for a  torture-porn age, young Maxim finds himself... well, actually, what happens is so traumatising that, besides not wanting to give it away, your reviewer would genuinely rather not discuss it. Suffice to say it would give HP Lovecraft nightmares and send Poe scuttling back to the bar.

Conclusion: this is cracking stuff, and not be read without access to your most comforting duvet and a sick-bucket. With one foot in the high literary camp and the other in genre (but never generic) horror, Starobinets establishes herself as the 21st-century Gogol, mapping a twisted road to the dark and absurd heart of Russia.