Short story collection review

Dead Girls

By Nancy Lee

Published by Faber

Loosely linked by a man’s conviction for the murder of a number of prostitutes, Lee’s stories all have a dark undercurrent of despondency running through them.

These include the fumblings of teenage sex; recreational drug use gone wrong; fractured relationships between parents and siblings; the slow pain of love affairs breaking down; and the chronic ache of a dead child.

There is some tenderness in these stories as well (a tattoo artist takes in a homeless woman he finds sheltering from the rain in his doorway; a daughter finds some reconciliation with her dying father), and a running theme about jokes (for which Lee never provides the punchlines) but on the whole, this is pretty bleak stuff.

It is, however, brilliantly written. Lee has the gift of grabbing the reader with unassuming first lines that at first seem banal and almost irrelevant, but immediately arouse the curiosity: ‘That boy works as a photographer for the Associated Press’; ‘Sally’s eyes have recently required glasses’; ‘You are addicted to television news’; ‘Jess holds her lipstick like a crayon’.

Lee alters the perspective from which some of these stories are read, jolting us out of our complacent acceptance of the traditonal third- or first-person narrative, providing the slice of life she is describing with an immediacy that shocks.

It is common to say that the best short story writers never waste a word, paring their tales to the essence of what is important, but this seems to me to be a great compliment and one that Nancy Lee deserves.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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