Two assured collections of short stories offer perspectives on love that aren't for the faint of heart
Ben Marcus: 'Leaving the Sea's final scene left me sucker punched.' Photograph: Michael Lionstar
Known for his experimental pedigree, the opening stories in Leaving the Sea are uncharacteristically realist for American author Ben Marcus, as if placed there to lure in a reader with tamer taste. But already something is off-kilter. In the black, hook-topped towers that loom over the Cleveland skyline of "What Have You Done?", or the bizarre medical treatment the young man in "The Dark Art" receives, we see hints of the more sinister dystopias yet to be unleashed.
Neither experimentalism nor dystopianism have ever made for easy reading, but what makes these new stories compelling is the humanity at their centre. They explore the relationships we have with those we most long to protect – partners, children, parents. A son strives to ensure the safety of his parents during rehearsals for a city's post-cataclysmic evacuation; a single father struggles after his ex-wife dumps their asthmatic toddler on him; the narrator in the title story is disturbed to find a man has entered his home and taken his place, now lying in his bed, holding his sleeping wife in his arms.
Relationships lie also at the centre of Scottish author AL Kennedy's new collection, All the Rage. It's a very different book by a very different author, but one with just as distinct an authorial voice and no less of a human core. The book jacket promises "a dozen ways of looking at love". But if these are love stories, they are love stories with "certain types of threat and the odder edges of sweet things", love stories for grown-ups, mute warnings of what might or has already gone wrong. Love is coupled with loss, affection with an ability to inflict pain. Their meaning unfurls, like a secret gently revealed.
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Relationships lie also at the centre of Scottish author AL Kennedy's new collection, All the Rage. It's a very different book by a very different author, but one with just as distinct an authorial voice and no less of a human core. The book jacket promises "a dozen ways of looking at love". But if these are love stories, they are love stories with "certain types of threat and the odder edges of sweet things", love stories for grown-ups, mute warnings of what might or has already gone wrong. Love is coupled with loss, affection with an ability to inflict pain. Their meaning unfurls, like a secret gently revealed.
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