This was my first Kennedy encounter, & I really liked it. A couple of the stories were a bit strange or a little vague but even with them her wit & style shone through. Others were simply gorgeous. I enjoyed her in the same way I love Zoe Strachan's stuff, in that Glasgow is often an element in the stories - a Glasgow which I know & which is neither tartanised nor criminalised. Instead its unique characteristics are allowed to show through, for better or for worse. ( )

Opening a collection of short stories is a little like getting into a lift (or elevator, if you prefer) – you never know who’ll get in, for how long they’ll ride, whether you’re likely to engage with them or what relationship, if any, they are likely to have with each other. Your curiosity may or may not be piqued, you may wrinkle your nose at the smell or be embarrassed at the enforced intimacy, however transient. What you do know is that, like any passenger in the lift, you’re unlikely to be vouchsafed someone’s life story, that your experience will only produce brief and probably blurry mental snapshots of your fellow travellers.

And so it is with this collection of A L Kennedy vignettes. In virtually every tale the reader arrives in medias res — you pass through gates straight into the midst of the action (such as it may be), trying to guess at characters, motivation, context, relationships, tone; and as each story concludes you never quite know if you’ve got a handle on it all, if your grasping at the situation attains something substantial or merely thin air. Sometimes a story reflects this seeming lack of substance: in ‘Failing to Fall’ the narrator allows others to dictate what happens to him but remains lost and directionless when not told to get into a taxi to who-knows-where. In ‘Armageddon Blue’ the protagonist is, literally, all at sea with her life, having cast off her previous relationships and – more in hope than in certainty – seeking both landfall and answers in the near future. And in the title story of the collection a young man is looking for his lost self — will he find it back with what remains of his family at the edge of the world where the land merges with the sea and the sky? We sincerely hope so, though even with the final “It’s all right” we can never be sure.

Within these taut and often terse mini-portraits we range the world, from Kennedy’s adopted home of Glasgow to London, from Wales to Paris and from rural America to an ocean cruise. In similar scenes we glimpse individuals – a fatuous guru, a twisted puppeteer, an underage prostitute, a ballet dancer — all with hopes and fears but each one ultimately lonely or alone, contemplating abandonment, past and present abuse, creeping age and certain death. Frighteningly Kennedy is able to get into the heads of fundamentalists, sociopaths and psychopaths and see the world from their warped point of view, from the controlling parents in ‘A Perfect Possession’ to the committed guerrilla in ‘The Boy’s Fat Dog’, from the fan-verging-on-stalker in ‘Warming My Hands And Telling Lies’ to the serial killer’s lover in ‘Mixing With The Folks Back Home’.

You might think that it’s all bleakness in these tales, but there is some leavening. We have a perfect take on the paranormal in ‘Christine’, humour in ‘On Having More Sense’ and satire in the rather strange ’The Mouseboks Family Dictionary’. But there is something sad about the collection as a whole, hinting at the strangeness that resides in every one of us, however much a view of normalcy we might try to project to the rest of the world. The problem is I’m going to be a little anxious about getting into a lift in future if the world is really inhabited by disturbed or damaged people such as the ones that Kennedy so effectively portrays here. It’s a tribute to her language and descriptive skills that we almost believe they inhabit our real world rather than merely residing in her imagination. Now That You’re Back is an impressive but disturbing portrait gallery, of characters both haunted and haunting.

http://wp.me/p2oNj1-D6 ( )

This is a collection of thirteen stories ranging from the creepy to the odd, from offbeat to funny. This is the first Kennedy title I’ve read (so highly praised by citizenkelly during my early days of LT) and I enjoyed it. She is a clever writer with a beguilingly odd, but astute view of life. Some of my favorite stories include:

--- “Perfect Possession” takes the reader subtly into the creepy as we hear from what we first think are loving, protective parents.
---A young man has an uncanny reunion with an elementary school chum in “Christine.”
---There’s some unconventional, casual sex in “Failing to Fall.”
---”Bracing Up” tells us the back story behind a puppeteer who shaves his entire body and loves the feeling of being confined in his puppet show box..
---”The Mouseboks Family Dictionary” is a funny, weird family story told in dictionary entries. Cleverly done.
---”Mixing With the Folks Back Home,” is probably my favorite of the thirteen. Delivered in a rural, folksy voice, a mother explains to her daughter why her father couldn’t be her biological father. She tells the story of Taylor Whitman, a man who was allergic to her skin, and the indispensible family friend, Bob Coons, who seems to be in town about the same time when various townspeople start showing up dead.

Seems I started one of her novels once, but I shall have to try again. ( )

13 short stories, mostly written as a first person commentary on situations that are never clearly explained, but ranging from sad and weird to apparent abuse. The writing itself is ok, but it's a thoroughly depressing bunch of tales. My copy came free with a magazine - I suspect vanity publishing. ( )