There's a nice feel to the volume, but the stories therein are slim and wet, caught in the emotional riptide of a 40 year odd successful North American grey haired adolescent creative. There's glamour, some yet to fade, there's snatches of emotional resonance, but the pay off for the reader is too meagre and happenstance. It's a vanity book, a literary agent's project put out in return for Neil doing a spot of work on some film, somewhere, sometime. I passed my copy on to the Great Charity Shop in the Sky.

About halfway through this, the playwright/filmmaker’s first collection of short stories, I found that I was imagining them as short movie scripts, rather than prose stories. Whether this is a good thing I’m not sure, but despite the lack of hope and general sense of desperation in all the tales I found myself enjoying these ‘nuggets’ of modern life. Fans of LaBute’s work won’t be disappointed. ( )