Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Macabre tales and dirty little secrets, 15 Sep 2003
Laura Hird is a startlingly good storyteller. Whether all of her literary output will continue along the lines of these macabre and hauntingly strange stories remains to be seen. In this particular genre she is among the best. Her stories embrace the dark spaces of our night minds, our visualization of the ill-defined fears that populate the nightmares of reality and illusion, and she has an extraordinary ability to make these weird tales credible. There seems to be a running thread of exploring the possibilities of man's cruelty to man. She molds brief visages of young girls abusing a mentally challenged boy (not unlike the famous 'Lord of the Flies' story), brutality to animals, numbing revenge, pedophila, molestation, and near-extraterrestrial body invasions by growths on the hands and face. These stories may not be for the faint of heart, but Hird is a mastercraftsman at making these tales all seem like reportage. The one flaw in her writing is her tenuous ability to end a story: they often are left dangling like a half dead spider caught on our mind's brow. Some may find difficulty in reading her Scottish brogue manner of conversation, but try reading it aloud and you will discover how additive it is in thinking through the story.
This is a fine short story collection. One wonders what a novel by Laura Hird would feel like...........
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Grim and Promising Debut Collection, 6 Feb 2003
I first came across Laura Hird through her story "The Dilating Pupil" in the Children of Albion Rovers collection. This collection of ten of her stories is fairly consistent, lots of slices of the underbelly of Scottish life. Slices is a key word here, 'cause while she is strong in quickly getting characters and places out there and in the reader's mind, most of the stories feel like one's walked into the middle of a longer piece. There is a kind of haste and unfulfilled quality to a number of them that leaves the reader a bit empty. That emptiness may also be in large part due to the sheer grimness of the stories and the nastiness and/or patheticness of the people in them. Necrophila, pedophilia, animal abuse, abuse of the mentally retarded, spousal abuse, psychological abuse, it's all here and at the core of the stories. At times the symbolism is overwrought (the woman who kills her ex-boyfriend's cat/pussy, the para who rapes a corpse, etc.), and sometimes the clever ideas doesn't lead anywhere interesting. The stories are quick reads though, and are valuable as another perspective on modern Scotland. Hird's next book, the novel Born Free, delivers on the promise evident in the collection...
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2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How many more great writers can come out of Edinburgh?, 12 Nov 1998
By A Customer
Laura Hird proves yet again that the talent pool in Scotland's capital is deep and wide. Hird has Irvine Welsh's attention to detail in dialogue but the scene is a social notch higher -- Edinburgh's bourgeoisie. And her beady eye misses nothing. This is a must for anyone who enjoys Irvin Welsh or James Joyce's Dubliners -- there are equal helpings of each within.
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by Laura J. Hird
by Alan Warner
by Laura J. Hird
by Jackie Kay
by Janice Galloway
