Nothing Is Strange by Mike Russell
I would like to thank the author for a copy of this collection in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - StrangeBooks
Published - Out Now
Price - £2.99 Kindle eBook £5.99 paperback
20 mind-expanding stories. Inspiring, liberating, otherworldly, magical surreal, bizarre, funny, disturbing, unique… so put on your top hat, open your third eye and enjoy: Nothing Is Strange
Micro-fiction is a tale that can be told in one or two pages or paragraphs. I’m only just getting more aware of it’s use but its very much a super short cohesive tale. The cohesion is I think really important because when reading Nothing Is Strange although these twenty tales are designed to take you into a very different world they create their own cohesive world that make the stories feel curiously real.
In this collection you get very quickly a feel for how things will go when in a restaurant a squabbling couple get to see the planet earth and more through the mouth of it’s owner. These are tales were the weird is normal or look normal until they takea huge detour into leftfield and possibly out the other side. A few for me really stood out - The Diaries of Sun City is a melancholic tale of someone feeling trapped and alone and starts noting that their daily diary entry vanishes the next day but the end is both weird and uplifting. The Meeting has two people seemingly doing the same job alternating day and night and yet they have a great connection in the offing. Extraordinary Else is about an escape artist trick that goes wrong for decades yet the audience never leaves which manages to be sad, tragic and heart-warming.
As with any large (although for such a small page length perhaps not the best word) collection there will be stories that don’t appeal; but fear not another tale is around in 2-3 pages. Overall I found this an interesting and unusual puzzle. A lot of the tales seem to be about people finding out they are not alone and making connections - the strange as any genre fan tends to pull people together. If you’d like to try some super small fiction no harm starting here.
