Published by Glasgow-based press sincere corkscrew, Scottish writer Ricky Monahan Brown’s new short story collection, Terminal, explores the curious and often jarring world of endings.
Honing a distinctive writing lens that meshes a Scottish-American background perspective with genres of sci-fi, modern Gothic, surrealism, and horror, Terminal spans the thematic waves of grief, betrayal, technology, violence, futurism, consciousness, relationships, love, death, and bodies through fourteen individual pieces of work. With this curious collection, Monahan Brown (author of memoir Stroke) brings an imaginative and bleak world of dark fiction to the table.
Terminal is not a collection for everyone. Like the sharpness of its title, these stories regularly focus on the darker sides of human behaviour and our seemingly built-in tendency to pander to our selfish faults, flaws, and desires as the ever-static, flashing future draws closer to yank us away from our natural humanity and away from true community.
Monahan Brown presents us with a book of choices: what would someone look like after this procedure or process? Would a certain person be in my life now if I did this? Is it OK to impact their autonomy?
It is a meditative, and sometimes funny, collection that pokes at themes of capitalism, greed, love, selfishness, memory, technology misuse, dystopia and utopia, failure; and the terror of imagined futures across a landscape of empty car parks, an orchard, cairns, a bloodied moshpit.
The collection’s opening story, ‘Little Apples’ – which was published previously by Edinburgh based indie publisher Leamington Books, in their novella series Novella Express – is a clear gem, and stands out as one of the best in the lot.
At times, Terminal does feel a little disjointed. Some of the stories have a more confident voice than others, and many follow quite a similar twisty structure that becomes predictable. But Monahan Brown’s creativity and vulnerability, drawn from his personal anecdotes of life in Scotland and America, is clear, and he shows himself to be a storyteller to keep an eye on for those with a love for anything Black Mirror-esque; those seeking odd, unsettling stories that fall a little outside of the norm.
Stories to keep you up before bed for an extra, uncomfortable, fifteen minutes, just thinking, thinking, thinking…
