There's darkness and a sprinkling of magic in May-Lan Tan's 11 strange, flinty, cigarette-stained narratives
Tan's excellent debut follows loners and outcasts, and contains several metaphorical car crashes, one fake one and one actual, brutal, skid off the road. Born in Indonesia, Tan has lived in Hong Kong and the US and is now based in the UK. These 11 stories range over those territories, focusing both on obvious drama (murder, crucifixion, wild drug use) and the seemingly less consequential (a conversation between a rich child and her maid, an argument between two Iron Maiden-loving teenagers). The concepts are intriguing. A pole dancer named Proust signs away her rights and becomes a ghost, a star falls for her stunt double, and a woman finds nude photos of her husband's exes, and starts to track them down. Tan has a hard, matter-of-fact style and specialises in neat description, whether depicting a mother "teetering on her highest heels and pouring macaroni cheese into a Pyrex dish" or a laugh that sounds "like a coin in a can". There's plenty of darkness and a sprinkling of magic, and these strange, flinty, cigarette-stained narratives speed by, offering lots of surface tension and compelling deeper passions.
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