Pulse <\/p>\n
Author: Cynan Jones <\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 978-1783782772<\/p>\n
Publisher: Granta<\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u00a314.99<\/p>\n
Cynan Jones allows his readers little opportunity to breathe. His compulsive narratives are relentless, sweeping you along thrillingly in propulsive short paragraphs. Appropriately, Pulse is the title of his new collection of six short stories, and that word indeed recurs throughout the book. <\/p>\n
As with his best-known novel, The Dig (2014), we are often in a natural world that is a long way from the comfortingly pastoral: instead, this is nature red in tooth and claw. In Reindeer, Ston heads up into the mountains in winter to track down a bear that is savaging the local livestock. Towards the end of this tense hunt, he has a violent encounter with the beast, which is storing dead reindeer in a kind of larder both up in the trees and under the ground. <\/p>\n
When Ston returns to the human realm, nothing here now seems real to him. Just so: as readers Jones takes us too to unnerving places, and when he returns us to our own world, our senses have been heightened, our perspectives disturbed.<\/p>\n
Cow starts with a negative pregnancy test for a couple, who then head to a farm where the man helps with a cow\u2019s brutally difficult delivery. White Squares, originally broadcast on the BBC to mark the National Short Story Award that Jones won in 2017 for The Edge of the Shoal, is the shortest piece, opening with a father using an air rifle to pick off ducks for a demented purpose, which only becomes clear near the sad ending.<\/p>\n
Best of all is the title story, which completes the book with the heart-stopping tale of another father, who is trying to stop an electrical threat to his house during a ferocious storm: a tree might fall on high-voltage wires. He and his wife are disconnected; he is sleeping on a pull-out bed, and their \u201clittle one\u201d is \u201ctheir most safe point\u201d. Again the ending is startling and terrifying, the father cradling the tiny child as the cattle catch fire. <\/p>\n
Earlier he had gone out by choice: \u201cIt was exhilarating … there was a sort of abandon stepping into the storm.\u201d That is just the experience of reading these incantatory and unsettling stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pulse Author: Cynan Jones ISBN-13: 978-1783782772 Publisher: Granta Guideline Price: \u00a314.99 Cynan Jones allows his readers little opportunity…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":261078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6489,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-261077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-book-reviews","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}