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Worts 'n' All, volume 1 To buy a copy contact Stewart at one of our meetings. |
Worts 'n' All contains twenty-six stories published since 1993. The long ones are not much more than three pages but these tiny tales kept me entertained on a long train journey between Oxford and Norwich.
My favourite has to be The Red Door in which a man moving into a retirement home unpicks a childhood mystery. This sets the mood of many of the stories that have an underlying theme of breaking free of drab everyday life to experience something better, or of regaining something that had been lost in the past. Utopia Island, My Last Escape, Autumn's Beck and All Those Years Ago are examples of this that vary from daydreams to life and death struggles. In contrast to this are the two humorous football stories staring, if that is the correct word, pub team stalwart Roger MacKinnon. I'm not a great footie fan but Donald MacKinnon's Boots and Roger's Match did bring a wry smile to my face.
Environmental and social issues are featured in several stories. The Crunch and The Stranger are about messing up the environment. Rufus the vegetarian dog seeks a tastier dish and BB the blackbird battles violence and racism in Blackbird, Bye, Bye. Every battery hen's dream is realised by the lucky Henrietta who falls in love and escapes to freedom. A messy past has to be escaped in the human love story When I Propose.
When A Child Is Born is a far future tale about the problems of starting a family when the planet is packed full of people. Like The Challenge, a virtual entertainment story, the science fiction ideas are not that original. Recently written mystery tales such as The Inheritance and Legend of the Bosmoor Mist are amusing even if they do have predictable endings. When the Screaming Stops is a captivating tale of loss and acceptance that brings the collection to a satisfactory end.
I hope this has given you a flavour of Stewart's stories. There are too many to mention them all by name and some are so short that it would take away the experience of reading them for yourself. If you buy a copy let me know what your favourite (or least favourite) stories are.