Chris McQueer

I picked this up in the Edinburgh Book Festival last year, and finally finished it just before I went back to Japan after New Year (keeping my weight down on the plane!). It's a bunch of pretty funny short stories, some with magical realism elements, although some of them are just building up to a lame punchline.

I liked it a lot - Glasgow and Edinburgh may be quite different, but I like to think we're cut from the same cloth ultimately, which shows in our sense of humour.

The quote on the cover - Irvine Welsh meets Limmy - is pretty accurate. Mixes the weird humour of the latter with the short stories about social realism of the former.… (altro)

This is pretty good for what it is, which is a book by some Weegie kid who lives with his mum and is ‘big on Twitter’. Some stories in here are little more than extended social media jokes, but the better ones play to his background in fun ways – such as ‘Leathered’, which starts off with a Scottish prison guard tweeting Kim Jong-Un? I could kick fuck out of him and ends up imagining what would happen if this got back to the North Korean leader and led ultimately to a televised bare-knuckle fight (supported by Ricky Burns v. Alex Salmond).

McQueer is at his best when writing in Scots, a language whose colloquial creativity, and ability to hardwire you into a person's brain, he has well understood. It's on display particularly well in the standout story here, the first and longest piece in the collection, ‘Big Angie Goes to Craig Tara’.

If there's wan place oan Earth ah love as much as ah love Blackpool or Benidorm, it's Craig Tara. In fact, ah'd go as far as tae say it's mah favourite place in the world. Ah know you'll be sitting there like that, ‘Really Angie? Craig Tara? The caravan park? That place is a shitehole.’ But it's no. It's fuckin amazin. It's heaven oan Earth fur a wummin like me. A wummin ae simple pleasures. Mah three favourite hings used to be booze, bowls and bingo. Since ah've gave up the bowls, ah've been huntin fur somethin tae replace it.

As a woman of a certain age, Angie is not, perhaps, the kind of character you expect a writer like McQueer to focus on, and it's great to see her here since most of us have known an Angie and we don't get to read about her much. At any rate, when the wee man's concentrating on his core skills of sweary Scottish ventriloquy, he definitely has the resources to flourish above 280 characters.

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Some weeks later…The Guardian just ran a nice interview with him here.… (altro)