A few of the stories feature hunters and most of them offer insight into violence. Here be Dragons too, it’s not all moist fun, the stories fold deeply worrying things within them, reaching out to grab us unawares whilst we stare too long in our mirrors. The interfaces between the overwhelming emotional responses caught withing these pages and the cold incongruity of the characters is delicious. Desire V Performance, Need V want, Realist V dreamer, Ego V opportunity. Filthy Animals focuses on the tensions between what we are, or think we are, and what we appear to be, and the flows that move between these layers. The prose is a meniscus, holding us together with the surface tension of meaning as random, dangerous, chaos churns below. Elsewhere, a little girl runs wild to the consternation of her childminder unspoken frictions among a group of teenagers come to a vicious head on a winter night and a woman dreads a first date only to find that something has cracked open. As he navigates their sexually fraught encounters, he is forced to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness – and to consider his return to life – half the stories circle this trio as they work it out on their own terms. Charles and Sophie’s relationship is difficult to read but Lionel is drawn to them both. Recently discharged from hospital, Lionel meets two dance students at a party. In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, a young man tentatively engages with the world again. The book won ‘The Story Prize’ 2022 you can really see why. Taylor seems to write about the huge things in life, but really, it’s the tiny things which resonate, and the prose captures those personal flickers in beautifully flowing sentences which offer backstory, insight and a smile at his fearless flair with words. This is humid book, I could feel the heat rising Taylor keeps their narrative beat and keeps it strong, it’s relentless in the best pounding way, Driving the reader on through the stories as they writhe on the page and echo the characters writhing.
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