Make no mistake about it: most of this book is about real people, and real social interaction. Otherwise, what’s there? Get on the tube in the morning and people stare straight into your face from less than one foot distance.

It is contemporary life that suffocates Harrison’s characters – the disillusion of middle age, loneliness, broken relationships between broken people, falling out. Themes are not about a suffocating bureaucracy however, yet the atmosphere is at times just as claustrophobic and harrowing. So yes, what we have here is a 21st century Franz Kafka: fiction about the ordinary weirdness of being human, all too human, in a setting that’s at times a bit off, and at times perfectly normal. But ‘elements’ is indeed just that: mere elements – as the core of most of these stories are humans and human relations: for every ounce of speculativeness, there’s three ounces of something Raymond Carver would have been proud of too. There are elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror and the plain the weird. Having said that, categories aren’t of much use in this collection: this truly is genre defying prose.

Harrison calls the short items “flash fiction”, but the “prose poem” moniker would have worked just as well. About half of those are very short, about half a page, and previously appeared on M. You Should Come With Me Now features 42 short stories written between 20.

M john harrison nova swing