If you're masochistically inclined, and enjoy soulless stories, lacking heat, heart and blood, then ohhh boy, is this collection for you. Thought not. It's as if a writer of product manuals, structural engineering reports or business continuity plans decided to turn to fiction. And this is the result. Yay.
Innumerable times Davis uses the continuous present tense - first person, second and third - but, rather than draw you into the story and character's viewpoint, you soon end up thinking - again and again - that these stories are purely exercises in technique, in the mechanics of storytelling. A clever mind writing them with a Montblanc fountain pen, to amuse herself while occasionally genteelly sipping a china cup of Earl Grey tea, and a madeleine with tiny finger pointed up. Clever in the same way some people whizz through and complete a daily newspaper crossword and then think no more of it.
Sadly, I can't think of a single story in this collected edition that made me marvel at the writing either for its virtuosity or for its characters. Depressingly, however, I can think of far too many that irritate for their lack of life and feelings, and absence of any real care or consideration for the albeit rice paper-thin characters.
Probably the most disappointing, irritating, pretentious, insipid, tedious, painful and banal short story collection I've ever read by an author so adored by the critics.