Due to be published on 12th November this is a debut flash fiction collection from award-winning writer, F J Morris.

It’s a bit like saying ‘Don’t think about an elephant’ so of course you can’t help it, only in this case it’s the ghostly presence of the great David Bowie floating through these stories. His songs (their titles), influential fashion-sense and his (almost) staged and unexpected death link surreal, surprising stories rooted in everyday life with a twist of sci-fi. The collection includes very short flash fiction as well as verse and some longer stories. An impressive range.

In the opening story, When David Bowie moved in, a failing relationship is pushed to breaking point after ‘pieces of Bowie landed daily’. When a woman feels her heart becoming cold and she starts to grow scales, in Loving the alien, she hopes it’s ‘a sickness that would go away’ but ‘It was genetic; an alien gene in my very DNA.’ With this metaphor F J Morris examines the impact on a relationship of the death of a baby, and the way the couple each hide their emotions. Other dark or challenging subjects are given this slant approach: child abuse in Blooming Scars and the loss of a sister in Swings and Rocket Ships. In the poem A Song of Space the writer plays on the contrast between Space with a capital ‘S’, ‘arms holding supernovas and planets and milky ways’ and the minute space formed by ‘the semicolon between now and then.’

Talking of semicolons, I particularly enjoyed the more experimental Slush Puppies that cut punctuation and capital letters altogether, echoing the experimental nature of adolescent sexuality: ‘I know she would taste sweet like her candy-floss hair.’

This Is (Not About) David Bowie is a collection that combines a light touch with serious undertones that question what it means to be human. Now to dig out my old Bowie records…

This Is (Not About) David Bowie will be published on 12/11/18 in eBook and paperback.