Book Review: The Sticky Fingers Collection by JT Lawrence

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Keywords: short stories, twisted, dark humor, South African author

I haven't been an avid short story reader, mostly picking them up when an outside moves me. In the case of these books, the force is the author herself, JT Lawrence. She's one of my favorite writers and solidly in the "will always read" column. I was familiar with her style from her novels, especially the dystopian When Tomorrow Calls series and its spin off novellas, and was happy when she started giving us short stories to fill in the gap between novels.

The subtitle for these collection is "12 deliciously twisted short stories" and she delivers on that promise. As with any short story collection, the reader will click with some stories and not with others but it is a happy reader who finishes the collection feeling that the author has indeed tricked, twisted, and perhaps emotionally plucked the reader's perceptions. Cut to the chase, I love the stories in this collection.

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One of the pleasures of a short story collection is that you can dip into it at any point and that is true with these collection. Howeverr, I will recommend that you read the collection in publication order. Why do I make this seemingly contradictory recommendation? First, you get to see how the author develops certain themes across the three collections. There are stories that are thematically related though not directly. It is fun to see how she can take the same theme and look at it from a different point. Second, there are several stories that directly cross between collections. The longest overlap between collections are the very humorous Trip Advisor stories. No spoilers but when you read the Trip Advisor story in Sticky Fingers 3 your going to go "hold on, wait a minute" and flip back to Sticky Fingers. There are also two sets of police detective procedual stories that feature the same detectives.

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As far as recurring themes go, one of the most pervasive is that of a persons disturbed mental condition and ability to handle reality. Here you'll find reaction to trauma, multiple personalities, imposter syndrome. Some of these are very poignant. Several stories look at how a woman handles an unsatisfying marriage. Two stories consider reactions to South Africa after 1993 when apartheid fell. "Kakkerlak" (Sticky Fingers 2, #11) is a particularly bleak, Kafkaesque horror.

Some other stories outside of the ones I described above that I hope will get your interest:
Sticky Fingers

• "Grey Magic" – about a modern, somewhat ditzy modern witch. Lawrence expanded it into a novel of the same name. Excellent novel.
• "Escape" – was my WTF! story. It features a baby that thinks it was born in the wrong body.
• "Pigeon Pain" – is a Hitchcockian bird story

Sticky Fingers 2

• "Rockabye Baby" – a pregnant woman seeks help in a strange shelter, West Haven, which seems to have a sinister aspect
• "Alpha Lyrae: A Robot Romance" – this story is expanded in volume 3 of the When Tororrow Calls series, What Have We Done. Of I wasn't already a fan of this series, this story would have pulled me in. 

Sticky Fingers 3

• "Every Breath You Take" a really, really disturbing look into the mind of a stalker.
• "Lucky Strike" – what happens when you betray the wrong woman