I really enjoyed this short story collection it was both weird and incredibly well written. South definitely made me stop and have a think about a few things that's for sure. I will definitely be looking out for more from Mary South in the future.

I don’t typically enjoy short story collections. The shorter format makes it harder to get absorbed in a story and jumping from one to another can feel disorienting. I’m glad I put aside my reservations and have Mary South’s collection a chance. I was rewarded by a range of stories that were a pleasure to read.

The stories vary in subject but there is a consistency across them that’s hard to pin down. Each has a similar feel, like they exist in that same world as each other which is much like our own but somehow different.

Mary South has a skill for taking an otherwise every day situation and adding an unusual twist to it that makes for an intriguing story. Often this involves a new piece of technology or a change in the way society works. I liked how these scenarios weren’t the real subject of the story, it was always the people in the stories that were the focus.

I’m pleased to have reached this far in the review without mentioning Black Mirror but it’s hard to talk about this book without drawing parallels to Charlie Brooker’s TV series. Both explore how messed up humans are through the prism of a near-future version of our world. Both share a fairly bleak view of the world that is made more palatable thanks to a black humour and relatable characters.

I really enjoyed reading these stories and would recommend You WilL Never Be Forgotten to anyone with a taste for dark short stories that are written with skill and real story-telling ability.

I had wanted to read Mary South's debut collection of stories since first hearing about the US edition, and was delighted to discover the book had found a UK publisher. What I'd read about Forgotten – such as the blurb, which says the stories involve people attempting 'to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair' – had given me the impression it would be near-future soft science fiction in the vein of Alexander Weinstein. The opening story seems to have been chosen to underscore that positioning: 'Keith Prime' is narrated by a nurse who must ensure her wards, a group of clones named Keith, are safely kept sedated until their organs are harvested. However, it isn't necessarily typical of the collection.

I'd compare South's work to Xuan Juliana Wang, Lauren Holmes, Jen George and Kristen Roupenian. She's good at unnerving, offputting premises – if not quite body horror, then certainly bodily squeamishness, as in 'The Promised Hostel', where the narrator is one of a group of adult men who take turns breastfeeding from a woman called Maddy. Some are so up-to-the-minute that the concepts might sound a little too calculated: in the title story, a content moderator stalks her rapist online; 'To Save the Universe, We Must Also Save Ourselves' uses the members of an online fan forum as a kind of Greek chorus. Both, however, are razor-sharp. The latter, especially, is a really smart way to portray the way pop culture icons are built up, torn down and dehumanised.

Another couple of standouts: my favourite, 'Architecture for Monsters', is about a 'starchitect' whose work references human anatomy. Parts of it are written as a pitch-perfect imitation of the sort of profile that might appear in a pretentious design magazine (complete with footnotes), and the style is so enjoyable it'd be a pleasure even if it didn't have the best plot in the book. In 'The Age of Love' two staff at a nursing home discover their elderly patients are addicted to phone sex lines, and start making recordings of the calls – a practice that backfires when the narrator's girlfriend falls for the voice of a particularly eloquent octogenarian. Both are pretty funny in what appears to be a dry and deadpan way, yet there's real emotion beneath that. This is a hallmark of the whole book, and particularly apparent in its strongest stories.

Edgy, contemporary, delightfully weird; South's "You will never be forgotten" is a collection of short stories some of which tend towards more realist territory whilst others take a more speculative bent.