A woman orders a sex doll for her husband’s birthday. A man makes films without a camera. A married couple take turns to sit in an electric chair. Cathy Sweeney’s inventive debut collection offers glimpses of an unsettling, and fractured world. They are by turns surprising and shadowy, funny and unreal, wonderfully transgressive slices of humanity.
Incredibly unsettling ... Sweeney's stories are seriously fractured fairy tales, featuring deadpan, disturbed, sometimes somewhat malevolent voices and perhaps too few flashes of humanity and vulnerability. They are quite bleak so won't be for everyone but Sweeney is a very interesting writer.

Received for review from Netgalley.

Interesting collection of short stories, some good, some bad, some plain weird. The ebook I received was not well formatted and it made it hard to tell when one story ended and the next began initially.

These are deliciously surreal stories that have some of the quirky weirdness of Lydia Davis and some of the rewriting fairy tales of Angela Carter. They focus on women, sex and bodies but not in a conventional way and there's a lightness in the writing that helps the imaginative edge take flight. Lots of inset stories and contested narratives shift things in terms of who owns the story. An exhilarating collection.

"In real life it's hard to know when one thing ends and another begins. We are much better of with fairytales." The stories in Modern Times, despite what the title may suggest, feel at times more like parable or fairytale than a more standard, contemporary short story. The tales deal with ordinary life, often women approaching middle age, sex and the body parenting and divorce.

The stories are very short - one is only a paragraph long, and a few are only a couple of pages long - which feels like ideal reading during a time when everyone's attention span is quite limited. Every story can be read quickly on the surface, or dived into a little deeper, and I really wanted to be able to talk about some of the more out there or shocking stories with others.

One of my favourites the collection is callrd The Woman Whose Child Was a Very Old Man. You could say it is about several different things, but at a basic level it is about a woman, who in order to be able to work and provide for her child, starts to put him in a freezer, where he can rest unharmed and it seems like she can put him on "pause". As she does this for longer and longer when she begins to write, she eventually forgets about him for too long, until she is an established author. When she remembers to take him out of the freezer, when she is eventually in a position to care for him properly, he has become an old man. She cares for him devotedly and presents her old son to the world. The narrator tells us that the story is set when women writers didn't have to be likable, which is a wry observation on the demands of the modern woman, but it also sheds light on the demands on women creators through history, who so often must choose between family and ambition, and will always be vilafied by either choice.


In The Birthday Present, a woman buys a sex doll for husbands fifty seventh birthday. This is presented as a practical solution to to her husband having "turned her into into an object to suit jis own needs". She is able to outsource the part of her relationship she can no longer endure and in doing so seems to create a new more equal partnership. They pick it out together, and he washes and dresses the doll in its own room. He becomes more affectionate towards the wife and eventually the doll becomes company for her instead of her grown up children as the doll expects nothing of her.

The focus on the body, sex and taboo in these stories are endlessly interesting as Sweeney invents so many different ways of dealing with the same theme, and I love that it is up to the reader to decide each stories meaning. I would have read double the amount of stories from this collection, so I'm very eager to read more from Cathy Sweeney.