In this collection of eighteen stories, Hugh Fulham-McQuillan writes with the playfulness and intelligence of such masters of the short form as Borges, Poe, and Barthelme. He examines the aesthetics of murder, the reigning fascination with the macabre in popular culture, and the tenuous line that separates art from life. One narrator traces the Möbius strip that encloses the assassination of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, and the murder of Lincoln by a famous actor in a theatre. Another undergoes plastic surgery to accelerate the process of his being possessed bu the ghost of the Italian composer Gesualdo. A detective ponders the interest he takes in investigating murders. Fulham-McQuillan wears his learning lightly and writes with the tact of a born storyteller.
Hugh Fulham-McQuillan is an Irish writer from Dublin. His fiction and essays have been published in Ambit, gorse, The Stinging Fly, the Irish Times, Dalkey Archive Press's Best European Fiction 2018, The Lonely Crowd, and The Honest Ulsterman. He is currently working on his PhD in psychology at Trinity College Dublin.