File Under Fiction, by Martin Locock

File Under Fiction is a debut collection of short stories by Martin Locock.

In Change and Decay, an archivist's visit to a crumbling gentry estate reveals a history of sharp practice and opportunism belying the elegant exterior, and he becomes embroiled in their current intrigues.

Exchange Mechanism is a science fiction story exploring what would happen if we could see inside other people's minds.

Candle on the Table follows a frustrated solicitor's obsession with a perfect family, unaware that it conceals dark secrets.

The world of a maverick PR man and the Toronto Mafia collide in The Gift of the Gab.

In The Time Zone Rule, two colleagues are sent at short notice to Morocco; they find the romance of the situation irresistible, but one night's folly changes their lives for ever.

All the stories explore moral issues within a framework of spare narration and realistic characterisation, overlain by sardonic humour and elegance of expression. They have been described as "funny, accurate and deeply cynical."

Martin Locock is an author and poet who works as a project manager at the National library of Wales. Previously he had worked in commercial archaeology, publishing extensively on a range of obscure topics. He was born in 1962 and has lived near Swansea since 1991. He is married with three children. He writes a blog, A Few Words (http://locock.blogspot.com).


I have a small emotional attachment to this book: its author lives in the same Welsh town where my grandfather was born and foolishly this gave me hope that the book would be good. Sadly, I was disappointed.

I did appreciate the errata which the author provided which read, "Corrections. A battle of wills between author and a subversive spellcheck program has led to the replacement of some words with ‘emoraliz’.” Sadly the errata is not quite extensive enough: both ‘emoraliz’ and ‘emoralized’ make appearances, accompanied by those little empty squares which appear in various computer programs when a special character is saved in a format which the program doesn't support: a good edit would easily have found this problem; its appearance implies problems with the person who typeset the book rather than a rampaging spellchecker; and as this book was printed via Lulu (which is exclusively POD) there was almost certainly no print run of defective books: the author felt that these books were good enough to go out with this error in place. And on that point, I strongly disagree.

The punctuation was erratic, particularly the use of dashes (hyphens are often used where dashes are required, with odd and inconsistent spacing around them); a couple of punctuation marks escaped from the quote-marks which should have enclosed them; and there were a good few surplus commas scattered throughout the text.

The writing provided me with the biggest disappointment: it was flat and dull and unengaging and no more than the barest attempt was made to catalogue the events presented. The characters had no life; the events were dull; there was no depth to the work, and no texture, apart from a couple of places where the author's voice, and opinions, intruded. And there, too, was a problem: I couldn't agree with the opinions he voiced, and they were presented in jargon-cluttered language which made them difficult to decipher.

On top of all of that there were issues with the grammar too. I read just nine out of a total of 187 printed pages and hope that this writer polishes his work much more thoroughly before he considers publishing anything else.

(This book doesn't appear to be listed on Amazon so I'm unable to include a cover image or a link to its sale page.)

As They Grow Older, by SM Cashmore

Witch Street is paved with stories for children. Strange stories. Spooky stories. Halloween stories.

This collection, AS THEY GROW OLDER, has a life of its own. Starting with The Toyman and The Grumpy Browns to fascinate the very young, the stories themselves grow older, stranger and spookier, until the almost adult Last and Longest Story at the very end.

AS THEY GROW OLDER should be read with the lights dimmed, read aloud at Halloween. It doesn't matter how old your children are, there is a spooky story in this collection written especially for them to listen to.....

If they dare.


This collection of short, spooky stories is cleaner than most, with a mercifully-low error-count. The writer has a fluent, if rather naive style; and he has a good grasp of grammar, too. These things count strongly in his favour and were I reading this as a slush-pile submission rather than a published book, those good points would mean that he was automatically in the top ten per cent of the work before me.

He would still receive a rejection, though. His tone is at times a little patronising and while that might have worked a few decades ago it's no longer acceptable in children's fiction; and his stories, while perfectly pleasant, are neither convincing nor compelling. The story Nearly Nine describes a monster which lives in the narrow space behind the wardrobe: consequently, it's shaped like a bath mat (and I quite liked that idea). The bath mat monster ripples across the bedroom floor one night, creeps up onto the bed where a child lies sleeping and—here's the punchline—wishes him a happy birthday. And that's the end of the story. This could have been done so much better: had the monster approached the child a few times but been thwarted, and had the reader had known that the monster felt the time was running out, the reader would have wondered why it wanted to reach the boy and there would have been some real tension to the story. As it is, we have some funny description of the monster, a brief moment of tension—and then it's over, and nothing much has happened.

I'd advise this writer to work more on the structure of his stories, to consider developing their narrative arcs a little more fully, and to update his tone just a little. I read a respectable forty-nine pages out of a total of 369, and feel that this writer has plenty of unrealised potential.

The Bouncing Boy, by Ilia

The bouncing boy lives a life of ridicule and misfortune until one day his help was needed to save his village from a stinking problem. An exciting adventure ensues with the bouncing boy and an unlikely comrade, an elder from the village. Will this duo survive the trip to find the solution to save the village?

The Bouncing Boy is an entertaining modern day fairy tale enjoyed by kids 1-100 years old.


This is a singularly unattractive book. The illustrations are off-putting, and very uneven: that awful cover illustration is repeated inside, not once but twice, and after that, the illustrations change entirely in both style and sophistication (I suspect that they are produced by photoshopping photographs, but can't be sure). The text clearly comes from a novice writer, and shows the usual mistakes: hyphens used instead of dashes, misplaced punctuation, odd capitalisations, occasional contradictions, errors in grammar, and a few sentences which made no sense at all. A lot of these problems could have been resolved by careful edit: but this writer would do better to work on becoming a better writer, and then write a better book. I read just three of its 54 pages.

Letters Never Mailed: 32 Years of Writing to Tom Waits, by Susan Borgeson

Susan Borgeson's place among modern day existentialist writers is definitely at the front table. The evidence that remains is within the pages of this book---and what does remain after writing Tom Waits everyday for 32 years--with no response--is truly remarkable. A woman of letters is an understated description of a courageous individual that was stricken in her teens with mild schizophrenia and severe, bi-polar (manic-depression) disorder. Her individual struggle to overcome is a lesson for women of all ages, and for anyone with a mental handicap. These ‘ letters’ were all written around the turn of the 21st century. And, nearly 10 years later , still have a reflexive quality that transcends the psychologist’s case study. Borgeson's letters have remained fresh and give meaning to our shared and diverse humanity….Richard Collins, RedEye Publishing International


According to the foreword by Richard Collins, over a period of 32 years Susan Borgeson sent Tom Waits more than 5,000 letters (which works out to a new letter every two or three days), but didn't ever receive a single response. This book contains just nine unedited poems which she wrote over forty-two hours, illustrated with photographs of her original handwritten drafts.

I am concerned by the excessive nature of Miss Borgeson's behaviour, and by her history of mental illness, and so have decided that it would not be appropriate for me to give this book the review that it deserves. But if Richard Collins of RedEye Publishing International took even a single penny from Miss Borgeson to pay for her publication, he should be thoroughly ashamed of himself, regardless of her mental state.