Mr Nice’s Bottom and Other Short Stories

In these tales, the high-minded meet the abject: a traffic-stopping phallus stalks the complacent avenues of West London; a CCTV hypochondriac prays for the millennium bug to deliver apocalypse; nudists metamorphose into pogromists; philanthropists discover that their charitable feasts are in fact banquets of blood.

Craven has already made his mark with the Bristolian Chronicles and novels including Amoeba Dick, Odour Issues, Pretty Poli and Helix Folt the Conservative. Here the shorter form becomes his scalpel: classical echoes collide with municipal grotesques; Swiftian spleen is married to Dickensian parody; philosophy itself is mugged outside a kebab shop, stripped of dignity and left in the gutter. Every story presses satire until it squeals, exposing the strange kinship of piety and cruelty, reason and absurdity, culture and excrement.

The result is a collection as funny as it is appalling, as erudite as it is filthy. These are stories you may wish to unread – yet their stains linger, indelible, on the reader’s imagination.