Product Description

Aromabingo builds on the critical success of David Gaffney's 2006 collection Sawn-off Tales, offering yet more of Gaffney's weird and edgy ultra-shorts, plus several longer works, so you can spend even more time inside the baffling, hilarious and sometimes moving world of a David Gaffney story. Think Magnus Mills mashed with the League of Gentlemen with a jolt of Mark E. Smithery for grit, and you're nearly there. Though many of his stories are shorter than a Napalm Death snarl, these precision-engineered slivers of fiction leave you with the dying chords of a symphony. They are about the small people, the tiny Tardis folk with cathedrals inside them, creeping by unnoticed. These tales will have you laughing like at a Tommy Cooper video though there's something hideous gnawing at the door to get in. Be careful, a spoonful weighs a ton.

Explosively funny, and untiringly odd, Gaffney's short stories don't just cut to the chase, they cut to the point of the chase, hitting the reader with a powerful one off injection of ideas and emotions which flood the mind and leave you reeling. Some of the plots are mad. In a future Britain where northern people are nearly extinct, the last northerners are herded up and kept on a reserve; a counselling robot tries to persuade a massage robot not to murder the cleaner; in the 1976 trouser a famine an obsessive collector struggles to find the perfect punk trousers from his extensive collection for his date with a Ruts fan. They are short but powerful - strong medication, so be careful. A few in a row will amaze and delight - one after another and you feel like you've been run over by lorry full of fridges.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #338129 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

Bookmunch, November 2007
Offbeat, unsettling, hilarious, Aromabingo is a solid step on from the accomplished Sawn-Off Tales. Gaffney is a name to watch.

Bob Magazine,2007
Like literary cocaine, you'll want another quick line.

The Short Review 2008
A triumph, blurring literary boundaries, a dose of unabashed comic bravura, honouring British writing with awkward, self-conscious, jagged aplomb.

Customer Reviews

Not as Good as !
Having devoured Sawn Off Tales I looked forward to more from Gaffney only to be slightly disappointed. Same menu, less bite especially in the shorter stories. I was more impressed with his elongated versions. He has the ability to tell a story in a Hemingwayesque "chopped to the bone" manner. I suspect that many take their shape from and are truncated by his interesting, shady, present occupation.

Come for the clowns, stay for the opera
It seems like everybody's doing ultra short stories now - John Fuller, Etger Keret, Dave Eggers, Dan Rhodes, even some of Miranda July's work is of that nature. Now David Gaffney's brought out a second collection. Like Carver, Gaffney aims for brevity and sometimes minimalism, and you get a sense that he started with a big lump of prose and chiselled away until a tiny perfect sculpture was formed. Now whenever I read a long piece of prose I wonder if there's one of Gaffney's short sharp shorts hidden within in, screaming to be freed. Funny vignettes on the surface, these stories have hidden depths and Gaffney's prose, like tangled, slimy weed, can drag you down into a murky place. Come for the clowns, stay for the opera.

Wander through a universe of quirk
As well as a few dozen more of the one-punch-and-your-out 200 word blasts of humour and poignancy Gaffney is famous for, in this, his second collection of short fiction, the author dips his toe into longer forms, and demonstrates he can do these just as well as the 150 word sprints he so brilliantly pulled off in Sawn Off Tales (Salt, 2006) In Aromabingo he helpfully divides his stories into three section -the 45s are micro fiction, the 12 inch singles are mid-length, and the long players are the big ones. One wonders what anyone under thirty will make of this categorisation, but I for one certainly got the idea. The `12 inch single' stories avoid the old eighties tricks of chucking in a few extra choruses and a long instrumental bit in the middle for the dance-floor, by taking Gaffney's ideas on to a new level, often losing a little of the broader humour, but acquiring instead a sense of loss, of despondency - menace even - that in his shorter pieces he can't really develop. The longer stories are often just as funny, but more wistful, yearning affairs. I liked This is about Dixie, which explores the effect of an electronic cat flap on the social structure of a bunch of neighbourhood cats, illustrating the loneliness and aggression of the narrator who, with no cats of his own, obsessively analyses the behaviour of the local cats with forensic attention. Overall, Aromabingo is an excellent read having all the wit and charm of sawn-off tales with the added brooding melancholy of a Gaffney given freedom to wander further intro through the minds and universes of his quirky people.