It wasn't his fault. Not really. But by the way he alternated between chewing on his nails and digging at his cuticles when he gave his report to the police, it was clear there was no convincing him of that. As for the other kids, well they bolted at the first sign of trouble, what with them all being at least seven years younger than him. He could have been tried as an adult—the last thing they wanted was to be considered an accessory. Not that he couldn't have kept them there.

"A subtly existential collection in which each story defracts, complicates, compliments, and magnifies the others. Intense and satisfying, and very painfully human." (Brian Evenson, author of The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell and Song for the Unraveling of the World)

"Short-titled and tightly tense, each story in this Padraig Hogan collection builds into a much larger Wax of human catastrophe. It's also sincerity, and it's sincere pessimism, such as in "Fingers" and "Flowers"; personal favourites, yet also metonyms for so many characters ripped from their sockets. Fans of the grim are recommended to make sure they're ready." (Pascale Potvin, Editor-in-Chief of Wrongdoing Magazine)

"In these stories the material world sometimes seems in rebellion against the hapless protagonists. Buildings and rooms don't seem the places of comfort they were intended to be. Shirts are hard to button. The natural world is in on the plot too, and the fallen angels-smug bureaucrats we should have expected them to be-have come to bargain for souls that seem no longer worth the trouble it takes to carry their extra weight. These are hard, sharply crafted tales for weird and troubled times. Padraig Hogan's voice cuts and delights throughout-alternately empathetic and unpitying, this work offers no refuge but in what serious and considerable pleasure-and even joy-remains to us in sharing words and the mind pictures they make of these humans and their alternately painful and comic earthly predicaments." (Anthony McCann, author of Thing Music and Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff)