Darker with the Lights on - by David Hayden (Paperback)

About the Book

The 20 stories in this debut collection from David Hayden are strange, uncomfortable fables of memory, metamorphosis, time, disassociation and death: hard to fathom, but impossible to ignore. An undercurrent of primal violence runs through the tales. In the first story, "Egress", a man steps out from a high ledge on his office building, to fall "with fresh delight" and keeps on falling, somehow outside the laws of gravity and time. Another story, "The Bread that was Broken," records the mannered conversation at a glittering dinner party where the centrepiece is a blackened, smoking corpse.

Book Synopsis

Wry, intimate, and startlingly imaginative, the stories in this debut bring a sharpness, and a strangeness, to the everyday.

Review Quotes

"The surreal and the mundane coincide brilliantly in Hayden's inventive debut collection."--Publishers Weekly

"Here are stories to read again and again. Here is language to live in. David Hayden is a serious force."--Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts

"It's an open secret that David Hayden is one of the most interesting short story writers around. Why it's taken this long for his first collection to be published is beyond me but I, along with anyone with even the vaguest interest in looking at modernism anew, will be queuing up for a copy."--Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

"Once in a blue moon, a book comes along that really is like nothing you've ever read before. The 20 stories in this debut collection from David Hayden are strange, uncomfortable fables of memory, metamorphosis, time, disassociation and death: hard to fathom, but impossible to ignore; twisty and riddling, yet with a blunt impact that reverberates long after the final page."--The Guardian

"Hayden's hypnotic combination of oneiric situations with pinpoint language conjures Calvino or Barthleme. His stories are airborne elephants: their lightness of touch belies their emotional weight."--Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo

"Handle this book with care. Goodness knows where its visions end."--Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

"Quietly innovative, subtle of tone, full of feeling--this is a superb debut"--Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane

"One of the most startlingly brilliant and original debuts I've ever read. Hayden is one hell of a talent."--David Collard

"Very, very fine fictions, which captivate and seduce the reader . . . Beautiful, luminous, and written with poetic economy and precision."--David Winters

About the Author

David Hayden's writing has appeared in gorse, The Yellow Nib, The Moth, The Stinging FlySpolia, and The Warwick Review, and poetry in PN Review. He was shortlisted for the 25th RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story prize. Born in Dublin, he has lived in the US and Australia and is now based in Norwich, UK.