The Filing Cabinet of Doom: 17 Bizarro Short Stories Paperback – 1 July 2014

Swann takes a fantastic, unconventional approach to the stories collected in this work. Fans of China Mieville will be familiar with the concept of "The New Weird" - tales which hang off an impossible conceit and follow their own internal logic but still feel very much like a "story" with a convincing narrative structure. Swann is a master of this, but rather than taking a richly gothic approach like Mieville, she strips down and pares the language down to let a bone-dry wit shine through. The writing's delicious and sparse, like Steve McQueen's dialogue in Bullitt. The stories themselves stayed in my mind for days - the bored oracle rock that split two tribes asunder for the fun of it, the woman who keeps getting herself modified into different mythological creatures to please a man who'll never love her back... fantastic. And slightly uncomfortable. Just how I like it. Aside from one novella-type inclusion, the stories are typically short and leave you turning the page for a new world, a new situation, a new person, a new slant on things.

A wonderful collection of stories that range in both content and style.These bizarro tales are often thought provoking and linger in your thoughts long after you've stopped reading.A fantastic book that I would put in the same league as Peter Carey's 'Fat Man In History'.

Crazed and wonderful!

A short sharp series of punchy and often fragmented pieces creating a surreal and strange world that is delectible to the senses. There are some strong and original images in this book and I can't wait to see how the author develops her style over the coming years.

You could design an hors d'oeuvre for each story in Madeleine Swann’s The Filing Cabinet of Doom, and most of them would involve sweet pickles. Like hors d’oeuvres, the entries in this anthology leave you with a burst of flavor and feeling, free of filler or distraction. They’re short enough to binge in one or two sittings, and mysterious enough to justify a re-read. You can turn each one over carefully in your mind, or gobble down the lot of them for a rush of sheer novelty. Swann achieves this by glossing over the unnecessary details that can bog down speculative fiction- the whats, hows and whens- to leap right into the struggles her characters are living.There’s a light satirical element to most of the anthology, gentle enough to avoid being didactic but too familiar to ignore. Swann doesn’t editorialize. She finds the fault-lines in daily life- s***ty boyfriends, jobs that consume your life, the inexplicable urge to be destroyed- and then lets these struggles speak for themselves. She doesn’t seem to diagnose the world’s ills so much as present the symptoms in their full complexity and mystery.Swann’s characters are frequently inhuman but never dehumanized. In just a few short pages she makes it feel entirely natural that a Frankenstein’d mermaid would subject herself to experimental surgeries to be with her boyfriend. One barely pauses to wonder why anyone would want to make love to the cruel Marzipan King, because he’s familiar the moment you see him. Her depiction of the grotesque is enchanting rather than lurid. Her monsters are beautiful the way a gas slick is beautiful: distantly entropic but alive with color. At the same time a healthy sense of the mundane grounds most of the stories, moments both cozy and embarrassingly familiar bringing the monstrosity closer to home.At times her aesthetic reads as if Lewis Carrol had grown up reading EC Comics and Sylvia Plath. Swann’s stories are painted with equal parts dissolving bodies, fairy tale whimsy and Hammer-style monstrosities. With some creators (like, say, American McGee or Tim Burton) this kind of mash-up can quickly turn into self-conscious gothic swill. Swann comes by it more honestly. In The Filing Cabinet of Doom, the subversive and the sweet feel less as if they’ve been crudely laced together, and more as if they’ve sprung naturally from a mutual source.

This is a great debut collection from an author with a lot of talent. She's both a surrealist and a realist, weaving together really accessible but strikingly odd prose that can satisfy a broad range of tastes, from the relatively conservative granny who still makes her own tea cosy, to the jaded absurdist who thinks it everything was already done in the year 1342.