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TRUE STORIES OF SO MANY STRAY DOGS HALF-TAMED BUT NEVER OURS TO COMMAND

Coming on Eddie’s place by the sea in the late afternoon, we looked down from the dunes to where the caravan park lay smashed and strewn across the flats and made our way on foot the last hundreds of yards, stepping around and climbing over the severed parts of cheap and fragile broken homes until we found the place where Eve had been wrenched out of her childhood. We could hear Eddie inside, wailing. Not wailing. Yelling.

In his second anthology repentant absurdist Martin Costello ventures into the darker side of encounters with despair: here transient male partners overwhelmed by what Kurt Vonnegut described as the ‘nightmare of meaninglessness without end’ exist only in savage expressions of coercion and cruelty. Their legacy lives on in survivors, generations bearing rare witness accounts of broken men who serve no purpose but to cling to their own ill-defined sense of place.

Praise for All The Things I Wrote Before I Wrote The Thing I Always Wanted To Write: “Mr. Costello is a gifted liar; a slanderer and a fabulist; a malicious disparager, gossip, tittle-tatler and scandalmonger.”
Stockett Parish Magazine