David Mathew's collection mixes slipstream with crime fiction to great effect. Sharply written and full of surprises.
Gary Couzens, author of Out Stack and Other Places
Mathew leads the reader into stories of calm and controlled prose, which contrasts with the unsettling way in which he turns our world slant and hallucinatory.
Iain Rowan, author of One of Us
Take a glass. Pour two shots of the gritty British workaday angst of the Angry Young Men. Pour a shot of the deep surrealism of China Miéville, add a soupçon of William S. Burroughs - then you have Sick Dice. No matter how you roll them, you come up with a grim world spangled with multi-chromatic psychedelic stars. Like the fate of one of David's characters, after you read this collection, strange thoughts will ride you like a pony. Remember to take your amphetamines so you won't commit any dreamcrimes. Highly recommended.
Don Webb, author of Through Dark Angles
Mathew toys with our perception of reason, understanding and human instinct. A fantastic compendium which somehow reconciles the everyday with the incomprehensible; the dream with reality; tipping fiction over the edge.
Maggie Cameron, Artist
Mathew is a master of subtle unease. His characters, inhabiting a world that is always an inch off-kilter, walk the margins of moral ambiguity in a selection of stories infused with sadness, surrealism and slow-burning mystery.
Neil Williamson, author of The Moon King
David Mathew has always had a talent for getting inside the heads of damaged criminal minds . . . you'll be taken to some very disturbing places, in the borderland between the strange and the terrifyingly insane. It might just make you doubt the world around you. It might just make you doubt yourself. . .
Keith Brooke, author of The Accord
Dysfunctional characters whose lives may have been shattered by childhood abuse, identity confusion and submerged memories inhabit the boundaries between reality and fantasy in these psychological tales: not for the faint-hearted.
Lawrence Dyer, author of A Cottage on the Moss
About the Author: David Mathew is the author O My Days and Ventriloquists (Montag Press) and two other novels and two volumes of short stories. A novel, The Parry and the Lunge, will be published by Montag in due course. His academic writing has been published as Fragile Learning and The Care Factory (Karnac Books) and he has also published two novels and a volume of author interviews under the name of Tom Lockington. A keen traveller and researcher, David Mathew is also active in education and psychoanalysis.
