The Hours of Our Lady by David Frankel

Publisher - Salo press

Published - Out Now

Price - £4.99

Our Lady of Darkness has been with us since the beginning. She exists in the places other gods forget, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. For Thomas De Quincey, writing in 1845, she was a creature of terror, but here she is redrawn – a figure of fear for some, of comfort and protection to others.

David Frankel’s sharp, alluring fragments read like reports from a disturbing world that, with gradual alarm, we realize is the same one we’re standing in. In these eerie commentaries, we feel flashes of Borges’ Labyrinths and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, though neither can fully prepare us for what we are about to experience. Dark-ravaged, ecclesiastical, rain-lashed, these are stories from a reality that before we glimpsed only in the corner of our eye, but now grows bigger, closer, presses in on us, urgently, with fervour. - Ashley Stokes, author of Gigantic

In short pieces full of vivid images, David Frankel goes out into the derelict edgelands of our messed-up society and encounters a strange, forlorn beauty in those places that defy the advertisers and financiers. ‘The tranquillity of negation,’ he calls what he finds there, in that zone of dread and grace, where the overlooked inhabitants find consolation in oblivion. A brief, marvellous, haunting book, reminiscent of Sebald and Sinclair. - David Swann, author of Season of Bright Sorrow

A shout out to Ashley Stokes who put this in my radar. An author I enjoy reading recommending something is always a sign I may enjoy something else. This is a very short 24 page booklet of micro-fiction . Each page has a quasi religious themed dark tale of interesting imagery that manages to unsettle and yet offer hope. In examples we get ‘Theology’ where this strange mythical figure of Our Lady is first introduced and Frankel makes the everyday landscape appear magical. The haunting ‘Parable’ in a few paragraphs uses a birds nest to create something unnatural. Old peopl’s homes are melancholic magical coincidences, a pond in the country is full of disturnign hope and a river has a sinister piece of debrix to discover.

This a very short collection but the use of language and imagery make it deeply enjoyable strange fiction and for fans of that well worth a quick read to savour.