Review: All Human Life Is Here
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 20, 2011
We're all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars through the bottom of a glass of beer. And some of us are just looking at the glass.Keith Rawson's terrific short story collection shows us life from all sides. From all angles. Lives that you sometimes have to squint to see. It shows us longing, avarice  lust, greed, disappointment, anger and ideas so brilliantly stupid that they just might work- although they don't.The characters in The Chaos We Know are on the margins of the society or dragging themselves towards those margins, even if they don't know it. They're skidding across ice that is even thinner than they realise.This is an anarchic, tragi-comic collection  of stories- some are laugh out loud funny, some are heartbreaking and others are bittersweet but all of them are human, all to human.Personal favourites?A Clipjoint Romance, Life On The Mesa, What I Lost Along With My Keys, Ma's Favourite Wife and the 'title track' The Chaos We Know.The Chaos We Know is a highly recommended collection of absurdist noir fiction. Fantastic cover, too.