A Million Versions of Right
Australian writer Matthew Revert purposely disregards the boring limits of consensus reality in favor of a better experiential flow for author and audience. He's been called a "bizarro" writer, but prefers the tag absurdist.The stories in A Million Versions of Right are irreal, but not confrontationally so. Revert distorts familiar experiences while retaining enough of the commonplace to make them universal for even the most staid of readers. A consistent motif is the unremarkable reactions of his protagonists when faced with circumstances beyond the unlikely (like ejaculating a series of mustachioed tillers, as occurs in the title story, where readers are introduced to the narrator's "clockwork father"). --Denver Examiner, April 16, 2010A Million Versions of Right, Mister Revert's collection of short stories, is an amazing achievement. Why? Well, because I hate short story collections. There's only one other short story collection I liked and that was the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach collection by Steven Erikson. But those were different. Very different to these. I just can't stand getting into a story and then being flipped out and told to get into the next, which is doomed to be not as much fun because I kind of just wanted to read more about that character. I prefer novels.And what makes them so great isn't their ideas. It's the style. Mister Revert has, simply, one of the most efficient and highly readable styles I've ever read for this genre. In most cases you can feel the author's desperate need to try and impress. You can see they're just trying to one-up the weirdness. But Mister Rever succeeds in keeping a natural eccentricity which is toned down greatly by a near precision-based editing exercise. You can see he's worked and reworked each story - and if he hasn't, then the man needs to be wired up to a machine which forces him to write, because if this is what he can do without effort, then he needs to give us something he tried. It would kick our brains out.If you like it weird, and you like it intelligent and you like it to challenge your mind, you can't go wrong with A Million Versions of Right, because no matter how wrong you think a short story is, this book will prove they can sometimes be all right. --Lateral Books, April 18, 2010This book offers a crucial and refreshing difference that should instantly establish it as a prototype of the Bizarro genre (perhaps New Absurdist?  Subject for a debate no doubt).  That difference is: in these stories, the nonsensical actually makes sense and the illogical is firmly grounded on logic, i.e. they have a raison-d'être.Granted, perhaps testicular annihilation and scrotum aesthetics shouldn't be appreciated by all.  And the paralysing fear that one or more of the `men' contained in `semen' may be what decides to burst forth at that next toe-curling moment is rarely a popular water-cooler topic.  Ditto for power blinks, malfunctioning bookmarks, and one particular comb-jar deep in the Hair District...  But all these things fill the pages for a reason, brilliantly described and brought to life to reveal the shocking silliness that exists in those things we call conventions. --Full of Crow, December 27, 2009