Sam Thompson's Communion Town, longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, comprises 10 stories loosely linked by their glimpses of urban life and the darkness of their themes. Thompson is intent on showing "how each of us conjures up our own city," and there's considerable variety, if at times a slightly frustrating opaqueness, to these stories.
If Thompson excels at anything, it's in creating a convincing atmosphere that's different from story to story. A sense of dread looms over several, including the eponymous opener, where the horrifying details of a terrorist attack carried out in an underground station by a group called the Cynics are mostly hinted at. It's clearly not safe to walk the streets of Thompson's imagined city at night, when the serial killer known as the Flâneur of Glory Part is abroad in "The Good Slaughter." In "The Rose Tree," a group of characters huddle in a bar against an unnamed terror. "You go out there, it'll find you," says one to a visitor who decides to brave the danger.
Two standout stories feature distinctive detectives. In "Gallathea," Hal Moody, a hard-boiled private eye in the noir tradition, is hired by a woman to search for herself. He tracks her throughout the city, his pursuit impeded at nearly every turn by a pair of thugs known as the Cherub boys, who gleefully administer a beating at each encounter. "The Significant City of Lazarus Glass" centers on the Sherlock Holmes-like character Peregrine Fetch, whose pursuit of the title character, a former detective suspected of murdering other detectives in ingenious ways, isn't quite what it appears to be. But not all is mystery and chills in Thompson's city. The narrator of the elegiac "The Song of Serelight Fair" meets a beautiful woman while working as a rickshaw driver; their love affair inspires him to discover his talent as a songwriter.
There's a veiled quality to most of these stories, and at times their connective tissue (other than the recurring names of neighborhoods like Glory Part or the Three Liberties) feels more elusive than explicit. The narrator of the Lazarus Glass story asks where the detective lives, "if not in a memory city, a city that is less a physical place than a world of codes and symbols." If you enjoy the work of decoding, there are pleasures awaiting you here. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: Sam Thompson's first novel offers 10 stories linked by their focus on some unusual events in a single town.