The book contains four short stories, the last of which doesn’t even have a name, merely a “part one” and a “part two”. The writing is workmanlike and, inevitably, spare, and it’s at this point a reviewer might begin to struggle for things to say if it weren’t for the fact that this odd little curio is, in a dignified and gnomic way, quite brilliant. The stories are suffused in a devastating sadness, these linked tales are dripping with sorrow and anger and heartbroken melancholy. There’s an awful lot conveyed in the brief opener “The Fence” and I totally cried at the inevitably tragic “Hunter’s Moon” (but let’s remember it’s me, and I cried at The Sea Saw so I’m hardly some great rugged bastion of stoic manliness). “Home For Christmas” has a twist that’ll thump you in your gut like a lump of lead, and the final story –a sort of wish-fulfilling tale of revenge more akin to Kill Bill than The Star’s Tennis Balls- will have you quietly (or not so quietly) rooting for the hero with an inner gleeful amorality you won’t perhaps have felt or even suspected of yourself since Rocky IV. Katakis can floor the reader with just 70 pages, and there are plenty of authors who’ve published thousands of pages of prose who are still to illicit an emotional response in anyone. But every line here is a creative writing seminar on the unstoppable elegance of broken souls.