Lives of the dog stranglers Book

Parkside is a typical suburb in a city in the south of England, its late Victorian terraces occupied by a few remainding elderly residents and new young families. Like any suburb its character is formed by rumour and fantasy. 'This isn't a neighbourhood', one character fumes, 'it's an echo-chamber'. Everyone is the figment of his neighbour's imagination. 'We're anything they want us to be - murderers, redheads, philanderers, dog-stranglers'. A brilliant mesh of interlocking narratives, held together by Parkside itself and the thematic thread of metamorphoses, Lives of the Dog Stranglers is by turn wildly funny, tragic and richly cynical. With a ludic mastery of language and huge curiosity and compassion for his impotent, driven characters, Simon Mason has fashioned an elegant, savage farce of suberbia.