I read the nine stories in Mark Haddon's new collection, The Pier Falls, over nine consecutive days — one bracing plunge every 24 hours. Anything more would have amounted to a violation of my own imagination. Anything less would have registered as disrespect for the devastating power of these eerily precise and dangerously suffusing episodes in the lives of mostly lost, lonesome, or abandoned people ... It's one thing to know and write brilliantly about how the world works. It's an entirely different thing to write with deep assurance about what happens when conventions are broken, relationships are scrubbed of ordinary decencies, and the mind shatters. Reality, in Haddon's stories, is endlessly decaying.
The nine stories in Mark Haddon’s debut collection are exuberant, lusty exercises in juxtaposition: intimacy and estrangement, exoticism and domesticity, innocuousness and malevolence, the cataloguing of minute detail and the expansiveness of the zoomed-out lens ... But nowhere do all these themes come together more brilliantly than in the collection’s centrepiece, 'Wodwo', a story that extends to more than 60 pages and earns every one of them.
Strengths and weaknesses pale next to Mr. Haddon’s sheer confidence as a storyteller. His voice can convey the authority of ancient fairy tales. 'Wodwo' is the book’s centerpiece by all measures: length, ambition and effect. In it, a family gathers for Christmas in a snowy English town. Mr. Haddon sets up the relations as if the story’s tension is going to be traditional and domestic. Then a stranger with a gun appears outside the family’s house. What follows is suspenseful, then fantastical, then man versus nature, then almost science fiction. The very end is head-scratching, but the impressive whole packs the action and themes that might power a very full novel into less than 70 pages.
Best known for his celebrated novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Haddon delivers similarly crisp and steady prose with his short fiction. Yet these stories prove more provocative, the inherent suddenness of the form working to the author’s advantage as he pits characters against great challenges ... Well-suited to short fiction, Haddon’s writing draws power and mystery not from the 'What?' but from the 'How?' In stories like 'The Pier Falls' and 'The Gun,' the essential plot information is conveyed in the titles themselves. Haddon doesn’t depend on twists or reveals to drive the narrative, instead building tension with the careful observance of these extraordinary moments and their repercussions ... Impressive in its scope and revelatory in its survey of man’s faults and strengths, The Pier Falls is a certain contender for the best short story collection of 2016.
The [title] story is a remarkable exercise in control, and in it Haddon displays an eerie ability to whisk his authorial eye from character to character, exposing each in turn with only a sentence or two. Haddon does this over and over in this unrelentingly intense and frequently jaw-dropping collection ... There are moments in this collection when the darkness feels almost wilful, as if Haddon is daring readers to keep going, right to the sticky end. The Pier Falls and Other Stories is not an easy read, but Haddon’s remarkable talent makes it worth it.
While reading these terrific tales one wonders how a single mind can create such diverse fiction as Mark Haddon has done here in his first collection ... these nine stories are truly spectacular ... Each of these stories grabs you with its lyrical prose and bold events, holds you tight and does not let go ... In the end, we are rewarded with tales and situations of great narrative strength and astounding imagination in which we could easily find ourselves but sure hope we never do.
What makes such a bizarre story ['The Pier Falls'] so special? The way that Haddon does it: his own cool verbal magic of plain and complete description ... Haddon’s capacity for literary variation in this collection is admirable: 'Victorian adventure story, science fiction, morality tale, contemporary realism.' All the pieces show how compassionate he is, and how anxiously he desires to make the best of what are sometimes awful experiences ... The Pier Falls is a tour de force of memory – accentuated with lively imagination – that makes us wonder if what we think happened, really did.
Compared to that masterpiece [The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time], The Pier Falls - along with a few of the other stories - is disappointing. Rather than examining the idea of emotional detachment, the writing itself feels oddly detached, setting the reader up to expect a resolution that never comes. But when he is good, Haddon is very, very good ... It makes for claustrophobic reading, to say the least. But by framing death as the central fact of life, Haddon interrogates it in an attempt to understand our human nature.
