The beautifully written stories in Tom Cox’s collection range from flash fiction to longer form. For me, they made for a refreshing experience, in that they sit outside my usual reading range, which consists mainly of realist fiction. The stories in Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood (Breakthrough Books, September 2026) start out in realistic settings, but then we’re off into the uncanny. Most of them share fantastical elements, sometimes including folklore, ghosts, hints of horror… The voice varies – as it should – for each story but always bears Tom Cox’s incantatory watermark. The playful absurdist vein running through each piece sparks recognition of the many absurdities of modern life.
In Richard’s Existential Diary, the eponymous protagonist wonders not “why are we here?”, but “why aren’t we?”, given our constantly distracted minds. His assertion that he’ll never be famous because “there were no moving images of me as a child that could be used for a bittersweet future documentary” can’t fail to elicit a chuckle (or a wry smile!) in recognition of today’s celebrity-building dynamics. In The Realism Tree, a magical tree prompts people to disclose their most passionate hopes, only to crush them with seeming realism. In All The Underrated Absolute Legends Who Made Us Feel Great When We Were Alive, two elderly residents of a care home regret how uncharitable they used to be in their youth towards people who praised them for small actions, but then the two are merciless towards a woman who pays them a compliment. In The Turning Point, the consequences of an invented episode alter the course of a man’s life. I particularly enjoyed some of the metafictional stories. In Memory Almost Full, authors’ brains develop a hole “when writing mutates from a hobby to a job to an unalterable medical condition”. In The Backlash, an AI author becomes the subject of the kind of literary criticism normally reserved for human writers.
I’ll end with a quote from one of the last pieces, where a sentence encapsulated for me the spirit of the whole collection. “And it is during these times that I most acutely realise how futile my attempts to control the world around me are and that all realities are just stories we tell ourselves.”
Image credit:
The cover is reproduced with permission from the publisher, Breakthrough Books. Cover art and illustrations by Joe McLaren. Cover layout by Jamie Chipperfield.
Valeria Vescina 