Nail and Other Stories

By Laura Hird

Following on from Children of Albion Rovers, this is a collection of short stories which delves deeper into the power struggle between the sexes and the generations. Set against the bland backdrop of middle-class suburbia, this is a world which is darkly humorous and bleak.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0862416779
• ISBN13: 9780862416775
• Release Date: March 2000
• Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Macabre tales and dirty little secrets

Laura Hird is a startlingly good storyteller. Whether all of her literary output will continue along the lines of these macabre and hauntingly strange stories remains to be seen. In this particular genre she is among the best. Her stories embrace the dark spaces of our night minds, our visualization of the ill-defined fears that populate the nightmares of reality and illusion, and she has an extraordinary ability to make these weird tales credible. There seems to be a running thread of exploring the possibilities of man's cruelty to man. She molds brief visages of young girls abusing a mentally challenged boy (not unlike the famous 'Lord of the Flies' story), brutality to animals, numbing revenge, pedophila, molestation, and near-extraterrestrial body invasions by growths on the hands and face. These stories may not be for the faint of heart, but Hird is a mastercraftsman at making these tales all seem like reportage. The one flaw in her writing is her tenuous ability to end a story: they often are left dangling like a half dead spider caught on our mind's brow. Some may find difficulty in reading her Scottish brogue manner of conversation, but try reading it aloud and you will discover how additive it is in thinking through the story.This is a fine short story collection. One wonders what a novel by Laura Hird would feel like...........

Hard-hitting, Shocking, Clever, and Haunting

From "Nail," the first Kafkaesque story in Laura Hird's ambitious collection to the final cruel realizations of the last story, "There Was A Soldier," the reader is by turns shocked, horrified, saddened, and amused. These ten stories have in common a certain grimness as they illuminate the sordid and dysfunctional world bubbling near the surface at the end of the 20th century in Scotland. Despite the use, at times, of Scottish dialect, I had no problem hearing the voices of these various characters: the sexual predator disguised as a teacher; the woman whose husband tries to talk her into swinging; the angry, stalking ex; the cruel girls subtly torturing a retarded boy. Their voices were clear-and often angry, nasty, or hopeless.Two stories particularly impressed me. In "The Last Supper," the lively, opinionated first person narrator, Darren, is helping his friend Dave move from his flat. Dave's rapacious landlord cheats him out of his deposit, and when Dave gets his revenge, I almost wanted to cheer. The tension of the story is well-done, and I loved this line: "Why do lonely people feel they have to inflict their misery on everyone else? Don't they realize that's why they're lonely in the first place?" (p. 49). The other story, "Routes," tells of a meandering bus ride taken by an unloved 12-year-old boy. The narrative is rich, the story full of insight, and in the conclusion, the character is the only soul in the whole collection who might possibly be redeemed by his ability to love something in the abstract. That was a knockout story.NAIL AND OTHER STORIES is not for the faint of heart, but the stories resonate, and the characters and images are surprising and unsettling. Hard-hitting and clever, Hird's stories will make you think-and they'll come back to haunt you later. ~Lori L. Lake, Midwest Book Review.

Grim and Promising First Collection

I first came across Laura Hird through her story "The Dilating Pupil" in the Children of Albion Rovers collection. This collection of ten of her stories is fairly consistent, lots of slices of the underbelly of Scottish life. Slices is a key word here, 'cause while she is strong in quickly getting characters and places out there and in the reader's mind, most of the stories feel like one's walked into the middle of a longer piece. There is a kind of haste and unfulfilled quality to a number of them that leaves the reader a bit empty. That emptiness may also be in large part due to the sheer grimness of the stories and the nastiness and/or patheticness of the people in them. Necrophila, pedophilia, animal abuse, abuse of the mentally retarded, spousal abuse, psychological abuse, it's all here and at the core of the stories. At times the symbolism is overwrought (the woman who kills her ex-boyfriend's cat/pussy, the para who rapes a corpse, etc.), and sometimes the clever ideas doesn't lead anywhere interesting. The stories are quick reads though, and are valuable as another perspective on modern Scotland. Hird's next book, the novel Born Free, delivers on the promise evident in the collection. Note: One of the better stories in the collection, "Routes", is available online in its entirety at The Barcelona Review.

Grim fun indeed.

With different Scottish voices, Laura J. Hird paints a grim picture of humanity with ironic humour. The picture painted, however, is a real attempt to find the nasty little things that make us all part of the human race. From the sick mind of an ex-soldier, children taking advantage the mentally retarded, to a woman abusing a cat, this has all of the sadness of life. That it is laced with a hard-nose humour speaks for the area of West Edinburgh (Gorgie) in which Hird was raised. The parallels to Irvine Welsh are there : the vernacular ; the train of thought. Hird is a more disciplined and visual narrator however, and rarely sounds drug-fuelled, as does the east of Edinburgh's more famous Hibernian supporter. Some stories in this book should come with a warning, but it is encouraging to see this dour picture is lightened somewhat in her excellent follow-up novel, "Born Free", which is a gem. Start with "Routes" and watch out for the last story "There was a soldier....", but above all don't miss out on a wee bit of urban blight from this lassie.