The Red Light Starts Blinking

Jonathon Kane’s debut collection of short experimental fiction, equally hard-faced and tender, follows characters searching for a way forward or back or around—some direction, any direction. Against the backdrop of Australia’s simultaneously lush and desolate Blue Mountains, a series of men are set adrift. Displaced and in unfamiliar lands, always only passing through, they seek missing spouses, missing children, and missing limbs while searching for a way forward or back or around—some direction, any direction. A transient odd-jobber takes a gardener position at a retirement home. A curiously named member of a mysterious network of Sensitives does calisthenics through an interrogation. A recluse contends with their deceased father’s missives scrawled in white chalk around a black-painted garage. Less a collection of short stories and more a set of interlocking teeth, The Red Light Starts Blinking explores the vicious gut-punches and tender-to-the-touch moments of modern life as felt from the fringes. Fragmentary and with significant gaps, the stories play with form and narrative while inviting the reader to a disquieting game of emotional roulette. As one character puts it: disturbed? deranged? delighted? The red light is on—only an attempt at entanglement will tell. For fans of: dark humour / absurdity / alliteration / a light dusting of magical realism / Thomas Pynchon / Paul Beatty / Amy Hempel / disjointed narratives / sun-baked landscapes / the cockatoo’s screech