Magic for Beginners

''There once was a man whose wife was dead. She was dead when he fell in love with her, and she was dead for the twelve years they lived together, during which time she bore him three children, all of them dead as well, and at the time of which I am speaking, the time during which her husband began to suspect that she was having an affair, she was still dead.'‘

''You should never burn down a house. You should never set a cat on fire. You should never watch and do nothing while a house is burning. You should never listen to a cat who says to do any of these things. You should listen to your mother when she tells you to come away from watching, to go to bed, to go to sleep. You should listen to your mother's revenge.

You should never poison a witch.'‘

And these are the only extracts that were worth highlighting. Apart from Stone Rabbits, Catskin, and The Great Divorce - stories of sadness, tragedy, bitterness and love that deserved to be part of a much better collection - the rest of the stories are an amalgam of surrealism and absurdism that serve no other purpose but to satisfy the ego of the writer. Confusion veering into paranoia just for the sake of it. There are much better short story collections that belong to the Magical Realism genre. This one was a frightful disappointment.