Briton Barlow delivers a delightfully gothic, witty and sometimes macabre trio of novellas, each based on an apparently authentic historical oddity. The title piece, for which Barlow earned a Paris Review
Discovery Prize, takes place just after the Second World War and concerns a breakfast chef taken in by Michael "Cast Iron" Mulligan, an enormous, worldly Irishman who will eat anything (worms, chairs, brass plaques) for a price. Dubbed Captain Gusto by his mentor—and charged with grinding up the stuff for Mulligan to eat—the chef later decides to follow in Mulligan's footsteps, with disastrous results. The second novella gleefully chronicles the trials of various Victorian English villagers after the birth of a winged kitten in their local workhouse. Fortunes are won and lost as Thomas-Bessie (" 'cos we didn't know if it were a boy or a girl") minds its own business amid all the attention, and various citizens go mad and chaos reigns. In "The Donkey Wedding at Gomersal," an endearing fable of midlife romance in rural 1850s England, a widow and a widower discover love together while doing a brilliant business in pork pies. Barlow's observant, chatty and sometimes playfully starchy prose perfectly complements his weird tales; this is a idiosyncratic and memorable collection. Agent, Peter Steinberg
. (Sept. 17)
