Music for the Off-Key: Twelve Macabre Short Stories

Drawing inspiration from everything from traditional horror movies to the sophistication of contemporary Japanese short-story styles, the literary and the popular merge seamlessly in this uniquely black British mix. This collection meticulously and insightfully observes West London's black communities—from patterns of speech, fashions, and pleasures to the pressures of racism and exclusion they seek to escape. Delighting in the dark, the grotesque, and the uncanny, these entertaining, genre-smashing stories provocatively reject the implicitly territorial limits placed on black British writing, and are followed by an afterword in which the author writes of his frustration with the narrow limits imposed on black British fiction by mainstream publishing expectations.