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The Sandman
The Do-Not Press paperback, £7
Dancing with Mermaids
The Do-Not Press paperback, £7
both by Miles Gibson
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)

This matched pair of reissues form easily the best release yet from the Do-Not Press stable. Short, densely realised, witty and affecting, they showcase a deliciously skewed, seriously wicked view of the world.

The lesser of the two, 1984's The Sandman, was surely one of the first in the soon-to-become-tiresome rash of serial killer literature. It's also definitive enough to have been the last.

Mackerel Burton was brought up in a shabby coastal hotel, innocent of the murderous future that awaits him. He adores magic, but is less sure about the death-tinged sex games of which young Dorothy is fond. When she grows up she marries a butcher because she likes the idea of someone who works with corpses all day. Mackerel? Well he gets to know the dead too - as The Sandman, a seemingly ruthless serial killer who stalks the London streets and revels in an urban slaughterhouse.

Despite its subject matter The Sandman is a refreshingly good-humoured piece. It reminds one of film director John Waters' assertion that, give or take the odd bad night, deep down most murderers are actually nice people. Mackerel kills, but he's never cruel, never sexually motivated, always quick and, as far as such things can be, clean. All he takes are pictures.

Deftly handled, even endearing, The Sandman is never prurient or obvious in its deranged dealings. Few readers will come away without at least a shred of sympathy for a man who, give or take the odd bad night (and morning and afternoon and evening) really isn't a bad sort at all.

The even better Dancing With Mermaids (1985), on the other hand, isn't strictly crime fiction at all. We're in Rams Horn, a tiny, isolated village on the Dorset coast; a place of real magic and genuine mystery. Like the seer who patiently awaits her drowned husband's return. Like the spectacularly monikered Matthew Mark Luke Saint John, the huge African sailor who wields a curious sexual authority over his landlady and her dullard daughter. Like the Philip Ridley-ish trio of emotionally-stunted but sexually curious young boys who plot to get one of their mothers naked.

The book has a perverse, Gothic power - all mad women, ineffectual, blustering men, and evil children. There are elements of Dennis Potter's queasy sexual politics here, the hermetic setting of Patrick McCabe's celebrated Butcher Boy there, but the whole perhaps works best if you think of it as Under Milk Wood scripted by Nick Cave.

Funny, seductive, macabre, Dancing With Mermaids has such a freewheeling otherness about it that you sense you're in the orbit of a truly exceptional imaginative talent. And with The Do-Not's apparent intention to reprint all of Gibson's books, it seems we are in for an exciting two years. •