Temptation is a terrible thing, but books like this offer themselves on a platter. It suggests that we should loathe it on sight: visually; by the heft of its pages. The cover - by someone styling themselves Joey DAMMIT! - is awful. Never judge on that criteria alone, they say, but really, effort is called for. Still.

Let's be fair, though, and take the invite to Matthew Firth's brief offerings on home ground. Stories, yes, and short, yes. Can't get him under Trades Descriptions. Nor nail him to the cross for not being able to write. He can write. It sounds lazy, I know, but try them and see: he can write better than Tom Clancy or Nicolas Blincoe or Ben Elton or that terrible Collins woman. On a workmanlike level - words next to other words - he pulls the trick off. Or rather,

He doesn't pull the trick off. Those fools at least understand that a book has to be about something, even if that something is childish, ridiculous, scrappy, even offensive. (Hello, Mr. Clancy). Mr. Firth doesn't. These are ephemeral. Not stories that are about. Other than, perhaps, images, strings of words that occur to you in the long watches of the night and you, somehow, graft at contextualing them. Graft. Hard graft. You can't argue against Firth on that score either. He's worked these; he's tried. But let's get personal and say, I know because I've done the self-same thing. Not published though, even through some obscure Canadian press. But done them. Ephemera masquerading as profundity. Stories that betray a debt to other, better writers. (Always better.)

"He takes her up the hill. It's an old reservoir, now a city park. He hasn't had a job in over two years. It's the middle of a Friday afternoon. His cheque just came in via direct-deposit. He made two quick phone calls. Bought some grass. Called Hillary."

See, it's not bad. That's not bad, per se. Reading a few of these - and there are 19 in 111 pages - I'm reminded (and this is purely personal, so don't call me on it) of Michael Gira. A happy-clappy Michael Gira. But this has no pretensions to lyric form (although I fear it has pretensions). Firth's style is too emphatic, the poetry in his prose too pedantic. His language doesn't flow. I've read this stuff, a hundred - and hundred and one - times before. Outcasts, truants and misfits. Not everyone belongs in fiction. Alienated, depressed or marginalized. Ah,

So let me be positive in the midst of this shitstorm of negativity. Although, sadly, not towards Mr. Firth. Life is too short to mess with even the very shortest of fiction when it's intent on telling you nothing. Please, read Ethan Coen's recent Gates of Eden collection ('The Boys' is one of the very finest short stories of the past decade). Or Magnus Mills' Only When The Sun Shines Brightly. ('Hark The Herald', ditto.) Or Ethan Canin's The Palace Thief. Or, if you never have, any - and all - of the late and shocking great Raymond Carver. This is the end coming up. The End.