The Librarian’s Cellar: The Blocks by Karl Parkinson

The flats of O’Devaney Gardens are the setting for a narrative infused with the malignant darkness of poverty, addiction, violence and death. The Blocks is a harsh, yet poetic journey of jargon and sucker punches that evoke haunting visions of human nature, some spiritual, some demonic, some pathetic and some heroic, and all told in a visceral and sometimes vicious vernacular. The boy becomes a man becomes a writer, and storied through his alter-ego, Kenny Thomson, Parkinson’s characters crawl from the pages, a dystopian cocktail, chaotic, brutal and sometimes majestic, a subculture that might seem well-contained within those tower blocks, but can’t be, for don’t we know these characters, these places, these spaces? Doused as we all are in the natural magic of resilience to survive and transcend in the face of adversity, or to succumb and surrender to it, what the author has achieved is to plant this gore and glory, redemptive journey in your face with his own mind-bending, lyrical style.

The Blocks by Karl Parkinson. Published by New Binary Press