5: One Star Review – Thin Places in Hard Concrete, story by story

The fifth weird story in my new collection Thin Places in Hard Concrete is told in the form of a series of reviews of a holiday apartment, and responses from the host. It’s another of my experiments with form along the lines of ‘Modern Buildings in Wessex’ and ‘An Oral History of the Greater London Exorcism Authority’ from Municipal Gothic. I always enjoy writing pieces like this because I get to adopt a range of different voices and play around with the language of bureaucracy and commerce. In this case, I’m quite smugly pleased with myself having included the line “Views of the iconic river and harbourside area” in the description of the property by the owner – inspired by something I saw in a real estate agent’s listing and jotted in my notebook. I enjoyed writing it. Laying it out for the finished book was another matter. Which idiot decided to include all these headings and subheadings? What am I supposed to do with all these star ratings? Fortunately, typesetter and designer Ray…