A raw debut collection that delves into the eerie and the beautiful, perfectly capturing our fears of human existence. Her heroes are unflinching and unusual, but feel uncannily familiar.

A collection of interesting short stories about girls and women. The stories are quite strange and unusual. Some are disturbing. I found it quite depressing, not exactly an enjoyable read. However, it is very well written.

An interesting read, if not always enjoyable or comfortable.

Thank you to netgalley, the publisher and the author for sending me this ARC.

With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. There's something to relish in the boundless possibilities of fiction and how a writer can make that which is known an inescapable fact; it doesn't shy away from darkness or boredom, from the potentially mundane. And in there, it feels anything but. Weird, dreamy, vivid.

I really need to stop reading collections of short stories. They just aren’t my cup of tea and I inevitably end up disliking collections because of the art form and not because of the writing. Black Light by Kimberley King Parsons is a well written collection of short stories. I can say that with confidence. King Parsons is a good writer but the collection as a whole just was not for me. It had no theme running through out so each new story put you at the starting block again and I just felt like I couldn’t connect.

Black Light is a good collection if you have a passion or a liking for the short story form but for me it just didn’t work.

Black Light by Kimberley King Parsons is available from 06th August 2020.

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This hyper-realistic short story collection is dark and depressing and with prose not always sharp enough to work for me. The stories are mostly about people in the middle of bad decisions; not necessarily life-threatening bad decisions but rather smaller, mundane ones. Often these decisions involve neglect, neglect of their own bodies, their living environment, or most tragically their children. In subject matter it reminded me of Lidia Yuknavitch's writing (who makes an appearance in the acknowledgements) but writing wise it could not reach her brilliance. I did not love the way Parsons wrote about weight and sadly too many of her protagonists were unkind about either their own bodies or the bodies of others.

This is a dark and interesting short story collection, similar in tone to Carmen Maria Machado or Julia Armfield, but without the more speculative elements that those writers are known for. The stories themselves are mixed in quality, with some being a little too disconnected for my tastes.

Black Light by Kimberly King Parsons is a gritty and raw collection of short stories. Unflinching and bold.