Test Drive, by DJ Burnham (Book)

DJ Burnham. Lulu (Tales from the Inky Well). UK, pb, 320pp.

I should be the last person on Earth to criticise DJ Burnham for self-publishing his collection of short stories, given that I’ve published two of my own novels (with more to come!) and started this magazine purely because I knew I could fill it with the nonsense I write if no one else contributed. So I won’t criticise this book purely on that account.

And given how badly the cover to TQF#19 turned out (I was trying to publish the issue on schedule, had no artwork in hand and it was 2.00 am, so apologies to all the contributors who saw their work published in the artistic equivalent of a smelly sock) I shouldn’t say much about the abundance of fonts and general clutter of the cover.

The profits from the book will be paid directly to charity, and I would laugh cynically that the profits from a Lulu-published book are likely to be small in any case, and that donating them to charity might make it easier to guilt his family and friends into buying a copy – except that we publish on Lulu too, and pay nothing to anybody at all. So really he’s one or two up on us there!

Would it be unkind to point out that one or two of the recommendations on the cover come from slightly undiscriminating sources?

And if some stories seem to be inspired by a single striking idea which the story contrives greatly to realise, that’s no worse that some of the stuff I’ve written.

In fact, it’s fair to say that a good few of the stories in this volume would have found a good home at TQF, and that’s about as good a review as I would give anything, given that I only have to read a few lines of any author’s work before I’m riven with the desire to tear it apart, all the better to clear the way for my own writing’s ascent to victory!

It’s a shame that none of the stories found their way to TQF, because if they had we would have given them a thorough proofreading before publication. The odd mistake is always bound to get through, in any publication, but Test Drive seems to average at least one outright mistake or awkward infelicity per page, at least as far as I’ve read, and on every subsequent page that I've scanned.

(I confess to not having read the whole book – I’ve been gripped by Xbox mania these last few months, to the point where I had to ask my wife to activate the parental timer on the beautiful machine. And this evening, having played out my allotted number of hours for the week and casting around for what to do next, I came to a horrifying realisation: for the very first time in my memory, I am not in the middle of reading a novel. What kind of man am I becoming? Expect reviews of Mass Effect and The Orange Box next issue!)

For example on page one Karl Ferris, who plans to drive a car upon the surface of Mars, laughs “out loud as he imagined the indignation of the cubicle, if it only knew of his plan to gel and comb it into authenticity”. That’ll be one stylish cubicle!

And on page seventeen Karl knows that “the means would justify the end”, which might apply if, say, you were talking about the excitement of riding your motorbikes a long way justifying a trip to Siberia, but in this case is just a basic error, typical of the kind of thing you miss when proofing and publishing your own work.

The great thing about Lulu, though, is that producing a corrected edition should be easy – unless, like this author, you’ve paid for Lulu distribution to booksellers, and would have to repurchase it for a new edition… He shouldn’t let that stop him from producing a corrected edition on Lulu at least, because in other respects this is a pleasantly substantial volume of stories, one which I look forward to enjoying during the long days to be endured until my Xbox 360 playing time is reset! – SWT

Originally published in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #20.