Swimming from the Flames

Susan Patrick is a librarian at Ryerson Polytechnical University.

These short stories centre on the internal lives of a variety of women,
often alone, isolated, or abused and usually ending with death, fear,
unhappiness, murder, or madness (from the convincing first-person
description of an elderly woman suffering from memory loss and

confusion to the troubled daughter tarred and feathered for betraying
her IRA father). Although the subject matter may be disturbing,
Holdstock writes with a sort of detached, dreamlike unreality (as if the
stories were taking place within the minds of the characters) and
displays a quirky sense of black humor (emotionally abused fat wife
finally kills her husband by sitting on him), both of which work against
the grim intensity of the stories’ subject matter.