Since he was composing a new character, namely a crime-solving psychic vicar who was to be the voice of his new short-story entitled “Hollow you” (part of the “Hollows” trilogy), David Mar would occasionally sit at the balcony of his flat, at the end of the day, in a Cretan resort watching the comings and goings of the teenage crowd below as they gathered around the pool. He was dismayed to witness the most boring of social interactions he had ever seen. The modern Youth were sanitized beyond repair, to the point boys kept to themselves, walking on eggshells, and girls preened themselves in their instagramable bikinis. The robotic lacklustre pool party somehow turned into the most extreme hedonistic yet gloomy debauchery in town, where teenagers drunk themselves legless.

The Smiling Tree is a real vision shared with one man who was as bewildered as Mar was at the bipolar behaviour of the English race. The Smiling Tree could be construed as an anthropological anthology of future British behaviour, from the skimping scavenging owl to the lavish lark. What was interesting however, once he got to share their entertainment, is the systematic behavioural pattern-shift which requires dull inaction during the day, through to the slow routine towards self-oblivion and self-abnegation where the self just melts away in an irreversible doom-like fantasy of parental laissez-faire and ethylene disaster.

1 (-) The Smiling Tree – David Mar (Independently published, 2019)

2 (1) Will You Still Love Me if I Love Her? – Elfie  (Independently published, 2019)

3 (8) The Cows – Lydia Davis (Sarabande Books, 2011)

4 (7) Arbroath – Jordan Lewis (St. Andrews Press, 2019)

5 (6) Purity of Aim: The Book Jacket Designs of Alvin Lustig – Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger (RIT Press, 2010)

6 (-) Elegy for the Last Male Northern White Rhino – Dean Young (Hollyridge Press, 2018)

7 (-) Nourished So – Maria Brady-Smith  (Independently published, 2019)

8 (2) On Imagination – Mary Ruefle (Sarabande Books, 2017)

9 (4) Sweet & Sour – Paula Jeffery (Harefield Press, 2019)

10 (-) Palmistry – Christopher Ringrose (ICOE Press, 2019)