The Fabricator's Tale by Katrina Palmer
Here, in a new work by the author of The Dark Object, a series of tense and violent short stories are intertwined to form a narrative whole – a collection, with a twisted narrative structure, that parodies the form of a novel.
When the protagonist, the dysfunctional Reality Flickers, meets the psychotic Heart Beast (aka the fucker), death, sex and sculpture collide in the stories that form The Fabricator’s Tale.
Palmer’s misanthropic characters are embedded within their own obsession with objects, exposure, voyeurism, and the sexualised abuse of power. They appear to exist in a highly dysfunctional world, that parodies, and replicates both the conditions of art, and its place in contemporary society.
This meta-narrative is punctuation by short, abstract, and often disturbingly violent stories, featuring nameless characters that expose the repressed tension between the animate and inanimate, the sick malaise of contemporary life, and the cracking points of human subjectivity.