The Red Grouse Tales - Leslie Garland

Author: Leslie Garland

Genre: Short Story Anthology

Rating: 2.3 stars.

This might work for some readers, but unfortunately, the writing style wasn’t to my taste and the stories weren’t quite as I had expected.

Let’s start by getting the background first. The ‘Red Grouse’ was a pub where the author and his friends would meet. On one occasion, some stories were exchanged and these were penned down in what would become this collection. The word “tales” is a slight misnomer. I had presumed this to be a short story collection; it turned out to be a collection of four novellas.

On the positive side, the four stories are quite different from each other in content as well as approach. But what binds them is an underlying theme of good vs. evil. All the stories use philosophical and/or religious musings to highlight this point. (This might work negatively as well as there are quite a few biblical ideas sprinkled throughout, which may not work with all readers.) The content is quite dark and many lines make you think.

However, the writing is extremely meandering. This comes from the delivery style because each tale is almost like a story within a story, where one character is narrating the actual story to the listener in the first scene. So just like real-life storytelling in pubs goes, the narrative doesn’t flow in a linear way but more like a long-winded journey. This has a resulting side-effect of needlessly increasing the length of the stories. All of the stories would have benefited from a streamlined narrative. A further consequence is that the stories become too slow.

Of the four stories, the first one “The Little Dog” worked the best for me, though it also begins very slowly. The second story was very easily the least well written. The remaining two were fine but the second tale spoiled my mood for the remaining two and I couldn’t appreciate them as much.

I wasn’t quite sure how to rate this book. For one, I was prepared for short stories, so to find four novellas of around 80 pages each was a dampener. The tales were also a bit too atmospheric for my taste. I wouldn’t have minded this in a full-length novel but when my head expects a short story, it wants crisper writing and no unnecessary padding.

All in all, a decent collection, but you need to go into this with the right mind-set, expecting a slow-paced and musing-oriented collection of four novellas. For me unfortunately, it turned out to be a mismatch of expectations versus reality.

2.3 stars, based on the average of my ratings for the four novellas.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the author at my request and these are my honest thoughts about it.