Bucket of Tongues

Winner of the 1993 Somerset Maugham Award, this first collection of short stories reveals Scotland's seamier drinking with the soccer casuals in the old stone circle; stumbling bloody-footed along the cliff-top path at midnight; lost in a liver'n'onions-fuelled fantasy of sex and violence.

Nobody can accuse writer Duncan McLean of having a limited range. His first novel, Bunker Man, was a horrific saga of violence and madness played out against a bleak coastal community in Scotland. But just when you thought it was safe to classify McLean with those other Scottish enfants terribles Irvine Welsh and James Kelman, he turned around and produced the charming Lone Star Swing, a fey and fascinating travelogue through the Texas country-music scene. Now he's back with a collection of short stories that veer off in yet another direction, one that mixes savage humor and the occasional tender moment into the endlessly brutal business of living that occupies most of his on-the-fringe characters.

Sporting titles such as "A/deen Soccer Thugs Kill All Visiting Fans," "Loaves and Fishes, Nah," or "The Druids Shite It, Fail to Show," McLean's stories range from a few paragraphs to many pages. What they all share is a bleak outlook, a ferocious rage, and language that would make a longshoreman blush. In "Bod Is Dead," for example, McLean gives us Buzby, described as "a hot-and-cold cunt" who's "quick to rouse, quick to freeze, he'd punch some bugger's lights out or give them a fucking hug depending on his mood, how his feelings felt that day, that minute, and all for nothing at all." In this particular instance, Buzby feels homicidal after watching his drunken mother seduce his buddy right in front of him. Butchers, workers on North Sea oil rigs, unemployed and underemployed alcoholics, drug addicts, and losers--these are the people who populate the world of Duncan McLean's making, and readers of Bucket of Tongues had better have the stomach to face them. --Alix Wilber