David Hayden's Debut Short Story Collection Burns With Incandescent Light

Hallucinogenic, unnerving, poetic, daring, majestic and, above all, highly original. David Hayden’s debut short story collection Darker With The Lights On is a thrilling series of vignettes that disturb as much as they satisfy the senses.

Effortlessly moving between an employee falling to his death, a squirrel-cum-teacher named Sorry, and dinner party guests gorging on a ‘blackened, smoking corpse of a man’, Hayden’s collection is a surreal journey into the dreamy depths of consciousness. The stories are separate but connected, planets orbiting the Irish writer’s nucleus of experiential prose.
The first story ‘Egress’ begins: ‘Many years have passed since I stepped off the ledge,’ and, as we enter the collection, plummeting to certain death, we never quite recover from this overwhelming sense of vertigo. As the narrator falls, his lively commentary – ‘I expected to be cold but the air was mild, the speed delicious, the freshness vast and edible’ – signals that everything is not quite as it seems, and that the reader should leave their earthen assumptions at the door. This is a place where synaesthetic imagery and absurdist plot lines coalesce to form a kind of modernist renaissance that feels like nothing else seen before. The dimensions have shifted.
In ‘Hay’ we become a man on a train, listening to the mechanical soundtrack of the carriage go ‘shack, shack, shack’. As the train ‘scutters over a long bridge that might have been an aqueduct in a country with water,’ and with an ochre light that ‘holds the interior still and suggests the great brown world outside’, we are placed in only a suggestive world, a makeshift template of reality that appears the same but feels and tastes and sounds quite different. The story’s dialogue is terse and dry, like a scene from Pinter, and the plot circular like his Irish ancestor Beckett.
Hayden reaches an apex of disturbia in ‘Leckerdam of the Golden Hand’, which begins ‘My name is Leckerdam and this is how my children killed me,’ and takes on a tempo of quicksilver fury. The ravenous and the murderous combine in images of butcher’s shops and guns as pieces of ‘sweating liquorice’ echoing the cannibalistic theme running through ‘The Bread that was Broken’. The effect of Hayden’s violent prose is arresting, but we cannot help but marvel at its honesty and humanity.
If ‘Leckerdam of the Golden Hand’ amplifies Hayden’s poetic ingenuity, ‘Limbed’ is where his prose reaches its dizzying summit: literally and metaphorically. It opens with what can only be described as an orgy of the senses: ‘Cornflowers, eye-blue, heartsease, winking violet, delphiniums, risen purple, primroses, tooth-yellow, upgazing, sightless, calendula stars, thyme, tight green spicing curls, daisies, scattered wings, opens palms; over all, fattening bees swing boozily in the warm air.’ The reader is left veritably quenched by this feast of sensorial delight.