The Red Light Starts Blinking
Buy direct from Diachro (most $$ for the author)
Buy from your local bookshop (support ’em!)
Buy the ebook
AVAILABLE 22 APRIL 2025
[sign up to be an Advanced Reader ]
Jonathon Kane’s debut collection of short experimental fiction, equally hard-faced and tender, follows characters searching for a way forward or back or around—some direction, any direction.
Against the backdrop of Australia’s simultaneously lush and desolate Blue Mountains, a series of men are set adrift. Displaced and in unfamiliar lands, always only passing through, they seek missing spouses, missing children, and missing limbs while searching for a way forward or back or around—some direction, any direction.
A transient odd-jobber takes a gardener position at a retirement home. A curiously named member of a mysterious network of Sensitives does calisthenics through an interrogation. A recluse contends with their deceased father’s missives scrawled in white chalk around a black-painted garage. A man momentarily hosts his estranged grandfather, halfway around the world. The unreliable characters slip in and out of one another’s stories, stitching together their self-whittled worldviews in almost undetectable ways. Connections are made and lost amid whispers and glimpses. Alienation and absence abound.
Less a collection of short stories and more a set of interlocking teeth, The Red Light Starts Blinking explores the vicious gut-punches and tender-to-the-touch moments of modern life as felt from the fringes. Fragmentary and with significant gaps, the stories play with form and narrative while inviting the reader to a disquieting game of emotional roulette. As one character puts it: disturbed? deranged? delighted? The red light is on—only an attempt at entanglement will tell.
[
Jonathon Kane’s debut collection of short experimental fiction, equally hard-faced and tender, follows characters searching for a way forward or back or around—some direction, any direction.
Against the backdrop of Australia’s simultaneously lush and desolate Blue Mountains, a series of men are set adrift. Displaced and in unfamiliar lands, always only passing through, they seek missing spouses, missing children, and missing limbs while searching for a way forward or back or around—some direction, any direction.
A transient odd-jobber takes a gardener position at a retirement home. A curiously named member of a mysterious network of Sensitives does calisthenics through an interrogation. A recluse contends with their deceased father’s missives scrawled in white chalk around a black-painted garage. A man momentarily hosts his estranged grandfather, halfway around the world. The unreliable characters slip in and out of one another’s stories, stitching together their self-whittled worldviews in almost undetectable ways. Connections are made and lost amid whispers and glimpses. Alienation and absence abound.
Less a collection of short stories and more a set of interlocking teeth, The Red Light Starts Blinking explores the vicious gut-punches and tender-to-the-touch moments of modern life as felt from the fringes. Fragmentary and with significant gaps, the stories play with form and narrative while inviting the reader to a disquieting game of emotional roulette. As one character puts it: disturbed? deranged? delighted? The red light is on—only an attempt at entanglement will tell.
For fans of:
Thomas Pynchon / Paul Beatty / Amy Hempel / absurdity / alliteration / a light dusting of magical realism / disjointed narratives / sun-baked landscapes / the cockatoo’s screech / dark humour
The Red Light Starts Blinking
by Jonathon Kane
9781738360901 (pbk)
9781738360918 (ebook)
261 pages
6 x 9 inches
22 April 2025
U$/C$/£/A$
Thomas Pynchon / Paul Beatty / Amy Hempel / absurdity / alliteration / a light dusting of magical realism / disjointed narratives / sun-baked landscapes / the cockatoo’s screech / dark humour
The Red Light Starts Blinking
by Jonathon Kane
9781738360901 (pbk)
9781738360918 (ebook)
261 pages
6 x 9 inches
22 April 2025
U$/C$/£/A$