The Red Light Starts Blinking
︎ Get the ebook (U$6.99)
︎ Order the paperback direct from us (to put the most jangle in Jonathon’s pocket)
Order the paperback from your lovely local bookshop, including:
︎ Australia (A$25.99)
︎ Canada (C$22.99) [subject to exchange rates ︎]
︎ EU (€17.99)
︎ UK (£10.99)
︎ USA (U$16.99)
Also available from major retailers, online and IRL!
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
dark humour / absurdity / alliteration / a light dusting of magical realism / Thomas Pynchon / Paul Beatty / Amy Hempel / disjointed narratives / sun-baked landscapes / the cockatoo’s screech
The Red Light Starts Blinking
by Jonathon Kane
9781738360901 (pbk)
9781738360918 (audio)
6 x 9 inches
272 pages
April 2025
dark humour / absurdity / alliteration / a light dusting of magical realism / Thomas Pynchon / Paul Beatty / Amy Hempel / disjointed narratives / sun-baked landscapes / the cockatoo’s screech
The Red Light Starts Blinking
by Jonathon Kane
9781738360901 (pbk)
9781738360918 (audio)
6 x 9 inches
272 pages
April 2025