Then Along Came Jones

The characters may be dark and damaged, but a posthumous selection of prose by a short-story master is raw and exhilarating.

- Anna Rogers

You don’t so much read Thom Jones as climb aboard his train – or some more violently careering form of transport – and cling on desperately. This posthumous collection of 26 short stories is an assault, an avalanche of raw, grim, savage and exhilarating writing, from a man who was prey to the illness, depression, addiction and alcoholism that also beset so many of his characters. This is a dark, dark world, inhabited by damaged Vietnam vets, cancer sufferers, dedicated consumers of pills (brand names, dosages and effects are often meticulously delineated), crazy fantasists, the lost and the disappointed. And yet there is also huge energy and invention, and wild, fearless, black humour.