Fiction — Published

Michael O'Connor — a Belfast man in the twilight of his regret-filled life — narrates a dual timeline moving between 1998 and 2008. His dialogue is woven into the paragraphs like internal monologue, filtered through a paranoid wreck. A story of the past coming back to haunt: the present and future always linked to history.

The second in #13 Press's series of 13 novellas issued over 13 months. "Some truths we allow to die."

Critical Response

"Finbow's writing style is slightly idiosyncratic. He doesn't present his dialogue in the conventional manner — it's woven into his paragraphs like internal monologue; through the filter of a paranoid wreck."

"Down Among the Dead is a murky read with flashes of hard-hitting clarity. This is no Micksploitation shoot-em-up. It aims for better and hits its mark. Touché Mister Finbow."

Crime Scene NI

"Down Among the Dead is a short novella which delivers a solid punch in just 40 pages. It's brutally noir and the characterisation of Michael, the protagonist, is tightly and expertly drawn. Finbow's prose is spartan, yet poignant. I read the story in one sitting."

A.B. Patterson

A 20,000-word noir poem — and a parallel prose novella — following X and Z, anti-lovers on a road trip from the Nevada desert to the gargoyle-sentried skyscrapers of New Babylon. Murder, torture, lust, and despair. A torque song for the twenty-first century.

Published by Snubnose Press, who described it as "the kind of title that exemplified what it meant to be a small publisher — most other publishers wouldn't have touched it."

Extract

The thing is, once he had done what I asked of him, he was no longer necessary. He stayed around until I found something else for him to do, someone else for him to do, somewhere else for him to be. Not here. There.

Proximity is relative. I saw him through the reverse end of an emotional telescope. His proximal philosophy was to share pulses. Gone but not forgotten. Forgotten but not gone. Never anywhere between.

Do Some Damage →

Critical Response

"Steve Finbow's Nothing Matters asks the remarkable question, Are you tough enough to read poetry? X and his femme fatale Z trade blood- and sex-soaked narratives in noir's first epic poem."

"Nothing Matters is a great, beautiful and entertaining experiment with the economy of genre. It's like Finbow had boiled a noir text and the essential words came out scattered on the page."

David Rachels & Benoît Lelièvre

A short story collection drawn to the dark underbelly of society and the psyche. Characters who owe money, kill, and make porn films. They smoke pot in North African hotels. They investigate their own cruel thoughts. They scratch their souls to see if they flinch. They are unsympathetic. Bleak. Part of the lost, the forgotten, the underclass abused by the excesses of capitalism.

Extract

Not in the nearby psychiatric hospital. Not in the cells of the local police station. Not in the grubby terraced housing by the railway station. Not in the condemned block of flats encircling the car park. But in an unnamed district on the outskirts of a city, to the north by the motorways, in an empty bar of a pub, I sit at a table, a half-empty pint of Stella before me, an open paperback novel.

I cannot see what I think nor think what I see.

Read full extract at 3:AM Magazine →

Critical Response

"Steve Finbow writes the exact opposite of what I want from fiction. However, he writes the exact opposite of what I want from fiction very well indeed."

"If you love Bukowski, you are going to eat up Finbow with a fucking spoon. He is the descendent of the experiments of the Beat writers and their contemporaries, but he is not trapped under their shadow. He is a technically gifted writer, comfortable in all the different styles he uses in this collection."

Benjamin Judge, Bookmunch

Balthazar Zachariah — Balzac — is a sardonic, diabetic, sexually voracious private investigator navigating the crime, desire, and domestic wreckage of North London. When hired to find a missing girl, he moves through a city of drug smugglers, people traffickers, psychic women, and dogs that go mad at his approach.

Part hardboiled detective fiction, part postmodern neo-noir, Balzac of the Badlands absorbs and disregards the entire history of the crime novel simultaneously. Blurbed by Stewart Home as "a dark and nasty new wave experiment — haunting, disturbing and horrific."

Extract

Some writer somewhere wrote something about never opening a book with the weather. And that's true if you live where I live. I mean, what would be the point?

OK, let's kick off with my name. I have the unlikely moniker of Balthazar Zachariah. Yeah. When you get off the floor and put your socks back on, I'll tell you again — Balthazar Zachariah.

Look. Over there. Across the street. Gobbets of birds strung out on telephone wires, flossed from the sky, particulate, like so many pieces of rotten meat. The birds have started to evolve into memory.

Read full extract at 3:AM Magazine →

Critical Response

"Former personal assistant to Allen Ginsberg, Steve Finbow's debut Balzac of the Badlands sears into the reader's psyche like a blowtorch. Rendered something like a Ballardian atrocity exhibition."

"Part hardboiled fiction, part post-post-modern neo-noir and always utterly compelling."

"This book will throttle you, but as any masochist will tell you, the bruises are ultimately worth it."

Bookmunch

A fiction anthology from Beat the Dust Press — three long short stories by Steve Finbow, Melissa Mann, and Joseph Ridgwell. Finbow's contribution, 'Asylum Beach: Travels in the Heterotopia', flips between modern Thailand and an alien civilisation, the scenes bleeding into each other in seamless juxtaposition.

"At times, you feel like this is a portrayal of a disturbed fantasy life; at other points it really does seem like you're getting a glimpse of a new and unknowable world."

Critical Response

"Finbow thanks Ballard, Dick, and Gibson — and his twenty-first century cut-and-paste vision is better than that of any other contemporary writer who has tried it."

"A sense of place, and a sense of time. The authors of Protest! love to engage with the world: a task that the majority of mainstream novelists will not — or cannot — take on."

Max Dunbar, 3:AM Magazine

Read review at 3:AM Magazine →