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Flesh Wounds
A popular businessman awakes one morning to discover that everyone hates him. A young woman must surrender her virginity to a grotesque enemy in order to fulfil her family's destiny. An extraordinary chain of events is set in motion when a cocktail cabinet falls out of the sky and kills a farmer. A depressed man decides to make his suicide the most exciting thing that's ever happened to him...Oozing paranoia, black humour and a certain amoung of old-fashioned gore, Christopher Fowler's fifth collection of short stories tells a chilling tale of desperate individuals learning the hard way that ...fresh wounds.
275 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1995
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86 people want to read
About the author
Christopher Fowler
264 books1,285 followersLibrarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Christopher Fowler was an English writer known for his Bryant & May mystery series, featuring two Golden Age-style detectives navigating modern London. Over his career, he authored fifty novels and short story collections, along with screenplays, video games, graphic novels, and audio plays. His psychological thriller Little Boy Found was published under the pseudonym L.K. Fox.
Fowler's accolades include multiple British Fantasy Awards, the Last Laugh Award, the CWA Dagger in the Library, and the inaugural Green Carnation Award. He was inducted into the Detection Club in 2021. Beyond crime fiction, his works ranged from horror (Hell Train, Nyctophobia) to memoir (Paperboy, Film Freak). His column Invisible Ink explored forgotten authors, later compiled into The Book of Forgotten Authors.
Fowler lived between London and Barcelona with his husband, Peter Chapman.
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Christopher Fowler was an English writer known for his Bryant & May mystery series, featuring two Golden Age-style detectives navigating modern London. Over his career, he authored fifty novels and short story collections, along with screenplays, video games, graphic novels, and audio plays. His psychological thriller Little Boy Found was published under the pseudonym L.K. Fox.
Fowler's accolades include multiple British Fantasy Awards, the Last Laugh Award, the CWA Dagger in the Library, and the inaugural Green Carnation Award. He was inducted into the Detection Club in 2021. Beyond crime fiction, his works ranged from horror (Hell Train, Nyctophobia) to memoir (Paperboy, Film Freak). His column Invisible Ink explored forgotten authors, later compiled into The Book of Forgotten Authors.
Fowler lived between London and Barcelona with his husband, Peter Chapman.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 18, 2017
Flesh Wounds is (yet another) chilling and unsettling collection of short stories from one of the best horror writers of our time. Christopher Fowler's tales are of urban and suburban life gone wrong, and he has a way of making our everyday routine part of the terror his work inspires. All of the tales in this collection are good, but a few are absolutely outstanding pieces of short fiction. Hated, The Most Boring Woman in the World, The Young Executives, and Brian Foot's Blaze of Glory will leave you thinking about how we have allowed society to bring us to this absurd present. They are confronting and powerful indictments on modernity, in the tradition of one of Fowler's favourite writers, J.G. Ballard.
October 20, 2019
I enjoyed a majority of the stories in here, a few of them I may remain indifferent to, but the bundle is very creative & still worthwhile. I would pick up another of the author’s works.
I bought this book due to the cover art — which is amazing —
October 7, 2017
Enjoyable but at times a little patchy.
April 1, 2025
My second reading of this stunning, fun c0llection of stories which, although they are definitely weird/horror/fantastic, are overlaid with a coruscating wit and optimistic joie de vivre that makes Fowler's stories uniquely brilliant. He does not hold back from identifying and chronicling the changes that corrupt the world but while he is sharp, even cruel, there is no sense of relapsing into bitter nostalgia (though the story 'Young Executives' comes close) and his delight in eviscerating's pompous absurdities is just to on target and funny to be anything but wonderful.
Particularly good stories are:
'Jouissance de la Mort' - which contains a throw away line which would later go on to bear fruit as a fully fledged story in its own right as 'Crocodile Lady' (reading Fowler's stories are a joy because they contain the genesis of many of his novels - like 'Arkangel' (not in this collection) which gave birth to the novel 'Hell Train' though to be honest I find his stories better than his novels.
'Mother of the City' - a wonderful London story, Fowler is particularly good on London - he loves the city and knows it, understands it and treasures it - it is, for me, a companion piece to his later 'Pubs of Old London'.
The thing about Fowler is that he is so much more than a writer of horror fiction - so few of his stories really contain any trace of the supernatural - but they are full of horrors - I have said it before in many way he is like 18th century satirists and social commentators like Jonathan Swift with his 'Modest Proposal' (and if that means nothing to you then you must google it). His is the comedy of horror in the everyday and one of the sharpest observers of despair that you can read.
I love his stories and defy anyone to not like them.
Particularly good stories are:
'Jouissance de la Mort' - which contains a throw away line which would later go on to bear fruit as a fully fledged story in its own right as 'Crocodile Lady' (reading Fowler's stories are a joy because they contain the genesis of many of his novels - like 'Arkangel' (not in this collection) which gave birth to the novel 'Hell Train' though to be honest I find his stories better than his novels.
'Mother of the City' - a wonderful London story, Fowler is particularly good on London - he loves the city and knows it, understands it and treasures it - it is, for me, a companion piece to his later 'Pubs of Old London'.
The thing about Fowler is that he is so much more than a writer of horror fiction - so few of his stories really contain any trace of the supernatural - but they are full of horrors - I have said it before in many way he is like 18th century satirists and social commentators like Jonathan Swift with his 'Modest Proposal' (and if that means nothing to you then you must google it). His is the comedy of horror in the everyday and one of the sharpest observers of despair that you can read.
I love his stories and defy anyone to not like them.
April 17, 2017
Christopher Fowler has written many collections of dark short stories, but in my opinion, none of those collections were better than “Flesh Wounds”. In saying that, I should add a caveat that I am yet to obtain a copy of “Sharper Knives”, but in working out which stories in some of his “greatest hits” style collections, such as “Uncut” would come from that collection, I feel that I am likely to maintain this opinion should I eventually succeed in obtaining a copy of the missing collection.
Everything Fowler does well is here and much that Fowler hadn’t previously shown to do well is also here, and proves he can turn his hand to everything. In the former category falls “The Laundry Imp”, which makes a frightening tale out of a normal situation, “The Young Executives”, which covers the dangers of office gossip and “Jouissance de la mort”, which showcases Fowler’s love of dark humour. “Hated” and “The Most Boring Woman in the World” take seemingly normal lives and adds an interesting and fund twist and “Mother of the City” showcases Fowler’s deep and abiding love and reverence for London and how cities can chew you up and spit you out if you don’t treat them properly.
In the latter category fall a couple of “Tales of Britannica Castle”, which remind me of Mervyn Peake and “A Century and a Second”, which has a Neil Gaiman type feel, alongside “The Unreliable History of Plaster City” and “Evil Eye”, which have more of a Stephen King influence than Fowler’s work is used to. Neither of these areas, of gothic horror and American based horror respectively, are Fowler’s normal stomping grounds, but he certainly feels at home in both.
I’ve always loved Fowler’s writing and he excels at short stories more than virtually any other horror writer, apart from Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood”. What’s more, he excels at many forms of story-telling, not restricting himself to straight out horror, but building stories out of normal everyday situations and scaring from a position of familiarity. Where Stephen King tends to make you familiar with the characters and then doing horrible things to them, Fowler enjoys pointing you at a familiar situation or place and then putting a twist on them to make the familiar incredibly unsettling.
However, in “Flesh Wounds”, more than elsewhere in his back catalogue, Fowler expands his repertoire. Plaster City and Britannica Castle are not familiar places and will not be found at the end of your commute, or potentially at the end of your street as with many of the settings, but this is where Fowler proves he deserves to be better known. His ability to build a story with characters you come to know and a history you can engage with before bringing it all down around them is certainly up there with Stephen King.
However, it is clear from that story that this is not Fowler’s preferred way of writing. He may be able to do it well, but there is more of a wry grin and a twinkle in the writing when he stays closer to home and add a little black humour to a story. “Mother of the City”, as well as being a love letter to London, is one of the best pieces of writing Fowler has done in any of his stories, as he treats his subject with a reverence that isn’t always present elsewhere. I don’t have the words to do justice to how “Flesh Wounds” makes me feel, but Fowler’s works deserve to be shown the adoration he feels for his city and it’s a shame that the King-esque type story he has stooped to here receives that from the masses, when far better is readily overlooked.
Everything Fowler does well is here and much that Fowler hadn’t previously shown to do well is also here, and proves he can turn his hand to everything. In the former category falls “The Laundry Imp”, which makes a frightening tale out of a normal situation, “The Young Executives”, which covers the dangers of office gossip and “Jouissance de la mort”, which showcases Fowler’s love of dark humour. “Hated” and “The Most Boring Woman in the World” take seemingly normal lives and adds an interesting and fund twist and “Mother of the City” showcases Fowler’s deep and abiding love and reverence for London and how cities can chew you up and spit you out if you don’t treat them properly.
In the latter category fall a couple of “Tales of Britannica Castle”, which remind me of Mervyn Peake and “A Century and a Second”, which has a Neil Gaiman type feel, alongside “The Unreliable History of Plaster City” and “Evil Eye”, which have more of a Stephen King influence than Fowler’s work is used to. Neither of these areas, of gothic horror and American based horror respectively, are Fowler’s normal stomping grounds, but he certainly feels at home in both.
I’ve always loved Fowler’s writing and he excels at short stories more than virtually any other horror writer, apart from Clive Barker’s “Books of Blood”. What’s more, he excels at many forms of story-telling, not restricting himself to straight out horror, but building stories out of normal everyday situations and scaring from a position of familiarity. Where Stephen King tends to make you familiar with the characters and then doing horrible things to them, Fowler enjoys pointing you at a familiar situation or place and then putting a twist on them to make the familiar incredibly unsettling.
However, in “Flesh Wounds”, more than elsewhere in his back catalogue, Fowler expands his repertoire. Plaster City and Britannica Castle are not familiar places and will not be found at the end of your commute, or potentially at the end of your street as with many of the settings, but this is where Fowler proves he deserves to be better known. His ability to build a story with characters you come to know and a history you can engage with before bringing it all down around them is certainly up there with Stephen King.
However, it is clear from that story that this is not Fowler’s preferred way of writing. He may be able to do it well, but there is more of a wry grin and a twinkle in the writing when he stays closer to home and add a little black humour to a story. “Mother of the City”, as well as being a love letter to London, is one of the best pieces of writing Fowler has done in any of his stories, as he treats his subject with a reverence that isn’t always present elsewhere. I don’t have the words to do justice to how “Flesh Wounds” makes me feel, but Fowler’s works deserve to be shown the adoration he feels for his city and it’s a shame that the King-esque type story he has stooped to here receives that from the masses, when far better is readily overlooked.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews