This is a stronger collection than Heading Inland, notable for the outstanding novelette ‘John’s Box,’ where a terminally ill man constructs his own coffin in a Warholian pop art stylee, and ‘Dual Balls,’ where a prim schoolteacher takes vibrating testicle apparatus into class to honour her friend and subsequently orgasms before the headmistress. ‘A Necessary Truth’ and ‘Symbiosis: Class Cestoda’ deal with oppressive domestic lives where women find liberation in odd ways: the former through a cold caller teaching philosophy, the latter through a tapeworm living in her stomach. Some stories are light, disposable whimsy, but in the appealing Barkerish mode. Note for completists: the stories in Three Button Trick compiles material from this collection and Heading Inland with no new stuff—it’s better to read the two distinct collections.
