“I ate a kid called Ash Tremblay yesterday. Parts of him, at least. The good bits. The crunchy skull, the brain, a juicy haunch.” Surely an unmatchable opening!

Here Be Leviathans is a collection of nine short stories by Northern Ireland-born Australian columnist and author, Chris Flynn. As with his previous work, he employs a range of unconventional narrators.

In Inheritance, an Alaskan grizzly bear is busy eating parts of a sixteen-year-old boy taking a short cut during a summer fun-run when a park ranger shoots him, injuring his snout. That’s going to be a problem: he still has a lot of eating to do before hibernation, but he lumbers off, now endowed with the knowledge and memories of one Ash Tremblay. After an unusual third encounter with ranger Frances Locklear, they realise that survival is unlikely, and devise a way to ensure a dignified and memorable exit.

In 22F, a sentient aircraft seat describes their tragic last flight.

In Monotreme, Parker the platypus saves a pair of German tourists from a saltwater croc by bringing them into the platypus den, where they meet the autonomous collective of platypus, all capable of speech, self-awareness, complex thoughts and the sense to keep quiet about it all, the result of scientific experimentation.

In Here Be Leviathans, a Smilodon fatalis and his mate roam a wildlife reserve populated with resurrected prehistoric megafauna, a place that hosts caveman survival camps where two-legs are armed only with Pleistocene era tools. They get wind of a plot by two of them to hunt sabre-toothed tigers with modern weapons: can they turn the tables?

In The Strait of Magellan, a cruise ship hosting tours in South American waters observes how passengers and crew handle the outbreak of a global pandemic, a variation of Herpes Simplex with Alzheimer’s dementia effects. As the ship relates their search for a safe haven, the narrative is interspersed with comments from an as-yet-undetected stowaway.

In Alas Poor Yorick, it’s 1951, and US Air Force Second Lieutenant Albert Six, a macaque test pilot, chats with the Brendas, mice who will accompany him in the rocket that will shoot them beyond the earth’s atmosphere before a re-entry that will likely cost them all their lives. The humans don’t realise just how smart their test animals are, though.

In Shot Down In Flames, a creek, a red fox, a shotgun, and a bushfire tell the story of the Boy and the Girl who, over the years, regularly meet at the creek to swim. Then the Boy has a problem, the Girl, a simple solution that gets complicated.

In A Beautiful And Unexpected Turn, Room 719 of a chain hotel observes as Hector and Diane spend their wedding night, then is delighted by their return at irregular intervals for anniversary celebrations. 719 is pleased to be privy to updates in their lives over the ensuing decade and feels invested in their ultimate happiness.

In Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, street kid and squatter in the Blue Fountain, an abandoned casino complex in Neon City (Las Vegas), JessiKa offers refuge to a graffer (graffiti artist) on the run from the Metros, and makes a series of surprising and pleasurable discoveries.

With these tales, Flynn gives the reader a variety of genres: quite a bit of speculative fiction, some tragic but much of it blackly funny, some contemporary human drama, some history, and even a feel-good tale. But with one exception, the perspective is a very different one from that readers are used to, so many of those points of view provide a unique insight.

The final tale seems to be a stream of consciousness narrative that uses phonetic spelling and lacks any form of punctuation, but readers who might dismiss this as “too hard” will be rewarded for persevering with an excellent story.

Readers not usually in the habit of bothering with the acknowledgements would do well to check out the Afterword/Acknowledgements/Blame Apportioned, when Flynn explains the inspiration and genesis of these stories, including the revelation that the pandemic story began well before COVID reared its ugly head. Imaginative, original and very entertaining.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by of Queensland Press.