The 26th UTS Writers’ Anthology contains its share of dysfunctional marriages and families; its griefs, losses, abandonments, and relational dissonances. The cutting exchange between a warring couple in Luke Johnson’s ‘The Rat in the Wall’ is particularly well observed; and the difficulties of communication between a father and son are poignantly evoked in Jen Thompson’s ‘The Things Unspoken’. An old lover cannot compete with the narrator’s rosy-hued memory of him in Amaryllis Gacioppo’s story of disillusionment, ‘I Don’t Need a Dog’.

Humour, irony, and the frankly bizarre are a welcome relief from the sadness of everyday existence. The twist is in the title of Danny Loch’s ‘Consuela the Hippo Powders Nose’, a deft reimagining of the Colombian authority’s pursuit of cocaine dealers. In Constantine Costi’s surreal tale ‘The Fish’, a walking, talking fish turns out to be quite popular with its human companions. Kate Simonian makes us both smile and squirm in ‘Scott’, a story of sex for the mentally handicapped.

‘Stars, hide your fires!’ says Macbeth and calls upon darkness to cloak his murderous ambition. The macabre, grotesque, and violent bubble beneath the surface of normality in Clare Cholerton’s poetic ‘Chantpleure’, her dissection of a nasty relationship involving taxidermy, the cruelty of children, and the surreal edge of sexual surrender.

Contributions to Hide Your Fires vary in quality and style: some disappoint; some are flawed or merely ordinary; but many are entertaining, compelling, or touching; a few even say something unexpected about the human condition.