Lairies by Steve Hollyman

 

Lairies by Steve Hollyman.

Published 8th April 2021 by Influx Press.

From the cover of the book:

Shaun wakes up in hospital after a fight in a local nightclub and discovers his girlfriend has been assaulted. 

Ade and Colbeck were there that night – the climax to weeks of escalating violence, their two-man vigilante mission to kick back against a broken generation. A misguided plan to combat the lairies that blight Britain’s bars, pubs and streets.

What really happened? And how did it come to this?

Lairies is the brilliant and brutal debut from Steve Hollyman, mapping the lives of violent young men at the start of the twenty-first century, living aimlessly but desperately hunting for purpose. 

Hollyman speaks to the heart of small-town Britain, offering scathing insight into masculinity, class, and the bleak realities of a man’s aimless early twenties, lifting the lid on a world most would rather ignore.

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Where to start? Lairies is quite an experience - one that grabs you by the throat and does not put you down until the classiest of endings!

It starts with a violent episode on a night out and then leads us down the rabbit hole of multi-person narratives from the characters who were present, swapping back and forth between the run up to the incident and the fall out from the events of that fateful night. 

Sounds simple, yes? But in fact, it is anything but. As in all the best stories using multiple points of view, everyone sees things slightly differently, coloured by their motives and experience. This unreliability is ramped up to the max by the way Steve Hollyman has the characters referring to each other by their surnames, first names, nick names and various shady terms of endearment or abuse throughout the book, and even though the chapter headings show you who is narrating at any one time, you are not sure exactly who is who, who did what to who, and what the connections between them are until very near the end of the novel, when the shocking truth about what happened that night comes spilling out. This is glorious storytelling that kept me guessing all the way through.

There is no getting away from the fact that there is a lot of very graphic violence in this book, accompanied by gratuitous swearing, but at no time does this feel too much. Every punch, kick and expletive has a part to play in the way the story plays out, and is used by great effect by Hollyman to explore the desperate search for purpose in the disaffected young men he is writing about. As an indictment of lad culture, small town hopelessness and toxic masculinity it is superb.

Imagine, if you will, a mash up between the violence of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess; the surreal wtf epiphany country of Chuck Palahnuik's Fight Club; the mad-cap drug fuelled, shouty road trip of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson; and the wonderful dark humour and camaraderie of Irvine Welsh's sublime Trainspotting books, and you might be approaching something like the incredible debut that Hollyman has crafted here. 

For me, Irvine's Begbie will always be king, but there are some promising young pretenders to the crown here, and it was an absolute joy reading about them. I cannot recommend this one highly enough - if you are brave enough to take the plunge!

Lairies is available to buy now from your favourite book retailer, or direct from Influx Press HERE.

Thank you to Jordan Taylor-Jones for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Steve Hollyman was born in Stoke-on-Trent and currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing. He is a graduate of the Manchester School of Writing, where he completed an MA and PhD. He is the vocalist and guitarist in the three-piece alternative rock band CreepJoint, whose most recent album A Generation of the Dark Heart was released in 2018.