Coma

Real and unreal landscapes, science fiction, rural New Zealand, the West Coast of the USA from Oregon to San Francisco, three stories in various voices and settings. In Digging Ground a family is separated by circumstance and by the state after a cataclysmic war. In Sunshower an overweight hitch-hiker is abused by a gang of thugs. The title story, Coma, is a diagram of the female character’s life before an accidental overdose, embroidered throughout by her lifelong friendship with another woman. Bill Direen’s third book of fiction is a sequence not only of dramatic monologues, but of cultural narratives about the harm, intentional or unintentional, we may do to ourselves or to each other. “Jim-Morrison-style metaphor solemnises her utterances. Death, or a funereal formality, pervades the atmosphere.” (Katherine Liddy, NZ Landfall) First published by Titus Books in 2005.