The provenance of the jellyfish remains a mystery. Certainly not what you’d expect, coming up for a long weekend, is it, Cathy?’ – ‘Actually, Tim, I think you’ll find a group of jellyfish is called a “smack”.’ One photograph makes it into the local paper, another fills five minutes on a regional morning show: ‘And in local news, a shoal of jellyfish has been causing consternation for tourists at one of the more popular pleasure beaches. Bringing their phones down to the beach, they snap pictures, send them into nature shows.

People claim they are poisonous – Sea Nettles, Lion’s Mane, Portuguese Man of War. A saturation, leeching down into the earth. Drowned in air, they break apart and bleed their interiors. They are translucent, almost spectral, as though the sea has exorcised its ghosts. The ocean empties, a thousand dead and dying invertebrates, jungled tentacles and fine, fragile membranes blanketing the shore two miles in each direction. The jellyfish come with the morning – a great beaching, bodies black on sand. Donald has a strong imagination, and I’m looking forward to what he does with it in the future.The following text is an extract from the story “Smack”, taken from Julia Armfield’s debut collection Salt Slow, published by Picador, which was nominated for the 2019 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. This is a good read for any fans of bizarre stories that are heavy on the funny. Our group finds themselves put through a series of tests that have some pretty humorous elements to them. Personally, I liked the last act of the book the best. There’s a plethora of odd ball characters that our heroes encounter, some help out reluctantly and some try to stand in the way. He writes fast paced scenes and keeps his characters moving from one altercation to another. This is just a small sampling of what Hung Hounds is about.ĭonald Armfield crams in a crazy amount of action and story into this short novella. From here he teams up with a rag tag group, Dawn the sexy heroine, Kickstand the retired porn star, and a monkey named Dookie, to try and send the hounds back to the dimension they came from. They are monstrous dog-like creatures, with huge penis’, from another dimension. The story is, our would-be hero, Humphrey, wakes up in the bathroom of a bar to find earth has been invaded by the hung hounds. Most of the time, the synopsis only gives you a small glimpse into the world you’re about to enter. You can never truly know what to expect when you pick up a bizarro book. My Review of Hung Hounds by Donald Armfield