Blog Archives
Brown, Jeffrey – Miniature Sulk
One of these days when I have a spare year or so I should go through all the pages on this website and list all these book in chronological order. This one came out in April 2005, but I’ve almost certainly reviewed stuff before and after this one before reading Miniature Sulk, or Mini Sulk as Amazon adorably calls it. This doesn’t have a defining, large story like most of his recent stuff, which of course means that I love it. In here we get to see plenty of Jeffrey as a child (including dealing with bullies and his early problems with women, and I sampled possibly his formative moment below), as well as a wide variety of other short pieces. Jeffrey gets punched by his Kung Fu brother, has a crappy birthday, loses control while being tickled, shows some bullies “what for”, gets extremely bored in church, wrestles a fatty, bites his nails, accidentally lets his salamander die… and that’s just the first third of the book. As most of the fun in these things is reading it for yourself, there’s not much point in describing every little thing in here. That’s the thing about Jeffrey: at this point, you know damned well whether or not you like his stuff. And, if so, what kind of books of his you prefer. This one has a bit of everything, including some short fiction in the back, so it’s hard to have much bad to say about it. One thing I did love was how he occasionally showed his younger self with his current stubble to differentiate himself from the other characters. It’s $8 but there’s more than enough in here to justify that price…
