Invoking the spirit of 1985 in a skittishly grotesque novel

Fiction: Heartbreaker, By Claudia Dey The Borough Press, €16.66

An early scene in Heartbreaker, the second novel from Canadian author and playwright Claudia Dey, introduces a book of grisly photographs entitled Brutal Errors of the Human Body, belonging to narrator Pony Darlene Fontaine (this is a novel of strange character names, Pony Darlene being nowhere near the strangest among them).

Starved of reading material in an enclosed, cult-like community called “the territory”, Pony ...