A wonderful collection of 15 short stories. The stories are varied, the characters rich and believable. Tsiolkas continues to prove that he is one of Australia's best story tellers. ( )

I thought that this was a beautiful short story collection. It took me quite a while to read as it’s quite heavy and rich so I had to take big breaks between stories.
Great stuff. ( )

A bunch of short stories from Tsolkas. He is rather merciless, brutal and likes to shock with his words. He is honest in his words. He writes beauty in darkness.

Here are some short thoughts about all the short ones:

Merciless Gods
Friends tel lings revenge stories to each other. Interesting, revenge is always good to read about,

Tourists.
Tourists in NY. The couple fight and feel lost. I did not understand the woman...

The hair of the dog
A man thinks about his mother. She wrote freaky books.

Petals.
This one was, well it was just an inner monologue (mostly).

Hung phat
I get it now. Most are short insights into lives. Normal, but interesting.

Saturn Return
He does like to write about what he knows, Greeks in Australia.

Genetic material
Sometimes these are just weird..good, but weird

Jessica Lange in Frances
And another theme is of course being gay. Knowing you are. Exploring what you might be.

The disco at the end of Communism
A man thinking about the brother he lost

Sticks, stones
A woman wondering if she hates her son

Civil war
White Au against dark AU

The t-shirt with the fist on it
Tourists in the middle east.

Porn 1
A woman finding about her son's secret life

Porn 2
The making of a porno

Porno 3
About a man who thinks loving another man is wrong.

I liked the stories. They were all different, even if the theme behind many were the same. Being Greek, having Immigrant parents and being Gay.

Many times with short stories you are left thinking I want more, in that way that they felt too short, they did not work. But Tsalkos makes his short stories work. He does have that power of putting a story together in a short story, and leaving you satisfied at the end. ( )

Not nearly as good as I had hoped it would be. The author does a much better job when he writes long stories. Even the title story which had a very good build up, failed to deliver by the end. I still really like this author. ( )

As most people know, I am a big fan of transgressive fiction and in Australia there is one author that doesn’t shy away from a touch or taboo subject. This author is Christos Tsiolkas and he is best known for his two recent novels The Slap and Barracuda. Merciless Gods is his first collection of short stories and deals mainly with sexuality, family and identity.

Author of six novels, Christos Tsiolkas was born in 1965 to Greek immigrant parents. Reading through his novels you quickly get the sense of what it must have been like growing up in suburbia as a Greek immigrant and a homosexual. He likes to explore these themes constantly and you get an idea of just how backwards people’s thinking can be. Then with his breakout novel The Slap, he challenged everyone’s thoughts, tapping into the universal dilemma around discipline and child-rearing.

Merciless Gods seems to be more of a “return to his roots” collection of short stories, which shares similarities with first novel Loaded at any of his other. There is this whole theme about social and personal struggle that play out within these stories. I am impressed with the way Tsiolkas challenges people’s views; particularly when it comes to sexuality and immigrants. There was a particular story that he wrote in Greek and then translated into English that was very powerful.

Christos Tsiolkas has officially become an ‘auto-buy’ author for me now and I will have to read the rest of his backlist sometime soon. Merciless Gods is hard-hitting and not for the faint of heart, he is pushing the boundaries but he does this really well. I am not sure when these stories were originally written, I think that will be interesting to know. However if you have never read this great Australian author, this is probably not the best place to start. Maybe begin with The Slap or Barracuda before working your way up to Loaded and Merciless Gods.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2014/12/13/merciless-gods-by-christos-tsiolkas/ ( )