Distortions by John Connor

Unsettling stories where the familiar begins to fracture

Good Condition - with light scuffs and marks on the pale covers, rubbed edges, corner creases and a chipped lower front corner.

A magician becomes entangled in his own illusions, a student's return from illness brings new fears, and ordinary life threatens to tip into something profoundly strange. In this short-story collection, John Connor explores people whose hold on the world is disturbed by manipulation, uncertainty or forces they cannot fully understand. The title story centres on an Auckland boarding house, where the proprietor's mixture of truth and deceit unsettles his tenants and feeds suspicion. Elsewhere, the boundary between external danger and a character's own destructive impulses becomes equally difficult to draw. Combining dark humour with psychological unease, Distortions invites readers into situations where appearances offer little reassurance and the apparently familiar can conceal a troubling instability.