Lives of the Dog-Stranglers

Parkside is a typical suburb in a city in the south of England, its late-Victorian terraces occupied by a few remaining elderly residents and new young families. Like any suburb its character is formed by rumour and fantasy. `This isn't a neighbourhood,' one character fumes, `it's an echo-chamber.' Everyone is a figment of his neighbour's imagination. `We're anything they want us to be - murderers, redheads, philanderers, dog-stranglers."

A brilliant mesh of interlocking narratives, held together by Parkside itself and the thematic thread of metamorphoses, LIVES OF THE DOG STRANGLERS is by turn wildly funny, tragic, and richly cynical. With a ludic mastery of language and huge curiosity and compassion for his impotent, driven characters, Simon Mason has fashioned an elegant, savage farce of suburbia.

"Deadpan satire at its deadliest." - Guardian

"LIVES OF THE DOG-STRANGLERS grows in charm and complexity the longer it goes on … Mason [has] an unexpected vein of compassion … a brilliantly flexible ability to write from the point of view of the beleaguered, the humiliated, the overwhelmed." - The Ties

"achingly funny, oddly distressing and, in the end, extremely touching" - Focus