There’s an infamous movie called Bad Boy Bubby. It was about a guy who grows to adult age and has never left the small apartment owned my his wacko mother, who has convinced him the outside air is poisoned. He becomes a little obsessed with cling-wrapping living things to see if they can breathe without air, and this leads to all sorts of strange and sometimes unsettling moments, especially when he discovers the world outside isn’t as poisonous as his mother made out to be – much to her cost. But as he’s spent the whole of his adult life with mother, he hasn’t really developed much in the way of the social norms, and his concept of sexuality is quite interesting and often amusing. It’s a great film. You should see it. I loved it.

But what I’m getting at is that I always thought that was a work of fiction. I now believe that somewhere, out there, a young man is crying for help. He’s been locked in his house since the day he was born and has formed a rather unique series of explanations surrounding male sexuality. His name is Matthew Revert, and his parents need arresting. Now! It’s for his own good!

A Million Versions of Right, Mister Revert’s collection of short stories, is an amazing achievement. Why? Well, because I hate short story collections. There’s only one other short story collection I liked and that was the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach collection by Steven Erikson. But those were different. Very different to these. I just can’t stand getting into a story and then being flipped out and told to get into the next, which is doomed to be not as much fun because I kind of just wanted to read more about that character. I prefer novels.

But I just couldn’t stop with this one. Each story is more astounding, more amusing, and more well … just more strange than the one before. Most explored some element of male sexuality but each had something different to say. From the opening story about a guy who upon ejaculating, squirts out a “moustachioed tiler” every time, to the point they infest his life. To the conspiracy theory of just what causes menstruation. And the man with a job which involves shouting abuse at walls while wanting to go home and listen to a set of headphones which throbs the sound of someone masturbating down his ears – eerie only because the spooky masturbator doesn’t ever actually cum. It’s an assortment of varied and sometimes puzzlingly psychotic tales.

And what makes them so great isn’t their ideas. It’s the style. Mister Revert has, simply, one of the most efficient and highly readable styles I’ve ever read for this genre. In most cases you can feel the author’s desperate need to try and impress. You can see they’re just trying to one-up the weirdness. But Mister Rever succeeds in keeping a natural eccentricity which is toned down greatly by a near precision-based editing exercise. You can see he’s worked and reworked each story – and if he hasn’t, then the man needs to be wired up to a machine which forces him to write, because if this is what he can do without effort, then he needs to give us something he tried. It would kick our brains out.

The most intriguing of the short stories was Meeting Max, which took up the vast majority of the book – an extended story of some 120 pages or so. It’s a story which wobbles around the idea of where did menstruation begin, what’s it for, and why only women have it. That’s one part of the story, anyway. I can’t honestly do justice to this plot which begins around a mystery which is plaguing local barbers in the barbershop district and causes our hero to begin investigating some truly dastardly crimes which are upsetting all our hero’s favourite folk – barbers. I’m so not doing his story any justice at all, but I am a hack, not a professional reviewer. Give me room to breathe, people! The first part is told in a hardboiled detective fashion, and the last half kind of shifts into a spiralling emotional near-scientific journal fashion as the central character begins to menstruate and the conspiracy is unveiled. The first part intrigued me greatly, because Mister Revert kept a tight grip on the hardboiled style with a dedication I greatly admire. You can’t fault his prose at all, even for a single line. Each line was finely crafted, and that’s no easy thing without sounding cheesy. It worked very well. The last half of the story went off in a different direction so fast it was like a baseball being thwacked for a home run. You’re looking at the catcher’s mitt, but the ball’s already out of the park.

And heading for the parking lot full of car windows.

Personally, I loved The Great Headphone Wank with its throbbing feel (you could almost feel a Barry White soundtrack) and thought Power Blink was a cheeky and hilarious story which gave me visions of The Exorcist.

If you like it weird, and you like it intelligent and you like it to challenge your mind, you can’t go wrong with A Million Versions of Right, because no matter how wrong you think a short story is, this book will prove they can sometimes be all right.

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You can find Matthew Revert at LegumeMan.Com or at his blog, Clockwork Father. Just make sure you wear gloves when clicking on his page. You don’t know what that wetness is…