The Lightning of Possible Storms

Originally reviewed by Will Fawley for Prairie Fire's Book Reviews Program. prairiefire.ca Jonathan Ball has built an impressive writing career that includes both poetry and fiction. That wild electricity of poetry explodes in his first full-length fiction collection, The Lightning of Possible Storms......more

Jonathan Ball’s short fiction collection, The Lightning of Possible Storms, is a volume that exults in the many ways in which it confounds expectations and keeps the reader off balance. Ball’s stories are brashly eccentric, cynical, surreal and delightfully subversive metafictions. In a manoeuvre th......more

A deeply, deeply weird, schizophrenic book that starts off as one thing, transforms into another, and desires nothing more than to make me pull my hair out trying to read it. I'm rating it 3 stars, because it lurches between funny, boring, profound, depressing, and dull...all within the span of a si......more

This was honestly a wonderful read, especially as an aspiring author/writer. There were so many things within this anthology that played with the way people write and create stories, broke the fourth wall, and made me have to pause and think before continuing. I really, really enjoyed the journey of......more

I liked the idea of this book far more than the actual book. I enjoyed quite a few of the short stories but I felt that the parts about Aleya didn’t quite fit. I would love to read a novel based on the description of this book; rather than a number of short stories with just the barest minimum of th......more