'A.S. Patric is a St Kilda writer and bookseller and his home city of Melbourne features strongly in this collection, especially in the title story. 'The Rattler' is a about a rogue tram driver who wants to be a writer.

In these stories, Patric specializes in taking the familiar and making it strange, often through the eyes of a character who is somehow alienated. The stories are not exactly metafictions, nor are they magic realism; but they have qualities of both. The characters are the wives and husbands, the drifters and workers, the lovers and immigrants and children of Melbourne that John Morrison and other social realists wrote about so movingly and Patric retains the tenderness and empathy of that era in stories with a sharp contemporary edge of uncertainty and strangeness.' Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Sydney Morning Herald (June, 2012)