The Collector of Tales

The Collector of Tales is set in a medieval style world where manners are crude and life can be nasty, brutish and short. In this world, The Collector of Tales, is making a journey and like most journeys it is made up of a series of binary choices. It is not a quest that he pursues, indeed he is simply out there to earn the money to keep his family fed and housed and yet it has all the infinite variations of possibility that buffet him and seek to drive him from his chosen paths. It is unsurprising therefore that the tale starts, like Dante's Inferno, with a choice of two paths in a dark wood. The Collector of Tales is written as a series of consecutive stories that offer a montage of the activities of the various inhabitants that The Collector of Tales comes into contact with as he traverses the cold landscape of this world. The style is a mixture of literary fiction interspersed with dark, almost slapstick comedy. It is also at once a kind of fantasy whilst at the same time offering an allegorical picture of our world, more in the manner of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. If you are looking for a novel that offers a slightly different view on fantasy whilst at the same time making direct comparison with the idiosyncrasies of our own frame of existence, then perhaps The Collector of Tales could be a novel that you might find interesting. Although The Collector of Tales stands alone as a novel, it is in fact the first in a trilogy that follows him through to his untimely death. In this first tale, we witness the Collector's peregrinations through a surreal landscape in his search for a little understanding about the place he occupies in space. During this process he is stripped down both literally and figuratively, to the simple man that he is.