Where do old pop stars go to die? Well, if they are the protagonist of Jim Bob's debut novel, they go to work in self-storage, where they meet interesting people and fall in love with women who look like French movie star Juliette Binoche. They meet others who look like weirdly bearded paedophiles. Should the opportunity arise, they are not adverse to having sex with a widow in a pub toilet while their thirteen-year-old son plays pub games in the bar with a bubblewrap fetishist.
A fictional autobiography told in short stories and pictures, Storage Stories is laugh-out-loud funny, gripping and often rather touching. Anyone familiar with the lyrics of the former Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine singer will recognise the lovely rhythm and flow to his words. As with his Carter lyrics, here Jim finds beauty, comedy, sadness and absurdity in the everyday things that would go unnoticed by most amid a world that has long-since gone to the dogs. As Jim Bob combines darkness with the wonderfully witty and surreal, he gives a strange sense of doomed romance to an otherwise mundane, miserable and menacing England.
Storage Stories is unputdownable in a Nick Hornby kind of way. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to go back to the beginning and start all over again.
You can purchase Storage Stories here.
Want to know more about Jim Bob? Read my interview here.
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