To be published on October 25, 2026, in paperback and ebook, available from Amazon. URL to be announced.
Assemblage & Other Miseries is the debut collection of short stories-cum-novelettes from Evan Findlay Hay, whose febrile fare delivers a tragic tale for every night of a wretched working week. Evan’s smorgasbord of dissected lives provides a properly immersive introduction to unseemly arrays of Londoners, trapped in impoverished milieus & misshapen by capitalistic impositions.
Piquant asides are guaranteed to get sapient cosmopolitans chuckling as his flawed characters, hampered by incessant fear, dehumanising uncertainty, & systematically induced doubt, strive to fashion authentic individualities in toxic atmospheres of monetarised meaninglessness.
Evan seamlessly reels off fatally funny disaffections, interlarded with a distinctive, potent,& restless vernacular; iconoclastic, barbed, yet humane, Evan’s perilous black comedies materialise into politicised parodies of a mainstream morality where there’s no reciprocity, only threatening jeopardies: spawning from the recklessly destructive, subhuman negligence of our collective overlords.
Be warned! Several narratives in Evan’s funky punky collection are set in the 1980s & reflect cavalier attitudes that were standard in various circles, during this era; thus, readers toting a self-aware & compassionate disposition may find such content unsettling. Howbeit, whilst awful facets are explicitly showcased, neither hate nor inhumanity is intentionally glorified.
Assemblage reveals a downcast boy from an unhappy family’s council tenancy in Willesden; bruised by domestic abuse, saddled with PTSD & a timid reflective nature, he responds to his white-trash upbringing with an act that would send Sophocles sprinting hand over mouth, to the nearest bucket.
Psychoneuroses evokes a drug-addled re-telling of Michael Fagan’s infamous burglary at Buckingham Palace; contemptuously anatomising UK culture & society against a backdrop of mythology, while sharing details of an unloved childhood rubbing shoulders with vermin, smut, & scatology. Ultimately, attempts to ingest enough psychedelics to balance insane concrete jungle shenanigans are doomed.
In lieu of Springtime includes a perspicacious fellow whose life is altered by dastardly forces, & out of necessity adapts to improve his lot, yet in the excitement of achieving his dream of solvency grows gravid with duplicity. Misplacing any sense of brotherly love is the price of a practicable trade-off.
Hello Sailor! satirises a cynical aristocrat wearily apologising for historic misbehaviours (inc. sick little jokes about Peaches Geldof) within a letter documenting debauched indiscretions.
Bob’s Full House shines an arc-light on an easily flattered contestant who surprisingly makes it through pre-show screenings onto Bob Monkhouse’s TV quiz, before watching his self-esteem melt like burning plastic.
Schreibtischtäter witnesses a naive jobseeker exercise his right to claim fiscal support but lose the plot during a bout of illusory transcendence.
Bullworker speaks of a salt-of-the-earth contract journo struggling to eke a living who forfeits his mojo hacking copy for jumbles of trade magazines in an entertaining yarn covering history, philosophy, psychological egoism, apothegms, body sculpting, plus a pinch of alternative monetary theory thrown in for good measure.
Assemblage & Other Miseries is designed and published by Chris Page/Psipook
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