Welcome to Blind Crescent, where everyone is watching, but nobody sees a thing. In this fictitious slice of suburban life, Michelle Berry peels back the pretensions of manicured lawns and the rictus smiles of "friendly" neighbours. With a deft hand, she paints a picture of suburbia so absurdly real that every suburbanite reader can't help but feel strangely at home.
In Berry's hands, ordinary circumstances are rendered as extraordinary, unsettling events and the reader must be aware.
Berry's prose has an austere, bleached quality, as if all extraneous material has been sizzled away. What's left is deadpan and allusive and often pretty damned funny.
Blind Crescent depicts dysfunctional suburbanites who are both disturbingly familiar and surreal, as fantastic as the inhabitants of the film Edward Scissorhands, as twisted as the neighbours we all live among.