The Dark Manual

usie Sakamoto, an Irishwoman in Japan, spends her days drinking heavily and cursing the home robot that takes care of all her domestic needs. She despises the thing her dead husband designed and is under the impression that it is about to do her harm.

To escape the overwhelming grief of her missing family, she takes to the nighttime and the lawless section of the city, loitering in seedy bars with her wild, drug-fuelled, hypersexual friend, Mixxy.

Are Susie’s persecutions merely a result of her own paranoia? Can the parliament of owls gathering eerily in the trees outside be of any significance, any assistance? Or will she have to search for the mythic Dark Manual, to find a way to finally switch off the homebot and end her litany of woes?

…it might already be too late…the machines are on the rise.

Japan-based Irish writer Colin O’Sullivan couples his usual lyrical flourishes with tense and often terrifying noirish scenes, to present before us an unsettling vision of an anxious woman teetering in an anxious time. Fans of "Black Mirror", the dark humour of early Haruki Murakami, and even Asimov or Aldiss, will be keen to sample another frantic foray into a near and nervy future.

Colin O’Sullivan’s first novel, "Killarney Blues", captivated critics and readers alike and won the prestigious Prix Mystère de la critique in France. His second novel, "The Starved Lover Sings", comes out in Russian translation in 2019. O'Sullivan's short fiction and poetry have been published in various print and online anthologies and magazines.