It’s no secret we like Graham Tugwell. I believe JDP was the first lit mag to publish him back in 2011 with “Mammy’d Give Me Minds to Eat.” A year later we highlighted Graham’s work on St. Patrick’s Day and have remained big fans as he’s undertaken a spectacular (and crazy prolific) indie writing career.

So we were pretty excited when a package from Ireland arrived at our underground lair a few weeks back, containing a minty-fresh copy of his debut mini-collection, Everything is Always Wrong. (It’s technically called a “collectionette,” which we think is Gaelic for “nicely produced chap book.” We’re just gonna call it a book from here on.)

Everything Is Always Wrong starts out with a simple prologue urging you to know the rules:

1. There is No God.
2. Love is Impossible.
3. The Universe is Malign.

It’s a concise and simple summation of the feel-good attitude that pervades Graham’s work and makes him so endearing. As prologues/forewards go, it’s a great start – not just to the book, but as the cruelly brutal mission statement that lies at the core of the more than seventy stories Graham’s published in the past two years.

After that, though, I honestly held my breath for a lot of the book. I obviously enjoy Graham’s writing a great deal, but I wasn’t entirely sure about the story selection. The JDP-published “We Left Him with the Dragging Man” is included, which is great (we nominated it for a Pushcart), but that’s something I’ve already read half a dozen times. Of the other four stories, “Romancing the Crab” and “High Five, Danny O’C” were both solid, showing the special gift Graham has for blending dark comedy, stark horror, warped sexuality, and social awkwardness into a speculative fiction soup uniquely his. But neither of them truly knocked me out. Moreover, the fourth entry, “Unskin Me with Your Neck of Knives,” while not bad per se, seemed a bit of a misstep. I would’ve preferred something a bit stronger like “Sweetly Tight Comiseratrix…Sadness Cultivating” or the unbelievably good “My Son Is My Motorbike” in that slot instead. (But then I’m a pain in the ass.)

Fortunately, the real payoff comes at the end of the book with “They’ve Come to Paint the Doors Again.” It’s simply fucking brilliant. There’s a quote floating around the Internet that compares Graham to Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker, which might seem a bit much at first. But after reading “Paint” you feel it’s completely valid. As an editor, it’s the one story that made me go, “Goddamn, I wished we published that.” With “Dragging Man,” it tips the balance of the book from just solid to fucking great.

In short, Everything Is Always Wrong is worth picking up, even if shipping from Ireland is a bit pricey. We have a feeling Graham will eventually catch on with a bigger audience. When he does, you can tell everyone how you were into him way back when and have the collectionette to prove it. Then you can explain what a collectionette is.