Clear by Ray Leigh

Bad Press Ink, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9168845-1-3

Available: Kindle

Twenty years ago, writer and then youth worker Ray Leigh saw firsthand the brutal lives of addicts, dealers, prostitutes, and thieves, as well as police and “government men” gone bad, and wrote Clear to capture the dark side of 1990s London. Leigh writes in a style he calls “distilled prose” which seems like a hybrid of a long narrative poem and a screenplay. The text is arranged to cross the length of the page rather than the width, and transitions in the action, dialogue and descriptions are marked by small, black daggers.

In a patchwork of quick scenes and character sketches, Clear captures the conflict, violence, dread, and horror in a part of the city that some people only glimpse on the news and that other people actually experience as a nightmare they are trying to get “clear” of but never will. Leigh includes the expected crime and poverty, but he also makes the fragments of story poignantly relatable by incorporating the ordinary parts of the characters’ day, things like what and where they eat or their interaction  with their children. This is a dysfunctional community with its own definitions of life, relationships, and values.

Leigh suggests that this work is, in part, a “love story.” That makes sense because there is so much attention paid to the heartbreak, sadness, and disappointment of these people that it is easy to conclude that Leigh knew and cared about them. Clear is so terrifying because there is a certain normalcy to this nightmarish flip-side to typical city living. To fully realize that both the typical and nightmare lives go on simultaneously, each a sort of parallel universe, is chilling and should only be the stuff of science fiction. Recommended.

Contains: violence, sex, crude language, adult subject matter

Reviewed by Nova Hadley