“A slag was carny slang for a punter who looks at the free attractions but avoids the paying shows. In Australia it meant to spit. A slagger was a brothel-keeper; a slaggering was a row – but was that a great commotion, a trip on a lake, or a line? It meant unwashed, useless, a petty criminal, a third-rate grafter. It was a slack-mettled fellow, one not ready to resist an affront… the word seemed to encompass everything. I myself was a slag, living in a city of slags – in a country, a universe of slags, in an infinity of pej.”

These stories set amid the boozers, losers and hard cases of Bradford’s divey flats and pubs retain all the stark reality of a galvanized bucket viewed with a distinctly poetic sensibility. A superb stylist, Broady is a musical writer whose intensity is always leavened with an erudite bark of savage humour in tales that are as unflinching as they are funny. Suspicion and paranoia are never far away and are the driving force in the title story about the roofer suspected of rather brilliantly daubing a towerblock with the words, ‘In This Block There Lives a Slag.’ Broady is a quiveringly antennaed writer whose razored observations are more often emblazoned than merely recorded:

“The explosion came one Sunday evening as I was singing along with Songs of Praise from Hereford Cathedral, feeling nauseated at the way the eyes of the congregation were opening and closing at the same intervals as their mouths.”

These twelve homespun tales from Hell and its environs (or ‘Yorkshire Fables’ to borrow the book’s subtitle) are narrated in an arresting and cultured town-boy pub voice. ‘Bouncing Back’ hilariously parodies Bradford City Council’s desperate attempts to attract new businesses and tourists, beginning by sending out bear mascots (men in bear suits) to run around the city centre en masse. Here, as in all the tales, there is plenty of texture and authentic mis en scene:

”I recalled a night in The Flying Dutchman when I was watching journalists pumping the regulars after the seventh Ripper murder. They weren’t getting much response until an old gimmer stuck his head out of the Games Room: ‘That London bugger,’ Jack told one ‘how many did he do, then?’. On being told that it was five he smiled and said, ‘Aye well, our lad’s beaten yours already,’ and returned contentedly to his dominoes and pipe.”

The collection draws to a close with the most fulfilling story, the saturated and nuanced ‘Tale of the Golden Bath Taps’ - a sadly beautiful, sordid and sublime tale of warped love. In it the narrator, a young musician, embarks on a doomed relationship with a beautiful but disturbed barmaid who works in ‘The Bollocks,’ a rough and tumble pub frequented by cons. Christine is not only a barmaid but a part-time stripper who specializes in a number of bizarre variety acts, among which is an eerie impersonation of her idol, Karen Carpenter. In its bleakly poetic rendering of disconnected connectedness (especially between the sexes), Broady’s story charts similar territory to Mary Gaitskill: two broken people meet and attempt to know each other within a disquieting milieu but they never quite make because our world’s former ‘certainties’ have been irrevocably shattered. Yet the vertiginous attraction continues and the participants are hopeful.

“I had the uncomfortable suspicion that for thousands of years we men – me, Gus, Burroughs, our dads, their dads and so on – had been taking out our soul-sickness on women until at long last we’d voided ourselves of it… but now as we approached, finally able to love, we found that we’d infected them with our former disease… and far from falling into our arms they began to revenge themselves on us… and there would be no happy ending, not even any respite… For the next few thousands of years the same old shit would be flying – only in the opposite direction. “

The narrator imagines himself and the barmaid as McQueen and MacGraw in ‘The Getaway,’ proving once and for all, there is glamour in the grit just as there is beauty in the bleak. This is a wonderful story with all the texture, the fall and rise of a novel. Somewhat reminiscent of a more localized version of ‘The Day of the Locust’, it establishes Bill Broady as the Nathanael West of Bradford.