M3 LEE AND OTHER STORIES

“It had been roughly four years now since the soldier had last seen his home in Wapping near the Thames. And the first thing that hit him was the smell. Of course, he had been repeatedly exposed to the sickening stench of rotting, dismembered and half buried corpses littering No Man’s Land after a Big Push, but this felt strangely new. A sea breeze swept up the estuary, and blew the various vile smells into a big invisible fog. Raw sewage, rotting vegetables left in the street, black smoke from dozens of chimneys and furnaces, animal shit. It all formed into a toxic cloud, and passed through the street for a few moments.” “He began to revisit the memory of those events, and felt a shiver of the terror he experienced reverberate down his spine. That terror provided the fuel to the now blazing fire consuming his thoughts. The anger making him curl his hands into tight fists, his dirty jagged fingernails scrapping against the surface of the table as he did so. He wanted them to pay.” What happens when an individual is far from home, full of anger, and lacking self-confidence? Some people are unwillingly bound to represent the dirtiest part of a society founded on a hypocrite moral. What occurs in their lives can push them to the edge of their limits, where it is easy to go beyond the subtle distinction between right and wrong, good and evil. The circumstances they are trapped in can unlock their true instincts and personalities, and the result sometimes is just a matter of survival. Oliver Salter provides the reader with a raw, vivid collection of short stories that explores uncomfortable thoughts and complex situations, inspecting the human condition through different historical periods.