Alan Carmichael

The Evil Genius Alan Carmichael

A teenager is brutally murdered on the streets of London. A year later his mother's best friend asks herself whether the chance of a child of her own has been rendered impossible by this savage act. A pupil exerts a malign influence on his class. After a sinister gesture of Christmas goodwill from the boy, a teacher finds his sanity and his grasp of reality beginning to slip away and disintegrate. Three German soldiers face the horrors of the Eastern Front as they flee their Soviet captors - and are forced to recognise that the apocalypse, both their own and their country's, is of their own making. On a freezing South London pond, the aftermath of a drunken office party shifts in one careless moment from euphoria to crisis. Over the course of three parties, a successful middle-aged man perceives the emptiness of his achievements in life - and the possibility of a route to salvation. A hallucinatory dash across the United States is transmuted into a fragment of distant memory. In The Evil Genius, these and other stories present snapshots of ordinary people struggling to cope with the joys and the terrors of the arena in which their lives are played out.