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In his 1970 essay ‘The Concept of Character in Fiction’, the late William H Gass wrote that those entities we call characters are often curiously incorporeal ‘I have known many who have passed through their stories without noses, or heads to hold them, others have lacked bodies altogether, exercised no natural functions … and apparently made love without the necessary organs’ This is in no way a failing in fiction; the making of character is an art of subtraction – like most arts And if we can accept characters who are only thought, feeling or sensibility, then we ought not cavil at those who are all biology, all of the time Such are the enigmatic personae in David Hayden’s austerely carnous short stories: often, they seem to be made of no more than names and troubled flesh   There are precedents, of course, for characters whose adventures mostly happen in their guts, on their skin, along the subtle channels of the nerves Certain stories by Kafka, Beckett’s prose, latterly the violent involutions of body and language in the work of Ben Marcus These writers invent a somatic fiction whose protagonists are ever alert to, and appalled by, the things their bodies contain, or get up to With Hayden, a kind of grotesque – you could not call it horror, though it is sometimes horrific – is sutured to absurdist narratives about mundanely mysterious characters in dreamlike settings Darker With the Lights On involves a daring abdication of much convention that survives in ‘experimental’ fiction   ‘Egress’, the first of twenty stories, is typically fantastic and visceral – scatological, even The narrator occupies an office amid the clouds, appears to hover weightless above a city, pissing and shitting on the populace below: ‘I rolled over, unzipped and sprayed onto the street with relief, without regret’ And elsewhere: ‘Sir Arthur throughout his life carefully selected a representation of his most memorable movements which his valet carefully dried in the sun before wrapping in Japanese tissue paper’ In other stories, bodily anxiety prevails, a hypochondriac vigilance lest parts detach and are found clogging the sink In