Brendan Foster, Fremantle Herald , pg 37, June 21, 2008.
"while most of the post-winton brat pack can produce flat,
unresonating fiction, DeCeglie can squeeze graceful prose out of even the most dreary,
commonplace, scraping-the-bottom human misery.....His Characters merely survive in a
world where happiness doesn't arrive neatly wrapped up but comes in more peculiar
parcels, if at all...DeCeglie goes past the sentimentality some artists have with the
port city [of Fremantle] and peels back the layers of paint to reveal a seedy, melancholic world."
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“Dark Shadow Off the Fire” is the best story in In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly. There, I’ve said it,
stated my opinion. Why is it the best? Because here DeCeglie invites us into an unknown (and terrifying) world.
Is this set in the past, present or future? I can’t tell. But it’s a kind of rural apocalypse, full of murder,
rape and revenge. And it’s gripping in the extreme. We are hit with this story’s intensity from the first line (
”The sun struck down on him like a wall of scalding water”) and it never lets up. Our protagonist is in desperate trouble.
His family have been killed, his home destroyed, and he is in great danger. Floating into his mind, however, are images
of something else entirely (”her perfumed creamy skin lends through with the pale rich blue of veins in her breasts and
the underside“). A man called Smith has left our narrator to die tied to a hitching post in the desert sun, in a situation
that reminds me of Gabrielle Lord’s novel Salt. His crimes seems to be carousing with Smith’s girl, a crime punishable by
death. Despite some serious injuries (which are depicted with conviction), our narrator manages to free himself and wreak
revenge on Smith. After that, things seem to descend into some hellish pit of Aboriginals versus whites, whites versus whites,
and man against man. This is extraordinary, and I will need to read it again to appreciate it fully. In this story, DeCeglie
offers us a dark vision far outreaching the urban angst of modern life.....From the publishing notes, I can’t help but notice
that the stories I think strongest were published more recently, and the minor pieces in 2005 or 2006.
This can only be a good thing."
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