If you can handle shocking, twisted plots about the dark side of human nature and ordinary people's daily life. If you don't mind reading at-times offensive stories and characters, you have to read this one!

Typical McEwan - creepy, disturbing, unsettling stories about human fallibility and the thin line between 'innocence' and the illegal, illicit or truly horrific. His capacity to bring specific moments in time (childhood incest, a canal-side murder, accidental death ...) to life shines in this short story collection.

Though I've been a McEwan fan since I first read Enduring Love, I've long avoided reading his debut collection of short stories. They've turned out to be everything I'd heard about them: perverse, disgusting, creepy, twisted, dark... and undeniably amazing.

I don't want to dwell on any individual story, or give all of the surprises away, but I'll try to explain why I liked them regardless of the content.

The very first story, Homemade, I really still don't like. It begins as a story of two adolescents who hatch a plan to pay a girl in thier class to flash them - simple enough - and somehow winds up being about the narrator's attempt to rape his sister. Not only was the latter half difficult to enjoy, but I kept wondering why it followed the first half at all.

But, making up for that, the next story Solid Geometry, made me laugh perhaps harder than I ever have laughed before. The twist is too good to give away, but let it suffice to say that it involves a mathematician, his annoying wife, a penis preserved in formaldahyde, and hidden spatial dimensions.

From there, the stories went up and down. Some, like Cocker at the Theatre or Disguises, seem light (and short) and not worthwhile. Others, like Last Days of Summer and Butterflies, are bizarre and dark, but wonderful. Butterflies, like the following story, Conversation with a Cupboard Man, actually do the most difficult thing of all - making you sympathize with a narrator who is a child molester, and another who is raised as a small child well into adulthood. These achieve the trancendancy of something like Lolita, where a skillful narrator can guide you into the dexterous and deviant mind of a sociopath, and better, make you nearly love them.

The title story - First Love, Last Rites - was well worth getting to. In it, two young lovers waste a summer away together, catching crabs (non-venereally) and hunting the rat that lives in their walls. It's the rare sort of story where nearly nothing seems to happen, and yet everything feels poignant. The final scene - again, can't give it away - took my breath away.

All in all, I'm glad I finally sucked it up and read it. It proves to me what I've always hoped - that, in the right hands, any material can find its way into beauty. I'm glad that Ian McEwan found other subjects - widely varied in his later career (which spans literary genres with ease) because it really is that incredible range that makes him such an incredible writer. Thinking on it now, even many of the great literary giants often seemed stuck in a particular mode or subject matter, be it hunting and fishing, the lives of the well-t0-do, or the sagas of mythical Southern counties... but I get the feeling McEwan could dive in and out of any of these arenas with mastery. And just as easily he could write about cross-dressers and street thugs and people from Mongolia. Sooner or later I'll make my way through the remaining McEwan novels (only a handful left) but now that I've gone all the way to the start, I feel more confident than ever that he is our greatest living writer.

First Love Last Rites – seven stories written by a very young but the same amazing Ian McEwan who made John Fowles say that ‘No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him’.

Therefore, instead of a review, I leave you with some quotes in support of this statement

"Under Ian McEwan's manipulation, depravity may take on the guise of innocence and butterflies can become sinister. With equal power, he can show a child's life become fouled by the macabre, or distil the awakening sensations of first love, tracing its ritual initiations and infusing them with luxuriant sensual imagery."
From the back cover of the 1983 Picador paperback edition (a much better description of the book's content then the one on Goodreads).

Some praise for this book at its publication in 1975:

"A brilliant debut..." A. Alvarez, Observer (London)

"The most devastating debut I have seen for a long time..." Peter Lewis, Daily Mail (London)

"A brilliant performance, showing an originality astonishing for a writer in his mid-twenties." Anthony Thwaite

"Ian McEwan writes to shock and succeeds...All his stories have a feeling of impending evil...It is a tour de force of concision, and fun, too, in a deadpan manner." Gabriele Annan, Times Literary Supplement

I don't often quote the original synopsis for a book nor excerpts from original reviews but I can recall reading these stories when I was in my twenties and being blown away by them - I thought they were powerful, extraordinary and nothing like anything I had read up to that point. Rereading them now I have no reason to reverse my enormous impression of writing that was something fine, exceptional and bordering on the unique. I must admit that when, many years later I read other works by McEwan I did not believe that they were by the same author as these stories. If you have only read his later work then I can not say that you will like these stories. But they are stories well worth reading. I am very pleased to have bought a copy of this collection and I will reread them again.

★★★★☆ (4/5)

A collection of disturbing albeit interesting stories. We traverse through the minds of a pedophile, a murderer, a child whose sense of identity has convoluted, a couple experiencing alienation, a disgruntled husband and many more. The stories are unsettling, but the beautifully vivid and emphatic prose keeps the reader's curiosity elevated.

Solid Geometry
•tYour sentimental Buddhism, this junk-shop mysticism, joss-stick therapy, magazine astrology … none of it is yours, you’ve worked none of it out for yourself. You fell into it, you fell into a swamp of respectable intuitions. You haven’t the originality or passion to intuit anything yourself beyond your own unhappiness
•tI brought my hands together and there was nothing between them, but even when I opened them again and saw nothing I could not be sure the paper flower had completely gone. An impression remained, an after-image not on the retina but on the mind itself
•t‘Dimensionality is a function of consciousness,’ I thought

Last Day of Summer
•tShe carries out an old table, and when it’s out everyone realizes that it was always in the way.
•tOur hooting and cackling gets louder and louder because the still air doesn’t carry it across the water and the noise of it stays with us in the boat

Butterflies
•tMy chin and my neck are the same thing, and it breeds distrust

First Love, Last Rites
•tIt was new to me, all this, and I worried, I tried to talk to Sissel about it for reassurance. She had nothing to say, she did not make abstractions or discuss situations, she lived inside them
•tshe never made general remarks about people because she never made general remarks. Sometimes when we heard Adrian on his way up the stairs she glanced across at me and seemed to betray herself by a slight pursing of her beautiful lips.
•tThen Sissel found a job and it made me see we were different from no one, they all had rooms, houses, jobs, careers, that’s what they all did, they had cleaner rooms, better jobs, we were anywhere’s striving couple

After hearing Ian McEwan's first book of short stories described as being "taut, brooding, and densely atmospheric," I think I got a somewhat skewed vision of what these stories would be. I was expecting tales set in London that oozed a gothic atmosphere. Instead, while the stories contain quite serious and deathly situations, they are written in a more light-hearted tone that is closer to Nabokov than Poe. Passages of nasty violence and tawdry encounters are dealt with in such a casual manner they almost escape their outlandish nature to seem quotidian and expected.

This isn't to say these stories are bad; it's quite the opposite. The dark yet comical events are embedded with a swirling mixture of emotions. They are simultaneously beautiful, sad, depraved, hilarious, and sanguine. The worlds McEwan builds are constructed around the idiosyncrasies of their characters, making each world unique and bizarre. For example, every situation becomes about feeling safe and secure for the overly sheltered narrator of "Conversation with a Cupboard Man." He even partially enjoys being trapped in an oven while he's cleaning it because it reminds him of his youthful confinement.

While the stories are diverse, many of them are linked by their salacious content. Just about all of the tales involve some kind of sexual encounter—usually an awkward one. There is really no conventional sex here either. Even when it's consensual, it might occur on stage, in a cupboard, or one of the partners might need to imagine monsters to get off.

The first one—and likely most controversial—is "Homemade," which involves a teenage boy who is continually persuaded by a friend of his to steal, do drugs, and discover various sexual pleasures. To unearth these pleasures and find out about the opposite sex, he is willing to go to extreme measures that most wouldn't even consider. I have never found myself laughing so much at such an extraordinarily uncomfortable situation.

This is followed by "Solid Geometry," a comical tale in which a husband makes use of geometry to make his wife disappear. The somewhat mundane "Last Day of Summer" plays out more like a standard story of a childhood summer; although, it does take a sudden dark turn at the end. "Cocker at the Theatre" is a brief and amusing interlude. The more disturbing "Butterflies" recounts the death of a young girl by a reclusive and deranged man. "Disguises" tells the story of an acting-obsessed aunt who forces her young nephew to dress up for in-home performances.

The best one, though, is the title story, "First Love, Last Rites." It follows a young couple who live in an old nondescript apartment four stories up from a quay. They mostly want to avoid interactions or feelings about the world, but even in their isolated and quasi-romantic abode, they begin to sense the inevitability of the conventional routines of life. The settling conformity they feel seeps into the environment around them. When the male character is out eel fishing, he notes the following: "I was amazed at how soon the clean white rope from the chandlers had become like all other rope near the river, brown and hung about with fine strands of green weed."

And, if there is one story here that suggests there are monsters or evil things lurking just beneath the surface of reality, it is this one. All throughout its duration, the characters seem to fear some unknown scratching and clawing noises that emanate from a presumed monster, which may or may not be imagined. Eventually, the fear of this creature seems to represent a fear of pregnancy, of bringing another life into this world they are desperately trying to avoid. Still, even with all its menacing qualities and cynicism, the story ends on an ambiguously hopeful note. Leave it to McEwan to embed scraps of hope in an otherwise dismal world.

4.25⭐️

“She was beautiful in an almost sinister kind of way, like a girl in a Modigliani painting.”

First Love, Last Rites is an essential read for fans of literary horror. The eight short stories within are stark and lurid in their gruesome detail. Ian McEwan is a masterful storyteller who evokes a foreboding sense of impending doom in very few pages.

“Love is like a fire. Whether it will warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell.”

Expect an atmosphere that’s taut and rife with sinister intention. These stories explore the depths of human depravity and how cruelty can sometimes emerge from seemingly innocent conditions like boredom, curiosity, and loneliness.

Of the eight stories, my favorites are, in no particular order: Homemade, Solid Geometry, and Butterflies. Each story is told from the first-person narrative. In the fortieth anniversary edition McEwan wrote an introspective saying, “My amoral first-person narrators especially were supposed to be condemning themselves out of their own mouths. I thought it more interesting for the author not to intervene.” I must say I think he made a wise choice! So very well done.

Ian, that Ian. This is his first published work - a collection of perverse and sinister short fiction. This isn't the Ian McEwan of Atonement or even Saturday. This is the young Ian McEwan who's just starting out, and who would begin with works such as The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers - dark, horrific and nightmarish novels. Published all the way back in 1975, these stories are set in some latter-day urban England filled with waste, pus, smog and rot and populated with walking, crawling and dancing monstrosities with various fears, obsessions and fetishes.

Most of the protagonists in this stories are children, or people who never quite got through adolescence. Acts of mental and physical violation abound, as they experiment with and on each other; the stories are brief but all have this uncomfortable feeling of things being very wrong hanging over them. It is the 70's - the time of sexual liberation and progression of society into a new era, but McEwan is not interested in offering judgment or opinion. These stories are narrated in a remarkably passionate way, offering no moral stance, interested merely in seeing where a boundary could lie and crossing it. McEwan is interested in seeing his protagonists act, shying away from clearly victimizing/antagonizing them. They live lives of loneliness and deprivation, filled with a quiet thirst for some sort of fulfillment.

McEwan remarked that in these stories he experimented with finding his own voice as an author, try different things and discover himself as a writer. It shows. Most of the stories are pretty outlandish in terms of their depravity and grotesqueness, but nonetheless remain confined within the realm of the real and warp neither time or space. All aside from one story, Solid Geometry, which is probably my favorite of the bunch and which was made by the Channel 4 into a television film starring Ewan McGregor. This story is the clearest example of McEwan experimenting with different genres and conventions, combining his interest in personal dynamics with elements of horror and speculative fiction. It's a frame story, and the story contained within is as good as the main narrative; its bizarre and eccentric and to say more would be to spoil it.

First Love, Last Rites is a debut which must have certainly raised many eyebrows when it was first published, even in the more liberal audience. Age might have lessened the shock one felt when reading these stories, but they have remained dark and disturbing, dark tales of perversion and depravity. The horror is well staged and masterly unraveled; well worth reading if you've got the stomach for it.

This is definitely not a favourite of mine. Some of these stories are really disturbing, one can even call them sick, but they are so well written that I cannot rate this book with less than 4 stars.

I’ve never understood the squeamish responses to Ian McEwan’s short stories. I read the combined edition - the hardback Cape put out in 1995 - while in Stafford hospital and found it far more absorbing than my surroundings. In that edition the stories from First Love, Last Rites were printed in a different order to the earlier Picador edition and used a larger, gothic-looking typeface.

While two stories date back to McEwan’s days as the only student on UEA’s then-brand-new writing course, most were composed in an attic flat in Stockwell where the rent was £3 a week. Many first ran in The New Review, edited by Ian Hamilton - the hard-drinking, womanising chain-smoker infamous for paying his contributors with rubber cheques. (Julian Barnes still has a cheque from those days stamped ‘return to payer’ so many times it looks like a spider’s web.) Canny readers may spot how many of McEwan’s blurbs - from Julian Barnes, Craig Raine, Douglas Dunn, Anthony Thwaite, and John Carey - were penned by fellow contributors to that magazine.

Other stories in the collection first appeared abroad. The longest story, ‘Disguises’, was printed in the American Review, and netted the author a $600 cheque just in time for Christmas 1972. This was the only story I disliked - still do - and not because of what happens in it, or the fact it’s 20 pages too long. The point of view is wobbly: a child’s perspective one second, something else another, sometimes in the same sentence. It’s often hard to suss what’s happening. After getting the cheque, McEwan wrote three more of the collection’s stories on the trot, buoyed by a wave of confidence. (They were ‘Last Day of Summer’, ‘Butterflies’, and ‘Solid Geometry.’)

The other stories are less cluttered, more direct, and more powerful. ‘A Conversation With A Cupboard Man’ was first written at UEA and initially started as a parody. McEwan was a big fan of John Fowles’ novel The Collector, and had set about composing a similarly monstrous, self-pitying voice. It seems that the tale changed with the telling. Many find this the most moving story in the collection, perhaps aided by the fact it’s told as a confessional monologue. Whether the reader is meant to or not, it’s hard not to feel sympathy for its warped narrator and how he got to be that way, which I will not spoil here.

‘Home-made’ also began life as a parody, this time of the braggart voice perfected by Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. The last line, like the mirage of sexual triumph in the narrator’s brain, is ironical. The first part goes on for too long though: paragraphs rather than pages would have said just as clearly, ‘this speaker is a prat.’

‘Solid Geometry’ arose out of other books. McEwan had been reading Bertrand Russell’s diaries, and wanted to write a story comparing the pithy selectivity of diaries and fiction. It also had its roots, obliquely, in real life. Like his hero in The Child in Time, McEwan took a van packed full of hippy friends to Afghanistan, where much of the talk focused on Alan Watts, Tim Leary, the I Ching, and doing copious amounts of LSD. Not for the last time in his fiction, McEwan pits a desiccated, logical male against a loving, mystic female - the irony being that the she is sent packing using the system he has derided (‘the mathematics of the absolute’). It also has three of the collection’s more powerful images - the ‘glaring’ enamel, the ‘slug like’ disintegrating penis, and the field of babies the female has nightmares about landing a plane on.

‘Cocker at the Theatre’ is amusing filler and the collection’s shortest piece. The title story and ‘Last Day of Summer’ are displaced matricidal fantasies, told with steely precision and without loss of nerve. ‘First Love, Last Rites’ recalls, for me, Graham Swift’s story ‘Tunnel’, also about young love amid wilful squalor. ‘Butterflies’ is the best-executed story in the collection, assuredly carried out. I often wonder if the title and narrator were also partly inspired by The Collector.

It’s interesting to note how the stories’ themes link and amplify each other, despite the years separating their composition. Many are about the cost of living up to a received idea of manhood - deep-freezing the emotions, shunning the feminine and the maternal, rejecting empathy. You may note that McEwan’s first novel, The Cement Garden, takes many of the threads from this collection and braids them into a whole. The collection’s pervading themes - men and women, science and mysticism, family, innocence and depravity - will later bloom into McEwan’s first five novels. Not many debuts are so fertile or so powerful.

A dark, strange, sometimes sick, odd, original, mesmerising eight short stories collection. This book was published in 1975 and was Ian McEwan’s first published book. It won the 1976 Somerset Maugham Award. It is 125 pages (Picador edition).

A strong short story collection and a very worthwhile read. For Ian McEwan fans this book should be a satisfying read.