I approached "Will You Let The Morning Come Soon?" with high hopes. The title alone is wonderfully evocative, almost a story in itself. The cover blurb promises an exploration of "the realities on unfettered hedonism". It's even a sensible length - by today's standards 125 pages probably counts as a novella.

The book certainly starts well. The (unnamed) narrator is woken up by the doorbell. He is in a really, really bad way and worrying about the blood in the bathroom. He opens the door and lets in Zoe, a young teenager he's met a couple of times before.

Things are promising for the first few pages as they talk. We quickly learn that the narrator has swallowed a bottle of paracetamol; a particularly slow, painful and stupid way to commit suicide.

From that point the book deteriorates rapidly into nothing more than an extended suicide note. The narrator is a young man (early twenties I believe) who has never got over his teenage angst. By half way through I was just wishing he'd hurry up and die.

For the next hundred or so pages the narrator gives us a pretentious, self-pitying account of his life to date. Poor Zoe has nothing to do except sit there and listen, she's just a flat sounding board for a monologue. She finally gets something worth saying in the last few pages when she gives the narrator a metaphorical slap round the face that he deserved much, much earlier. That's part of the problem here - the narrator is a totally unsympathetic character, a pretentious whining brat.

As I said at the start, this book is little more than novella length, yet it still comes across as padded. It feels like a short story from a Uni fiction mag that's been extended to publishable length.

Maybe it's a sign of my incipient middle age that I find this book so unappealing. Yes, I remember feeling like that. I didn't like it then and I don't really want to experience it again by proxy.

Corkett can certainly write and does an undeniably good job of reproducing the angst. Unfortunately he does so without adding anything useful, insightful or even remotely interesting.