Safe Inside the Violence is an unforgettable collection of 13 crime stories that shows why LitReactor wrote: "Irvin's tone is lightening fast, hard hitting, and leaves the reader breathless and shocked with the sudden and realistic portrayal of violence."
Praise for Safe Inside the Violence:
"A fine collection of crime stories told from the point of view of regular people, forgotten people, and their painfully human decisions are a roadmap to their inexorable Hell. Irvin's smartly restrained stories simmer and linger, and build to a wonderfully menacing and tragic cumulative effect."—PAUL TREMBLAY, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Little Sleep
"The Naked City was an old TV series that ended each episode with a voice-over that intoned: â€There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them...†This quote would fit perfectly the theme of Chris Irvin’s brilliant collection of stories, Safe Inside the Violence, about the disenfranchised among us. This is noir at its finest and signals the arrival of an uncommonly good writer whose work, if described by a single word, would be â€intelligent.†The second descriptor would be: â€hugely entertaining.†Like I say to my friends: You gotta read this guy."—LES EDGERTON, author of The Bitch, The Rapist and The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping and others
"At the heart of every crime is an unanswered human longing, and Christopher Irvin knows this well. These stories are full of all the betrayed hopes and thwarted dreams that steer men and women down dark and unglamorous paths. Irvin writes crime fiction with a bruised heart, which is the best way to write any kind of fiction at all."—NATHAN BALLINGRUD, author of The Visible Filth
"With so many hardboiled crime writers, they do nothing but stick to the same worn out themes and character types that have been done to death over the past 100 years, and add nothing new to the genre. But with Safe Inside The Violence, Chris Irvin has managed to craft a collection that not only breaks the molds of hardboiled crime fiction, he completely shatters them. If you only read one short story collection this year, make sure it is Safe Inside The Violence, you will not be disappointed"—KEITH RAWSON, author of Laughing At Dead Men and All Those Hungry Mouths
