‘Even in my fantasies I wasn’t the hero,’ laments Mackenzie, the narrator of ‘Zoanthropy’, one of the stories in this new collection from the enthusiastically touted young American author and screenplay writer David Benioff. This line would not have jarred in most of the pieces, for the central character is rarely the driving force in these narratives. Instead, it is the lovers and fathers, the cuckolded and abandoned who are charismatic. The protagonists are bland and mundane; even success seems to come to them at a price not worth paying. They are narrators rather than heroes. 

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