Abandon all soap, ye who enter here; you won’t stay clean in “Endland.” A squalidly funny collection of short stories set in the ruined fairground of Brexit Britain, these “postcards from hell” present parochial filth as mock epic.
Endland, not England? In Tim Etchells’s grim state of the nation, Endland stands for the post-industrial urban centers of northern England, from Thatcher to BoJo. It’s a wasteland of public housing and tower blocks, roaming gangs and bloody ends. Its denizens are usually violent, depraved or both. One woman is described as having “not much lolz left in her eyes”; despair is all-pervasive. “It is a well known fact,” Etchells writes, “that there are more snakes than ladders in the great game of life.”
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