What sort of sicko would fake a roadside memorial? It’s not a trick question and the answer is … a character in one of the stories in Brisbane writer David Cohen’s latest book of short stories The Terrible Event.

The Enigma of Keith: Another Memorial, is a tale about an academic who gets caught up in a web of his own deceit. This academic happens to be researching roadside memorials and he creates a fake one to gauge whether people slow down or not when passing. This particular fictional roadside memorial is around the Upper Coomera area.

“I was trying to write a story about an academic investigating roadside memorials then I noticed that there was actually a body of scholarly literature about the topic.” Who knew?

For his sins Cohen read an article entitled ‘Effects of roadside memorials on traffic flows’ by Richard Tay, Anthony Churchill and Alexandre G. de Barros in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention, Volume 43, issue 1, January 2011. Riveting stuff.

We think it’s safe to say that not many writers are inspired by reading that but with Cohen you expect the unexpected.

In his story the academic who creates the fake memorial ends up elaborating and creating an entirely fake personality of Keith, the young man who is supposed to have met his end on a stretch of road at Upper Coomera. The academic gets further and further caught up in the web of his own creation. In the end you feel sorry for Keith, even though he’s a figment of the academic’s imagination. And of Cohen’s.

But do not go looking for this memorial.

“I didn’t use an actual location where there is one,” Cohen says. That, presumably, would be a kind of sacrilege.

Who would think of writing a story about such a subject?

Well, David Cohen, a library adviser at QUT whose wife also lectures at that university. The couple live in inner city Brisbane with their young son. Without locating them I will say they live in a fashionable suburb but in his writing, Cohen is drawn to less fashionable locales.

He is the author of two novels – Fear of Tennis, and Disappearing off the Face of the Earth and another short story collection, The Hunter and Other Stories of Men which is emblazoned with an Ibis on the cover, a bird we all know as the Bin Chicken.

He came onto my radar when I read Disappearing off the Face of The Earth. I was binge watching Storage Wars on subscription television at the time and was fascinated that he had chosen a storage facility in the light industrial heartland of Brisbane’s south side as the setting for that book.

Hideaway Self Storage was supposedly just off the M1 and the business was in decline and being run into the ground by manager Ken and his assistant Bruce who soldier on as the facility falls apart around them.

But something weird is going on as tenants begin disappearing, leaving behind units full of valuable items. It is described as “a surprisingly funny study of physical and mental deterioration” and, like his new book, it features mentions of progressive rock which Cohen happens to be a fan of. He confesses to occasionally mentioning Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

In The Terrible Event the titular story is about how a public memorial’s name is changed to avoid any mention of the tragedy it has been set up to commemorate. It is, Cohen says, an exploration of beauracracy, cancel culture and the absurdity of just about everything.

“It is never made clear what large scale terrible event occurred though” Cohen says. It has an almost Kafkan atmosphere.

In his other stories two attention seeking activists campaign against exclusionary policies adopted by the gift shop at a local shopping mall. In The Holes he explores the scintillating subject of stationery and also writes of a customer service worker who becomes obsessed with a mysterious colleague who is mysterious because she has worked from home for so long nobody remembers her. Does this ring a bell anyone?

In Bugs the proganist finds an old talking Bugs Bunny toy in a storage locker. (There are those bloody storage lockers again)

“He’s a middle-aged divorced guy who has kept things from his childhood,” Cohen says. “He goes back and looks at things including this talking Bugs Bunny which says these prerecorded phrases. As the doll starts to deteriorate, he starts to decline mentally, more or less in unison with the doll.”

Why does Cohen write this stuff?

“I guess it’s a way of addressing some of my own anxieties,” he says. “I was thinking of dementia when I wrote Bugs. My father had dementia when he died and there are echoes of that in the story. “

All his stories are absurd in one way or another and are inspired by his life in Brisbane. He and wife Simone moved here 13 years ago and riding local buses and finding inspiration in the most unlikely locations has been his trademark in recent years. Growing up he read MAD magazine (that’s no surprise) and was enchanted by the eccentric works of counter culture American writer Richard Brautigan. One of his literary heroes is the British writer Magnus Mills, a writer who happens to be a bus driver. Which makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

The Terrible Event by David Cohen, Transit Lounge, $29.99