Book Review: Look Who’s Morphing – Tom Cho

Look Who’s Morphing is a humorous collection that breaks rules and gets away with it.

Look Who’s Morphing is described as a “collection of fictions” by Melbourne writer Tom Cho and draws heavily from pop culture to create a collection of work that comments on identity and changing identity in a light and humorous way.

In a lot of the pieces, the narrator is referred to as ‘Tom Cho’ and due to the extravagance of some of the stories; the pieces can come across as Tom living out some his fantasies. He described this in his talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival as the character being a ‘Mary Sue,’ and in the fiction world we’re meant to avoid this as a rule, but I think this worked in this case and the stories were entertaining.

Also, I liked how Tom referred to certain relatives and friends multiple times, giving a kind of connection and synergy between the stories even though they could stand alone individually.

As I’m working on a short story collection myself, I paid close attention to the format and the structure of the collection to see how he did it, how his collection compared to others. I liked that he seemed to break the mould of a lot of collections and include very short pieces, like flash fiction. Flash fiction is becoming more accepted.

The weaker story in the collection, in my opinion, was the final story, ‘Cock Rock,’ which was another fantasy in which Tom is a 55-metre tall Cock Rock God who plays to the adoring fans in Tokyo before having sex with some of the fans. I felt the story went on for a little too long and pushed the boundaries of that ‘Mary Sue’ rule, which seemed much more allowable in the other pieces.

But the main thing was that the gender politics of the final piece were quite questionable, and I was uncomfortable with the way the character acted. The problem being that when a character is presented as the author it can lead to readers attributing the character’s behaviour to the author as well – but I’m not so sure that that’s a fair statement to make.

The overall writing style of the collection was much more ‘tell’ than ‘show’ which is another broken rule within writing that seemed to work really well. The sparse style, mixed with elements of repetition gave it a feel as if the narrator was talking and made the book quite an easy read.

Which brings me to my final point; as a slow reader, I was surprised by how quickly I read this book. This was because I was enjoying reading it but also the length and style of the fiction made it easy to read. I liked that, but it makes me wonder if it’s harder for shorter pieces to resonate with a reader because they spend so little time with the characters.

It’s a question that’s been posed by short story writers before; I guess I’ll have to wait and see if I remember these stories down the track.

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