Year: 2018

‘Mrs Calder and the Hyena’ by Marjorie Ann Watts

I met this author at a party in the burning heat that seemed to melt London this summer. I found myself hoping that I might be like her when I reach my eighties or nineties. A few weeks later, I read this book of short stories. I enjoyed them so much, I felt irritated that she had not received more attention from the literary world. This is a most peculiar and most tender collection. I read this opening story with certain amazement. It is such an unexpected little gem, I want everyone to read it. I also want to hear Watts read it. That would be a proper treat.

From Are they funny, are they dead? CB editions, 2010)

‘The Furnished Room’ by Barbara Neuwirth

This book was recommended to me emphatically by Eleanor Crook, who I’ve already mentioned above. This story is five pages short. I don’t want to say very much about it, in part because it has helped me peel back another route into Book Three. I might say that this is a story about the city, about loneliness, and about objects – to borrow from Peter Schwenger (well, Virgil really), the tears of things. I will give you one line only: “And she was to live in this room, alone and lonely, an intruder among the memories of others who had lived here before her.” Thank you so much Barbara Neuwirth.

From The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000 edited and translated by Mike Mitchell, Dedalus, 2003

‘Preparation for a Collie’ by Joy Williams

There is a part of me that would quite like to be Joy Williams. She lives in the middle of nowhere with her large, strange dogs and she drives a battered car. I may have read that in the The Paris Review or I may have imagined it while reading The Visiting Privilege. I came across the book in 2015 whilst on a US tour with my first book, In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre. I was in the bookshop at the University of North Carolina. The staff in the shop were lovely, and I felt welcome to sit down and start reading this book. I was drawn to it because of the cover, with its fuzzy image of a German Shepherd dog. And perhaps I cannot forget this particular story because it also has a dog in it – and it is brutal. Williams’ stories are always shot through with humour though, no matter how unpleasant the tale. For the last three years, I have not been able to get this image out of my head: “David wraps his legs around his father’s chest and pees all over him. Their clothing turns dark as though, together, they’d been shot.” Oh, Joy!

From The Visiting Privilege, Knopf, 2015. Originally published in Taking Care by Joy Williams, Random House, 1972

‘Perform Small Tasks’ by Diane Williams

I could have picked any one of the forty stories from this collection. Her writing is so energetic, always surprising, and militantly singular. When I start reading one of her stories – no matter how many times I’ve read it before – I often find myself thinking “Ah, yes, I’ve got this one sewn up! I get it! I’ll not be conquered this time!” What a fool I am. Williams has this knack to outwit her readers. I don’t believe it’s intentional, but simply who the writer, Diane Williams, is. Her sharp eye on life. Her ability to tunnel into the mundane, to slip through the cracks, and pull out endless treasures. I’m with Jonathan Franzen, who said: “Diane Williams is one of the true living heroes of the American avant-garde.” Keep ’em coming, Diane!

from Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, CB editions, 2016

‘The Necessary Strength’ by David Constantine

So I’ve saved what I believe to be the very best until very end. I should get down on my knees to type this final entry. It was almost impossible for me to pick just one of David Constantine’s flawless stories, published beautifully, always with stunning covers, by Comma Press. Thanks to Mike Harrison‘s recommending – possibly via one of his addictive blog posts – I bought a copy of The Shieling. I was blown away. I went out and bought Under the Dam as a present for someone else, but promptly read it myself, cover to cover. A year or so later, I was given Tea at the Midland and, oh my goodness me, like the previous collections, it is unbelievably brilliant. With every one of his stories, when I reach the end I go straight back to the beginning. His work is always deeply pleasurable and immensely satisfying, and you can never quite pin down how he’s pulled it off. His work is mysterious, genuine, technically perfect and aesthetically awesome.

So why did I choose this one? Well, it was a tight contest between this and ‘Memorial’, which is in The Shieling, and which I adore and have read at least a dozen times. Both stories pop into my head all the time. I came down in favour of this one because it is linked to my enduring fascination with horses. As a little teaser, I give you the opening two sentences: ‘That horse makes me nervous,’ Judith said. ‘I don’t like him being here.’

from Under the Dam and Other Stories, Comma Press, 2005

A Hemingway Personal Anthology

Editor’s note: Sam’s 12 stories a gathered as a single entry in the Personal Anthology archive so as not to skew the author statistics. Sam has not forgiven the editor for this.

I’ve chosen twelve Hemingway stories – and you can’t stop me. I won’t argue with you about Hemingway’s character. There are reasons he has become unfashionable. But those failings are part of his tragedy – and that tragedy also makes him fascinating. He was wounded right from the start. He was always lost, like so many of his generation. From this pain he produced some of the most astonishing prose of all time. His writing was not only technically accomplished and full of unforgettable images and symbolism, it was also sensitive, insightful and honest. He might have messed up his life, but in his pages he often got close to perfection. And here’s the proof:

‘Hills Like White Elephants’ (First published in transition in 1927, and then collected in Men Without Women, 1927)

This is one of Hemingway’s most famous stories and one of the best examples of his iceberg theory of writing. The idea is that he gets the most from the least. The few words you see on the surface have great weight and depth beneath them, hidden under the water.

Here we have a couple sitting at a table beside a train a station on a hot day. It feels like these two young people are there before us in HD, every line of their features delineated, every emotion revealed in extreme close up. Actually, Hemingway barely gives any more description than I gave in this paragraph’s first sentence. He just provides the station, the table, some beer and the heat. He leaves it to us to fill in the rest of the image, just as he leaves it to us to fill in the gaps in the couple’s stilted, frustrated conversation. The hard and painful thing they are talking about is barely mentioned. And yet we are made to know just what it is. I won’t say more about that here, for fear of bruising the delicate beauty of the story. Suffice to say, what we get by implication and silence is worth more than we would ever get if it were all spelled out. (The iceberg theory in a nutshell: Papa don’t preach.)

It’s an amazing technical feat – but when you read the story, none of that really matters. It’s the emotion that counts. The tragedy and fear and bleakness of the young couple’s situation. It’s also worth noting that it’s the female character who carries our sympathies and the moral weight of the story. There are centuries’ of female struggle in her anguished one line outburst at the climax, where she begs the man to “please please please please please please please stop talking”.

‘Che Ti Dice La Patria’ (First published as ‘Italy – 1927’ in The New Republic and then collected in Men Without Women)

But Papa didn’t just rely on allusion to get his point across. Sometimes he gave it to you as blunt and forceful as a bull’s head ramming into your stomach at full charge. In this story Hemingway’s narrator and a friend drive into Italy two years after it has been taken over by Mussolini. They are not impressed. Hemingway understood fascists long before most others. Here he lays out their pettiness, hypocrisy, cruelty and stupidity with clinical precision.

Hemingway also knew what to do with fascists – which was to hate them, hard and cold and absolutely. This story is furious. It’s nasty. This weary bitterness of tone is only augmented by the knowledge that Hemingway had been wounded when fighting for the Italians in the first World War, and often written about its people with love. The fascists were Brexiting a place he held dear and he knew no good could come of it. It’s a warning we still need to heed.

‘In Another Country’ (First published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1927 and then collected in Men Without Women)

In fact, here is a story inspired by Hemingway’s earlier experiences in Italy. And an unanswerable demonstration of the futility and ugliness of war. How’s this for a first sentence:

In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.

 What these haunted, injured men do instead is work on machines that they are told will make them better – but which we readers know will barely help them at all. Meanwhile, we learn about their ruined relationships, their hopes as crushed as their limbs, their few pleasures, their frightening, empty, crippled future. All that takes up just five pages, plenty of those taken up in turn with descriptions of the useless medical procedures. Did I tell you Hemingway is a genius?

‘The Killers’ (First published as ‘The Matadors’ in Scribner’s Magazine in 1927 and then collected in Men Without Women)

It’s nearly all dialogue and it’s nearly all brutal. It’s a crime story where the crime isn’t committed – but the victims are nevertheless scarred and doomed. Two thugs enter a diner looking to kill a “Swede” who normally eats there in the evenings. They don’t find him – but that doesn’t make anyone any happier.

This is noir without the glamour, just the truth and darkness of situations where men intend to hurt other men. The sharp back and forth between the two would-be-killers inspired numerous films – but none of them had the cruel force of this story or its expansive overview of the problems in prohibition America.Hemingway himself said, “That story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote. I left out all Chicago, which is hard to do in 2951 words.” He did it though.

‘On the Quai at Smyrna’ (First published in the 1930 Scribner edition of Men Without Women as ‘Introduction by the Author’, re-titled as ‘On the Quai At Smyrna’ in The First Forty-nine Stories in 1938)

I’ve used up my first four selections with stories from Hemingway’s second major collection, Men Without Women, and that one probably isn’t even my favourite. For sheer, raw power, you can’t beatIn Our Time. Plenty of the stories in that slim book would nowadays be called Flash Fiction – especially the four- or five-line explosions of war-horror that intercut each the more complete stories. Even those full stories can be very short. ‘On the Quai Of Smyrna’ is a case in point. It totals less than 750 words, but it contains volumes on the pity and casual cruelty of war. It’s a black stream of horror: dead babies, women clinging onto their dead babies, women giving birth in the dark (“surprising how few of them died”) and pack animals having their legs broken and then being thrown into the water. “My word yes a most pleasant business” it concludes with sarcasm that doesn’t so much drip as gnaw into you like sulphuric acid.

‘Indian Camp’ (First published as ‘One Night Last Summer’ in ‘Works in Progress’ in The Transatlantic Review in 1924 and then collected in In Our Time in 1925)

Oh man. Oh god. Again, I don’t know how to describe this story without spoiling the awful tension it produces. You might have to take my word on this one. It starts with a lovely description of a doctor and his son making paddling their way across a lake to a shanty where “inside on a bunk” a “young Indian woman” has been “trying to have her baby for two days” – and oh man, oh god. We see it through the eyes of the steadily-less-innocent boy as the doctor works and — that’s all you’re getting. So many of these stories are so artfully constructed that the only real way to understand them is to read them. But once again, it’s worth pointing out Hemingway’s sympathy for the woman and his admission of his own fear and vulnerability. Somewhere beneath the macho posturing, there was always something more beautiful.

‘Big Two Hearted River parts I and II’ (First published in This Quarter in 1925 and then collected in In Our Timein 1925)

This is a story about a man going fishing. He walks for a while, he pitches a tent, he sleeps, he wakes, he eats his breakfast, he goes to a river and he casts his line. Each detail is carefully and beautifully realised – and in that meticulous focus something magic happens. The story turns into everything that the writer isn’t describing; the worries he is so carefully avoiding, the pain and ruination of a young man who has… what? Well, you have to fill in your own spaces, but given the story’s position at the climax of a collection about the ravages of war and agonies of love, that isn’t too hard. We feel the weight of the story all the more because it doesn’t try to say what can’t be said. It’s a miracle of concision and precision and silence. (It’s also, incidentally, a very good story about fishing. You can enjoy Hemingway on all kinds of levels.)

‘Cross Country Snow’ (First published in The Transatlantic Review and then collected in In Our Time in 1925)

Yay! Ski-ing! I don’t even like skiing. But I love it when Papa describes it:

On the white below George dipped and rose and dipped out of sight. The rush and sudden swoop as he dropped down a steep undulation in the mountain side plucked Nick’s mind out and left him only the wonderful flying, dropping sensation in his body.

 Yes please. That’s the other thing about Hemingway. For all his pain and anger, and for everything he got wrong, he can still show you how good it can be to be alive.

‘Snows of Kilimanjaro’ (First published in Esquire in 1936 and then collected in The First Forty-nine Stories in 1938)

But then, there’s also death. And – oh boy – I just can’t. I know I’ve already busted through most sane adjective allowances in my last few descriptions, not to mention excited interjections, but: wow! This fucking story. Holy shit. Fuck me. God almighty. Oh wow. This is one hello of a good story. Just read it. And make sure you get to the end. Because after the most fearsome beginning and overview of the agony and waste of existence Papa gives you the most exhilarating, remarkable, unspeakably uplifting moment of beauty. Before crashing you right back down again and emptying out everything like a nuclear wind. This is 1930s Hemingway, after all, and he was pretty pissed off. But wow. Fuck. Wow. He could write.

‘A Clean Well Lighted Place’ (First published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1933 and then published in Winner Take Nothing in 1933)

Don’t just take the excessive praise from me though. Take it from James Joyce. He called A Clean Well-Lighted Place “one of the best short stories ever written.” And he would know. This one is an argument between two waiters about when to shut their café, which has just one person in it, nursing his drink, lingering as long as he can. One of the waiters is keen to go home. The other understands that home isn’t an easy place for some people to go to – and that they need the refuge of a “clean well-lighted place.”

In the waiters’ exchange, Hemingway conjures all the eternal howling and empty darkness of the universe and sets against it a bright café, and a drink and not being entirely alone for a little while longer. It is among the most beautifully heart-breaking things you will ever read.

‘Fifty Grand’ (First published in Atlantic in August 1927 and then published in Men Without Women in 1927)

Here’s the kind of macho story people who don’t read Hemingway expect him to write. A pumped-up, exciting, proto-Rocky training sequence in a boxer’s boot-camp, followed by a fight so vivid you can hear the thud of glove on skin, feel the fists pounding into your face. Except, of course, that’s not really the story. The real story is about compromise, endurance, shame and pain and human frailty. It’s sad and true and wonderful.

‘A Day’s Wait’ (First published in Winner Take Nothing in 1933)

Let’s end with something lovely. It’s the story of a nine-year-old boy who is ill and full of fear. So much fear that he can’t even talk about it. Still, his father sees that “he was evidently holding tight onto himself about something” and gently sets out finding out what. It’s quiet and tender. In its happy resolution, it’s even light-hearted. But with the kind of happiness that also brings tears of sadness and relief. Ah. Thanks Papa. You’ve made me feel human.

Introduction

Most of my life has been consumed by short stories. My first book, as editor, was a tribute to my love of the Pan Horror books. From there I started experimenting with the short form as a writer of three collections of Pan Horror tributes, homages, knock-offs; call them what you will. However, it’s through editing Best British Horror, first for Salt Publishing, then Newcon Press, that I’ve found my true calling as an editor, a compiler, a navigator to the myriad of nightmares that can be yours with a simple turn of the page. I suppose that every book I edit is my own personal anthology – however, to be given carte blanche like this has sent me into a mild panic. I can pick any short story I want? Where to begin, where to be…

‘Near Zennor’ by Elizabeth Hand

‘Near Zennor’ is a tale suffused with grief, and is the closest thing to a magician’s trick that you’ll find in fiction. Hand has written a note-perfect tale. The story is a gut-punch and out-Aickman’s Robert Aickman, the master of the weird tale. It concerns an American who finds a stash of letters left by his British wife, who has recently passed away. The letters reveal that she, along with two of her friends, when they were thirteen, visited an author called Richard Bennington, and the story goes down a very dark road.

The widower travels to Cornwall to solve the mystery and finds himself in a world that may not be our own. It’s a deeply disturbing tale – made all the more terrifying by the fact that the author says, “As my original author’s notes states, the inexplicable events that Evelyn experiences as a girl in fact happened to myself and two friends when we were 13. To this day, I have no explanation for them; I only know they actually occurred. For decades I’ve had that in the back of my mind as something to use in a story, and it finally all came together in ‘Near Zennor’”.

First published in A Book of Horrors, Jo Fletcher Books, 2011

‘Granny’s Grinning’ by Robert Shearman

Rob Shearman is one of the only people on the planet whose stories consistently surprise, shock, delight, horrify and nauseate me all at the same time. ‘Granny’s Grinning’, I’m loathe to say, made me throw up in my mouth a little, which will no doubt make Rob’s day. It’s only because what came before in the tale was simply a normal domestic family Christmas story that just happened to have a suit that could turn you into a real life zombie. Then, when Granny gets vocal, the tale goes from amusing to all-out horrifying and, once read, it’ll never be forgotten.

First published in The Dead That Walk, Ulysses Press, 2009. Collected in Remember Why You Fear Me, ChiZine, 2012

‘When Charlie Sleeps’ by Laura Mauro

Laura Mauro, who this past Sunday won a British Fantasy Award in the ‘Best Short Story’ category, is in my mind one of the forefront authors of this new ‘Golden Age’ of genre writing. ‘When Charlie Sleeps’ is a tale about a creature in a bath who controls the mood of the city of London and the three women who look after him. That this story is inspired by the Skunk Anansie song ‘Charlie Big Potato’ makes the tale even more weird and gives an added dimension to the decay and chaos in the story.

First Published in Black Static #37, 2013. Collected in Best British Horror 2014, Salt

‘All That You Love Will Be Carried Away’ by Stephen King

King is a rite of passage, and he certainly was mine when I first read Pet Sematary at a very impressionable age. However the older I got, the more I enjoy his short stories – they are more delicate than his verbose novels and they give you King at his very, very best. I don’t know what it is about this tale of a salesman who collects graffiti in bathrooms while on his travels – but it grabbed me when I read it in his collection Everything’s Eventual, in 2002. I read it once a year and it’s a beautiful, poignant tale with an almost happy, almost suicidal ending.

First published in The New Yorker, January, 2001. Collected in Everything’s Eventual, Sribner/Simon & Schuster 2012

‘Skullpocket’ by Nathan Ballingrud

By far the best story in this anthology (I’m not lying when I say the other tales in this book simply didn’t stand a chance when the editor included this one), ‘Skullpocket’ features Jonathan Wormcake, the Eminent Corpse of Hob’s Landing – and Nathan builds a world that is extremely tilted, but man alive I would pay whatever price I had to visit it. It starts like a piece of ‘high-pulp’ (the best compliment I could ever give) and you’re unsure if you’re reading a children’s story and then… you forget about what it is or isn’t and just read it. It’s a horror yarn that has a horrific ending that completely works – and that’s a rare thing, indeed.

First published in Nightmare Carnival, 2014. Read it online here

‘Now Showing at the Roxy’ by Harry E. Turner

Harry E. Turner is probably better known for the trove of stories he gave to Pan Horror editor Herbert van Thal, but my favourite story of his is found in the rival series that was edited by Mary Danby. Harry is the most skilled author out there at mixing his horror with comedy, and his stories, more than any other, have influenced my own writing.

‘Roxy’ contains many spoof films such as The Son Of The Thing From The Slime, The Return Of The Curse Of the Hunchback Werewolf, The Nymphomaniac Mummy From 20,000 Fathoms Beneath The Earth’s Crust Meets The Boneless Snakeman, I Was A Sex Mad Teenage Vampire Dolly Bird From Outer Space, Bluebeard’s Journey Into The Intestines Of A Whale, I Was Dracula’s Transvestite Masseur and The Heart Transplant, Voodoo Drug Addict, Thigh Booted Nun Meets Abbot & Costello On Ice – and if that doesn’t tickle your funnybone, you’re probably inhuman…ah!

First published in the 10th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories, 1977

‘Our Man in the Sudan’ by Sarah Pinborough

It’s a real shame that Sarah Pinborough doesn’t write short stories anymore (one was published in 2016, her first since 2012) – but as she is now a rather awesome author of novels such as The Death House, 13 Minutes and Behind Her Eyes she has a good excuse. ‘Our Man’ is a tale of Middle-East supernatural intrigue. It is exquisitely detailed, and Sarah’s use of language to create a genuine frisson of unease in only several thousand words just makes me miss her short fiction all the more.

First published in The Second Humdrumming Book of Horror Stories, 2008. Collected in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Robinson, 2010. Read it online here