‘Netherwood’ by Stephen Volk

I was lucky enough to be a beta reader on this, the final novella in Stephen Volk’s mind-blowing trilogy of works which had previously explored the lives of Peter Cushing and Alfred Hitchcock. ‘Netherwood’ is about two men, the jingoistic occult-author Dennis Wheatley and ‘The Great Beast’, Aleister Crowley. Steve creates a fictional account that you will believe actually happened by the end of the novella. Volk evokes the time, the sensibilities, the craziness and the inherent danger in dealing with a once great bull, bloodied but not yet done by the matador’s sword. A stunning work.

First published in The Dark Masters Trilogy, PS Publishing, 2018

‘The Clinic’ by Alex White

Without a shadow of a doubt the most horrifying and heart-wrenching story in the whole of the Pan Horrors, written by the pseudonymous ‘Alex White’ – a house name used by several Pan Horror authors, but in this case I believe ‘The Clinic’ was written by Conrad Hill. The story is about a young girl, Ellen, who is sent to a correction facility in France by her family for no reason in particular and is ‘corrected’. The last paragraph is among the most affecting in horror literature,

First published in The Fourteenth Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1977

‘The Queen in the Yellow Wallpaper’ by Lynda E. Rucker

I bought this story from Lynda when I was putting together The Burning Circus anthology for the British Fantasy Society. This story is about a writer who is creating a play much in the same vein as the ‘The King in Yellow’ written by Robert W. Chambers. Rucker writes pure ‘Southern Gothic’ and is one of our great genre treasures; I was beyond honoured to publish her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange in 2013.

First published in The Burning Circus, 2013

‘The Judge’s House’ by Bram Stoker

The first horror short story I ever read, at primary school when I was ten. It was in a small red leather book, almost bible-sized, and I read it in a deserted classroom one lunchtime. I never forgot it and became rather obsessed with the story over the years. I turned it into a screenplay and tried to film it as my entry to a film school in Edinburgh (sadly, I never got in) and in 2010 wrote a sequel to the story called ‘Reconvened: The Judge’s House.’

Malcolm Malcolmson is a maths student who wants a bit of peace and quiet and hires the ‘Judge’s House’. A kindly cleaner does the exact same thing that is done to Jonathan Harker in Dracula and warns him away from the Judge’s House as clearly BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. Malcolm happily ignores her warnings and soon takes a long drop from a short rope. This story is still terrifying and takes me right back to that classroom thirty-two years ago.

First published in Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, December 1891. Collected in Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, Routledge, 1914. Available to read online here.)

‘The Crow Palace’ by Priya Sharma

Priya is a gifted author and her stories remind me of the works of Angela Carter; she evokes that same kind of mystery, terror and awe as AC. If you haven’t read anything by her, please buy Priya’s debut collection All the Marvellous Beasts (2018) which contains this story. ‘The Crow Palace’ is one of the better ‘quiet horrors’ that I’ve read in recent years. Sharma’s use of language is rich and lush, the interactions between characters aren’t stilted; their conversations ebb and flow like a dawn tide and it’s the perfect story to round off my personal anthology. Its disquiet will haunt your thoughts.

First published in Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, Pegasus, 2017

Introduction

In one way or another, my writing life has been bound up with the Creative Writing programme at the University of East Anglia, so this is a personal anthology with UEA as its theme. It isn’t intended as a plug for the programme. In part, it’s an acknowledgement of my indebtedness, since it’s been such a privilege to work with the writers I’ve worked with. I only regret having to leave out some personal favourites for whom I can’t invent a UEA connection: Richard Ford, Anthony Giardina, Tessa Hadley, James Kelman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Agnes Owens, and a recent discovery, Alix Ohlin.

‘First Love, Last Rites’ by Ian McEwan

As an unhappy art student, aged 18, I wandered into a stationery shop one lunchtime and noticed First Love, Last Rites on a carousel of Picador paperbacks. The carousel was a new thing. So too was Picador. So too was Ian McEwan. The cover image of a naked girl lying on a bed in the soft light of dawn appealed to the habitually lovelorn late-adolescent I then was. I wasn’t a book-buyer, but I spent my lunch money on that book – it cost me £1.25 – and seemed to find something of myself in each of the stories. It was only later that I realised that most of them concerned incest, masturbation, the killing of children. By then I was a student on the MA in Creative Writing at UEA, attempting to emulate this title story. Ian McEwan was my literary first love. Malcolm Bradbury, our teacher on the MA, sounded his last rites when he said one day in class, “The problem with Ian’s recent work is that he’s become too aware of the consequences of his own imagination.”

In First Love, Last Rites, Picador, 1976

‘A Conversation With My Father’ by Grace Paley

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say I left art school because of Ian McEwan. I applied to do a Literature BA at UEA instead, and in my first class I was introduced to this Grace Paley story by a young lecturer called Rosemary Jackson. I fell in love with both of them. Paley was a generation older than McEwan, a New York Jew, a lifelong anarchist, activist, feminist, and her voice couldn’t have been more different from his: sassy and wise, sorrowful, exuberant. I read everything she’d written, and spent the next three decades regretting there wasn’t more. But as she said, “Art is too long and life is too short.” The enduring appeal of this story, and most of her stories, lies in its rejection of plot, the tidy tales her father enjoys. Paley’s fictional alter-ego wants to please him, but she despises plot – “the absolute line between two points” – because “it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

First published in New American Review, 1972. Collected in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Virago, 1979 and Collected Stories, Virago, 1984

‘The Intensive Care Unit’ by JG Ballard

Soon after I graduated from my BA I sent a short story – my first – to Ambit magazine and received a hand-written rejection note from the fiction editor, JG Ballard: “well writ but not good enough.” I was thrilled. I’d recently read The Atrocity Exhibition and decided that he was my new favourite author. Written in the more realist mode of his earlier and later novels, the story ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ is typically prescient, and typically Ballardian in its tropes of surveillance, violence, perverse science, and desire mediated by technology. In this story all human interaction, including family life, is conducted remotely by “television hook-up”, until the narrator – a doctor, of course – makes the mistake of arranging finally to meet his wife and children in the flesh. There is a lot of flesh.

In Myths of the Near Future, Jonathan Cape, 1982. Also in The Complete Stories, Vol 2, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘Why Don’t You Dance’ by Raymond Carver

McEwan, Paley and Ballard were my models, and I spent most of my time as an MA student at UEA trying – and failing – to emulate them. If Malcolm Bradbury had an opinion on this he didn’t say, but my other MA teacher was Angela Carter, and she did. I submitted a single page of single-spaced typewriting that attempted to be McEwan, Paley and Ballard all at once. “Oh Andrew,” she sighed, “why don’t you just write about what you know.” She gave me a copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. She had no use for it, but assumed I might – and I did. In the years that followed it seemed that everyone aspired to be Raymond Carver, if they didn’t already aspire to be Angela Carter. For a short while I tried – and repeatedly failed – to emulate ‘Why Don’t You Dance’. It’s still mysterious to me how it works, but when I began to write about what I knew, in a voice that sounded more plausibly like mine, the permission came from Raymond Carter – via Angela Carter – and has much to do with his embrace of the everyday and the quixotic in the quotidian.

First published in Quarterly West, 1978. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1983, as well as Where I’m Calling From and Collected Stories

‘A Regular Thing’ by Lynne Bryan

I met my wife Lynne on the MA in Creative Writing, and have a vivid memory – apparently entirely false – of reading this story in our workshop. We became each other’s first reader, though the exchange was hardly fair. For nearly six years I tortured Lynne with barely-altered pages from my first novel Pig – the same page, a comma changed – and sulked when she couldn’t see the improvement. In return, I was rewarded with these wonderful short stories. Several of them were spun from the day-to-day facts of our life together, in the process becoming more comic and more surreal. We were often quite poor, and the title story is based on our experience of queuing for free hand-outs of surplus EEC butter and cheese. This story, ‘A Regular Thing’, in which a young woman charges her lover for sex, isn’t autobiographical. It was much anthologised and later made into a prize-winning short film in Denmark.

First published in First Fictions: Introduction 11, Faber & Faber, 1992. Collected in New Writing 3, Minerva, 1994 and Envy At The Cheese Handout, Faber & Faber, 1995

‘By the Canal’ by KJ Orr

In several ways I was one of the failures of the UEA MA. I drifted in at one end and drifted out at the other. I didn’t know what I was doing, and it was years before I published anything – unsurprisingly, because I hardly wrote anything. It was 20 years before I returned as a Royal Literary Fund writing fellow, which eventually led to a job on the faculty, which led to my occupying Angela Carter’s old office and Malcolm Bradbury’s old job. Katherine (KJ) Orr was in one of my earliest workshop groups, and stood out not just for the poise, elegance and often surprising violence of her short stories, but for her commitment to the short form. She certainly did know what she was doing. Many students begin the MA writing short fiction and, as they see it, ‘graduate’ to writing a novel. For Katherine, there is no graduation. The forms are different, and differently challenging. Eight years after she submitted ‘By The Canal’ to our workshop she included it in Light Box, her debut collection. It remains as enigmatic, and subtle, and shocking, as when I first read it, and the collection is a near-perfect vindication of Katherine’s dedication to the art of what she calls ‘shorts’.

In Light Box, Daunt, 2016. An excerpt was published in Cheque Enclosed, UEA, 2007

‘The Elasticity of Bone’ by DW Wilson

In 2010 the Booker Foundation inaugurated a scholarship at UEA that remains the most generous we have to offer. The recipient is chosen by the tutors on the strength of the writing in their MA application portfolio, and Dave (DW) Wilson was our unanimous choice for the first award – largely on the strength of this story. Born in Canada, a graduate of the University of Victoria, he was then in his early 20s, and already appeared to have found his voice and his themes. Dave writes to a particular cadence, his sentences beautifully weighted. He registers the shifting weather of moods, and the eloquence of the small gesture. Above all he finds the soft spots in the armour of blue-collar masculinity. His stories reek of maleness, and sadness, and here in ‘The Elasticity of Bone’ he finds a way of speaking about the love of a father and son through the medium of judo. They fight, and it means the opposite of fighting. Soon after graduation this became the opening story in his debut collection.

In Once You Break A Knuckle, Hamish Hamilton, 2011

‘Who Will Water the Wallflowers?’ by Eliza Robinson

A couple of years after DW Wilson, his friend and fellow UVic graduate Eliza Robertson came to UEA from Canada, and was likewise our unanimous choice for the Booker scholarship. I’d taught Dave in the MA workshop and felt we spoke – and wrote – in the same language. Eliza writes – she sings – in quite a different language. I couldn’t teach her; she already knew too much that I didn’t know. Her virtues are relatively easy to list: the density and lyricism of her prose, the surprise of her sentences, the precision of her noticing, the structural adventurousness, thematic seriousness, the obliqueness. The effect is less easy to describe, but Emily Dickinson’s often-invoked poem comes close: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”, which is what this story does. ‘Who Will Water the Wallflowers?’ is lushly atmospheric, ominous, poetic and strange – and like several other stories in her debut collection, intimate with vulnerability, loneliness and loss.

First published in The Walrus, 2014 and available online here, in Wallflowers, Bloomsbury, 2015