Year: 2019

‘Escape from Spiderhead’ by George Saunders

On the surface this is a dystopian short story about the corporate abuse of science. Convicts with relatives able to raise the necessary funds can transfer from prison onto a drug testing project. Jeff, the narrator, takes advantage of the scheme and dons a MobiPakTM, which enables researchers to chemically modify his moods, passions, sexual arousal, feelings of attachment and verbal eloquence. As the experiment takes an even more alarming turn, Jeff realises his survival depends on escaping from the drug regime. A lesser writer might have produced a mere socio-political satire from this material: those elements are present, but George Saunders also peels away the comfortable delusion that we control their own behaviour. The story also highlights the plasticity of our beliefs, attachments and personalities. ‘Escape from Spiderhead’ is by turns a fascinating thriller and a deeply unsettling contemplation of human psychology.

First published in The New Yorker in December 2010 and collected in Tenth of December, Bloomsbury, 2013

‘Marionettes’ by Claire Dean

‘Marionettes’ does for Prague what ‘Don’t Look Now’ does for Venice. For Claire Dean it’s both a living city and a territory of the imagination: her knack for terse but memorable portrayal of landscape and built environment makes a massive contribution to the story’s mounting sense of unease and dislocation. The unnamed protagonist and her partner, Karl, return to the city after a gap of seven years, revisiting key landmarks and reminiscing about the previous holiday. She discovers an unstaffed marionette shop and, on a visit without Karl, finds a pair of marionettes that resemble the pair of them. When Karl doesn’t believe her, she attempts to find the shop once more but its location seems to be curiously provisional. It can only be found when she isn’t looking for it. The narrative is peppered with hints, overt and symbolic, that the woman has become stifled by her relationship and the final segment is an alarming, dreamlike recapitulation of this theme.

First published as a Nightjar Press chapbook, 2011 and collected in The Museum of Shadows and Reflections, Unsettling Wonder, 2016

‘Mr F is Mr F’ by JG Ballard

This early tale by Ballard is a Freudian nightmare. Charles Freeman is rapidly losing weight, getting smaller and looking younger. At first, he believes this alarming physical transformation is psychosomatic and attempts to hide it from his pregnant wife. As the story unfolds his metamorphosis begins to limit his freedom, sap his energy and change the way people respond to him. The narrative style is more traditional than that of Ballard’s later stories, but it exhibits the same economy and energy of language. It also exhibits the author’s lifelong fascination with the overlap of weird and mundane aspects of perception. A crazy but strangely convincing story – once read never forgotten.

First published in Science Fantasy, Vol 16, No 48 in August 1961, and collected in The Complete Short Stories of JG Ballard: Volume 1, Fourth Estate, 2014

‘The Bloody Chamber’ by Angela Carter

On one level ‘The Bloody Chamber’ is a feminist remix of the tale of Bluebeard, but the narrative has other layers. There is no straightforward ‘key’ to its mysteries: it is packed with psychoanalytic imagery, mythic symbols and literary allusions, including embedded homages to de Sade as well as Perrault. Carter relocates the story to the coast of fin-de-siècle France. The narrator, who has recently married a wealthy Marquis, enters a forbidden room in his castle and makes a horrific and life-threatening discovery. There’s a gripping conclusion, revealing whether she escapes or becomes a victim of uxoricide, but this tale of gothic horror also provokes reflection on the darker aspects of passion and sex.

First published in The Bloody Chamber, Victor Gollancz, 1979. Currently available from Vintage Classics

‘The Ceiling’ by Kevin Brockmeier

A tragicomic tale of self-deception, impending doom and the limits of human communication. Mitch, the narrator, is oblivious to the unhappiness of his wife, Melissa, and she is seemingly unaware of the imminent threat posed by ‘the ceiling’, a square of “perfect darkness … without blemish or flaw” spotted in a bright sky on the day of their son’s seventh birthday. As ‘the ceiling’ looms closer and closer, Brockmeier ratchets the sense of threat and futility. As the quotidian and fantastic collide, there are elliptical and parallel conversations, almost Pinteresque in nature, but with menace replaced by melancholy. Brockmeier’s central conceit might refer to the auto-destructive and stifling nature of relationships, it might acknowledge the self-imposed limits of modern life or it might highlight the tendency of people to become obsessed with their own misery. 

First published in McSweeney’s, issue 7, 2001 and collected in Things That Fall from the Sky, Vintage Contemporaries, 2002

‘The Door in the Wall’ by HG Wells

In this sad, strange and ambiguous story, Wallace, a career politician climbing to the upper heights of Disraeli’s ‘greasy pole’, is haunted by something he experienced at the age of five. As a lonely and unsettled infant, he opens a green door in a white wall in West Kensington, and wanders into a place of wonder, security and happiness. He joins the games of kindly playmates and mingles happily with panthers and capuchin monkeys. The schoolboy Wallace fails to relocate the door and suffers the derision of his classmates. As a successful adult he swerves several opportunities to re-open it, perhaps because he has urgent demands on his time, or because he is a respected public figure who no longer needs the comforts and distractions of the garden. Or maybe he fears the garden never really existed. As a Cabinet Minister, his longing for the garden becomes stronger and he is torn between the competing demands of escape and duty. His fate, telegraphed from the start, is sealed by his inability to reconcile and the spiritual and material. That’s how I read the story as a schoolkid in the 1970s. I’m now less certain I fully understand it, but I still think it’s perfect.

First published in The Daily Chronicle on 14 July 1906 and collected in The Complete Short Stories of HG Wells, Phoenix Giant, 1998. Available online here

‘The Happy Man’ by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem follows in the footsteps of Dante and consigns his narrator to Hell. In this case the character is dead but re-animated to allow him to support his family. Occasionally, he is transformed into a small boy and returned to his personal hell, a zone populated by archetypes such as the witch, the robot maker, the wolfman and a terrifying sexual predator called The Happy Man. During his periodic recalls to hell, his family must deal with his presence as a zombie. His guilt over this is increased by his 12-year-old son treating his father’s hell as if it were a computer game and sedulously drafting a map. The story has a metafictional aspect: the unfolding of the narrative leads to a redefinition of hell for the narrator. I won’t reveal whether this proves to be a blessing or a curse. It’s a deeply unsettling story, leavened with strands of sparkling wit: the narrator is informed that his posthumous detachment from human engagement will not be a problem at his workplace because “Most people won’t know the difference.”

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1991 and collected in The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, Faber and Faber, 2002 and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine: 30th Anniversary Anthology, Tachyon, 2007

‘The Tiniest Atom’ by Sarah Schofield

Sarah Schofield read an extract from this tale at the 2016 Ilkley Literature Festival, and it blew me away. It still does. It’s the only story here that explicitly considers the idea of determinism. Originally commissioned for an anthology based on famous scientific thought experiments, it concerns ‘Laplace’s Demon’, in which knowledge of the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe enables the future to be calculated. Schofield weaves this abstract notion into a touching tale of wartime loss and peacetime regeneration. Frank returns from World War One, visits the son and widow of his comrade Ted and becomes part of their household. He adopts Ted’s roles as lover and father, carries out his jobs and pursues his hobbies. In flashbacks to the trenches, Ted explains ‘Laplace’s Demon’ to Frank in the chaos and bloodshed of war. Later we see Frank working with Ted’s son Thomas to reassemble his fallen comrade’s orrery – a symbol of the predictability of life and behaviour, and an emblem of emotional recovery from horror and destruction. Frank’s life may appear to be fully plotted, but he makes a curiously life affirming decision to walk in Ted’s shoes. 

First published in Thought X, Fictions and Hypotheticals, Comma Press, 2017. Available online here

Introduction

Remembering favourite short stories and not just relying on recent reads is always the balance, the deal we have to strike with books, films and many other things. The pressure of the now, the brain elevator that stores our yesterdays on lower floors of recall has to be resisted, or at least tempered by a resilience of memory! 

(I’ve missed Thomas Hardy because of memory elevator problems, but he writes great short stories which I haven’t read since childhood, would love to read more African and Asian short stories, and I seem to remember Peter Carey writing some corkers, but alas all erased from hard drive, and finally medieval ghost stories which I love but can’t remember either!)

In no particular order, other than that of (trust me) freestyle recollection…

‘A Pair of Eyeglasses’ by Anna Maria Ortese, translated by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee

Literally how a child sees the world, another tale from Europe’s recent past of poverty, lest we forget how recently we were like ‘the others’ that fortress Europe seems intent on turning away. A girl literally made sick by seeing things clearly. Reminds me of the Bushwhack Bill song ‘Ever so Clear’: “I had to lose an eye in order to see things clearly.” Quite.

First published in English in The Bay is Not Naples, Collins, 1953, most recently republished as Evening Descends on the Hills, Pushkin, 2018. Also collected in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Penguin, 2019. Available online here

‘The Wedding Trip’ by Cesare Pavese

An elegant, languid, timeless almost noirish tale of how we fuck each other up in the name of love and how money fucks everything, the absence of it, poverty perverting our relations with those we should love, and what is love anyway. As only the Italians can write, timeless.

First published in English in Festival Night, Peter Owen, 1964, then in The Leather Jacket, Quartet, 1980 and The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Penguin, 2019

‘The Last Picture Show’ by Ryu Murakami

A terrible snob at times, I love the fact that not many people know Ryu as opposed to his more famous namesake Haruki. As the Stones were (for some) to the Beatles, this Murakami is the Rolling Stones, or better still for me, the Small Faces of that face off. His novels are mind-blowing and his shorts let us glimpse corners of the bigger picture that is modern/post war Japanese pop culture.

First published in Ryu’s Cinematique, 1985. First published in translation in Tokyo Decadence, translated by Ralph McCarthy, Kurodahan Press, 2015. Available to read online here

‘Inakeen’ by Wendy Erskine

This collection blew me away by how observation of the parochial can be so simply amplified into a bigger picture, resonating with the world as it is. This story, of loneliness, imagination and the power of the other to fascinate us, is funny sad, and being written in a minor key allows us to expand on it, bringing our imagination to bear on hers…

In Sweet Home, Stinging Fly, 2018/Picador, 2019