‘William Wilson’ by Edgar Allan Poe

(b) Short story as doubling of one sort or another, or several sorts all at once:

In his essay-cum-flowchart ‘Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories’ (which bears more than a passing resemblance to Borges’s Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), Roberto Bolaño boils it down to ‘just read everything by Poe.’ If you want to boil that down further, just read ‘William Wilson’, a story which manages to be both the essence of Poe and at the same time, somehow, something quite different from the Poe most people have read. It’s a perfect short story that shouldn’t be nearly as good as it is. It’s a deadly serious comedy and a life story in ten pages.

Mainly though, it’s a doppelgänger story. I’d argue it’s the doppelgänger story, except I haven’t read all the other doppelgänger stories ever written, so I can’t. But it feels like it should be, and has certainly been claimed as prime influencer for many subsequent doppelgänger tales by many different writers. A man relates the sorry tale of his life, and for the purposes of convenience (he says) he’ll call himself William Wilson, his real name being, by now, absolute dirt. At school he discovers there is another William Wilson (presumably also not his real name), whose birth and school-starting days exactly match his own. This other WW becomes both friend and foe, equal and superior, until a final yet ambiguous confrontation sends them both on their individual ways. Years pass. Their paths cross again, and again, and then again, and while the narrator slides inexorably towards debauchery and dissolution, his enigmatic double never fails to shine a searing light on his sins. It doesn’t go well, not least because Poe’s narrator is, as so many of Poe’s narrators are, clearly bonkers. But he tells his tale as a sort of one-sided diacritical discourse with himself playing both parts, and it’s too rationally told to be a straightforward case of madness à la Tell-Tale Heart. As more than one commentator has noted, ‘Will I am, offspring of Will’ is hardly a randomly chosen pseudonym under the circumstances.

First published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, October, 1839. Collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Lea & Blanchard, 1840, and The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin Classics, 2006. Available to read online here

‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ by JG Ballard

Talking of doubling: there is a chapter in Ballard’s 1967 fix-up-collection-collage-novel-anomaly-thing The Atrocity Exhibition titled ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ which is entirely different to this 1976 story; and yet also, because it’s Ballard, isn’t, quite. This ‘Notes’ though is probably my all-time favourite Ballard story, because it is made entirely of footnotes, and I love footnotes. Or possibly it’s that I love footnotes because of this story. Whatever.

An eighteen-word synopsis is all that remains of an “undiscovered document” detailing the final breakdown of one Dr Robert Loughlin, and events associated therewith (and just pause there a second to consider that whole “undiscovered document” notion). The story consists of those eighteen words and a paragraph-long footnote for each one of them (including for the two ‘a’s, two ‘his’s, and an ‘and’) that gradually eke out the details of the various characters’ tragic final meeting at Gatwick airport. Each of the characters is named for an aircraft manufacturer, except for Loughlin’s lover who is called Leonora Carrington (but who isn’t the Leonora Carrington, or at least I don’t think so). About halfway through is it noted of Loughlin, who is obsessed with man-powered flight, that “for some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination.” By this point, it’s clear that Ballard is having fun with his own mythology. We are then told that the obviously bonkers Dr Loughlin had a habit of meticulously footnoting every single word of large pharmaceutical indexes, usually with “imaginary aviation references”, and it is at this point you realise that you’re in an ouroboros of a story and that there’s no way out.

First published in Bananas, issue number unknown, 1976, and in RE/Search, No. 8/9, 1984. Collected in War Fever, Paladin, 1991, and The Complete Short Stories Volume Two, Flamingo, 2001

‘Something by the Sea’ by Jeffrey Ford

(d) Short story as infinite and unending dream:

I remember reading an interview once in which Jeffrey Ford raved about the unique perfection of ‘William Wilson’, but by that point there was very little that could make me love either that one Poe story or any of Jeffrey Ford’s stories more than I already did. How no one has yet chosen a Jeffrey Ford story for A Personal Anthology, I have absolutely no idea.

‘Something by the Sea’ is a gorgeously convoluted hymn to Oneiros that starts very simply, with an elderly man leading his niece and her dog to a perfect spot under a willow tree for a bit of family storytelling. There are fireflies and lanterns and sweet treats. And a hookah. And the dog is called Mathematics, and speaks. Or maybe we’re into the dream by now, it’s (delightfully) unclear; as is whose dream it might be. There are pirates and goddesses and wars in strangely-named-yet-entirely -believable lands, and questions like “When you eat a brain, what does it taste like?” (and answers like “Bittersweet”), and most of it happens on or under or over the sea, and all of it is Uncle Archer’s story for Maggie, and the hard, awful truth in the cracks of it is to do with Maggie’s mother’s madness. It is beautiful and sad and immense and endless, and completely insane and entirely dream-logical, and Jeffrey Ford is a magician, and you should read him.

First published in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, Golden Gryphon Press, 2002, then in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November, 2002

‘Settling the World’ by M John Harrison

(e) Short story as sacred physical artefact:

Someone — I forget who; certainly not me — once said that Jeffrey Ford was the American M John Harrison. Which, like most such comparisons, sort of works and also almost entirely doesn’t. ‘Settling the World’ is a case in point. It has the wonky, left-field, yet entirely natural-seeming inventiveness of Ford’s early stories, mixed in with a sort of John-Buchan-meets-Saki archness, and topped off with something incurably bitter. But it’s Harrison’s preternatural precision that marks it as entirely his own.

“With the discovery of God on the far side of the Moon, and the subsequent gigantic and hazardous towing operation that brought Him back to start His reign anew, there began on Earth, as one might assume, a period of far-reaching change.”

As one might assume, indeed. Oxlade, our Departmental hero, an odd cross between Harry Palmer and Richard Hannay, is sent out to investigate goings-on along God’s Motorway, the mysterious miles-wide divine link-road that has formed ex nihilobetween the Thames Estuary and the industrial Midlands (Harrison does love to traumatise genre tropes, in this case the beloved Big Dumb Object of hard sci-fi). Oxlade’s nemesis, retired foreign spy Estrades, is also there, digging around and causing trouble. It’s all a bit of an old school cloak-and-dagger hoot with extra weirdness thrown in, until they get onto the Motorway itself and Estrades’s real plan is set in motion. It doesn’t go well. Trying to blow up the Umwelt of God never does, and even that is far from the end of Oxlade’s travails.

This is easily one of my favourite Harrison stories, even though, like the Poe, it’s a bit of an odd one out for him (it was originally written for an anthology of ‘utopian science fiction’ but Harrison really doesn’t do topias, whether u or dys; what he does do is something that stretches the grimy mundane and the gnarly weird directly across each other and as far as either will go without quite snapping; sometimes even further). But it’s also my favourite because it’s in my copy of The Ice Monkey that cost me £5.99 in the mid-90s and that the man himself signed, with great down-to-earth friendliness and aplomb, at a reading at The Horse Hospital in London in 2013. While, as per Oxlade, it’s almost never good to meet your God, it was, in this case, a sheer and genuine pleasure to meet my writing god.

The book itself is, of course, now in a hermetically sealed bulletproof glass case in a time-locked vault in Zürich.

First published in The New Improved Sun, Harper & Row, 1975. Collected in The Ice Monkey and Other Stories, Unwin, 1988, Things That Never Happen, Gollancz, 2004, and Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, Comma Press, 2020

‘Down by the Water’ by PJ Harvey

(f) Short story as weird gothic blues confessional rock ballad:

In a blog post about ‘interesting sf & good fantasy’, M John Harrison cites PJ Harvey’s 1996 B-side ‘Who Will Love Me Now?’ and it’s a fair point: songs can be epic dark fantasies too (I mean, have you listened to Tom Waits’s ‘What’s He Building in There?’?). I prefer Harvey’s ‘Down by the Water’ though, a dirge-like thing of wheezing guitars and Hammer-horror violins that follows a woman who drowns her baby girl in the river and then pleads with the river’s deities to bring her back in one piece. Or rather, to bring back all the pieces of her, so that the deranged woman can herself commit the required resurrection?

“Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter”

To be honest, it’s all a bit unclear, which is what makes it all the more horrifying and grimly compelling. It’s a beautiful song about ugly things, and it makes you crave to read the story it’s based on, and then you listen to it again and realise you’ve just heard the whole thing, entire.

First published as the lead single from the album To Bring You My Love, both Townhouse Records, 1995. You can watch the video online here

‘The Women Men Don’t See’ by James Tiptree Jr aka Alice B Sheldon

(g) Short story as manifest sleight of hand:

Another spy story that becomes an alien story, except this time neither of those is actually the point, because the spy telling the story is really the alien, at least from the point of view of the people he’s telling the story about, and the aliens are the spies and are a tiny bit lame, to be honest, like out-of-their-depth Boy Scouts lost in the jungle, or in this case the mango swamps of Belize.

Alice Bradley Sheldon wrote critically and commercially successful science fiction under the pseudonym of James Tiptree Jr, and no one knew for a decade. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ is written utterly convincingly from a standardly privileged 1970s man’s point of view: the women in the story are there, he unthinkingly assumes, for his benefit, to be interested in him, to be attracted to him, or at least seduced by him, to care for him when he’s injured, to back him up when he recounts the tale of their adventure, etc; the women are there to see the men, not the other way around.

Except the women — Ruth Parsons and her daughter Althea — are in fact the tale’s true protagonists, and ordinarily arrogant, blinkered, out-of-his-depth Don Fenton is an unwanted sidekick, barely a bit-part in their story. We just happen to be listening to his (hopelessly skewed) version of events. The best part of this is that all the macho male genre critics of the time assumed Tiptree was a man, and praised ‘his’ writing for its Hemingway-esque qualities, its eloquent capturing of the true male spirit, and so on, completely missing that they were being perfectly skewered just as much as pointless feckless Fenton. As Sheldon’s biographer Julie Phillips notes, ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ is about the psychic damage caused by having to see the world through men’s eyes, and thereby to understand how little you are, yourself, truly seen.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December, 1973. Collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, Gollancz, 2014

‘Nurse’s Song’ by Louise Glück

(h) Short story as lyric poem:

“As though I’m fooled. That lacy body managed to forget
That I have eyes, ears; dares to spring her boyfriends on the child.”

It’s impossible to do this one justice in a commentary that’s going to end up three times longer than the poem; really I should just quote the whole thing, but I don’t think that’s allowed. It’s a classic kitchen-sink, upstairs-downstairs tale of Edwardian melodrama, ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ set in pre-WWI Bloomsbury, except it’s told from the nursemaid’s point of view and with stunning economy. If a short story is a novel with all the unnecessary words taken out, then this poem is a short story with all of its unnecessary words utterly excised. Glück’s body of work encompasses many of these stripped-down narratives — ‘Archipelago’ for instance is The Odyssey reset as a terrifying 11-line micro-horror-story. ‘Nurse’s Song’ hovers on the edge of jealousy and vengeance without descending into either, and in ten lines of good-hearted plaint (but with a stinging kick at the end) tells a whole tale of decadence and deceit and hubris, and of what that might do to a child of such a marriage, and of how only the unnoticed servant can see the damage or care enough to do anything about it.

Collected in Firstborn, The New American Library, 1968, and in Poems 1962-2020, Penguin Classics, 2021

‘Hilda’s Wedding’ by Elizabeth Jolley

(i) Short story as something that is fabulous and broken:

“Smallhouse and Gordonpole polished the whole hospital every night. It took them all night. They emptied the bins too and they were allowed to smoke which was fair enough when you saw what was sometimes thrown away from the operating theatres.”

Elizabeth Jolley was an English expatriate Australian writer who was originally a nurse, and said about both professions that they “require a gaze which is searching and undisturbedly compassionate and yet detached.” As both nurse and writer (and English expat) I could not agree more. It’s not always a comfortable position to be in — the inside outsider — but it’s inescapable. It’s probably why I chose nursing when I realised I didn’t have the balls to commit to writing.

‘Hilda’s Wedding’ is classic Jolley: innocent yet biting, playful yet profound, mired in the everyday grime of common reality even as it spins off into a deeply weird and quintessentially Australian gothic surreal. Night Sister Bean (a recurring character in Jolley’s stories) is, everyone says, a witch. “‘Always stand between Sister Bean and the drip,’ they said.” Our unnamed narrator decides to test this hypothesis, but then the story steps sideways into poor simple “always pregnant” Hilda’s lack of a suitable husband, and while Sister Bean is away recovering after her own surgery, the hospital’s night crew stage an impromptu wedding. The Casualty Porter is pressed into service as the bridegroom, Smallhouse volunteers to give Hilda away, and Feegan the Warden conducts the ceremony, at one point mixing up the marriage liturgy with the funeral service to hilariously screwball effect. The kitchen boy gets rather left out, and is seen crying near the end, though the whole wedding was a play-act (we assume). And then suddenly in the last paragraph we’re back to Night Sister Bean and the possibility of karmic retribution for her infusion witchery. It’s such an oddball rattle-bag of a story, and entirely loveable, not least for its spot-on description of a large hospital:

“One block for hearts and one for chests, a block for bladders and one for bowels, a block for bones, one for women’s troubles, one for mental disorders, one for births and all for deaths.”

Written in 1976 and set easily 20 years earlier, it’s still a horribly accurate picture of where I work now.

First published in Looselicks, 1976. Collected in Woman in a Lampshade, Penguin Books Australia, 1983

‘Inescapable’ by Peach Momoko

(j) Short story as über-commercialised graphic design:

I cannot quote this story in any useful way, because it is wordless, and because it sits in its own unique place in the vast agglomeration of story and lore and canon that is the Star Wars universe. But after forty-five years and counting, that universe is now so utterly supersaturated into popular culture — is now literally inescapable — that it would be near impossible to find anyone who had so little idea of the storied elements of the Force, the Dark Side, and Darth Vader that they wouldn’t be able to understand and be moved by the vast terror and all-too-briefly grasped relief told in these twenty-four eye-poppingly gorgeous panels.

Honestly, I am fully Star-Wars-ed out. Glutted, satiated, full to puking. I don’t care how good the reviews are for Andor and Ahsoka, I’m done. But I have read this short graphic tale countless times now, and it will not leave me alone, because it’s a horror story, full-bore hellscape horror, with Vader as the demon at its heart, and what the hell is that doing in the Star Wars universe? The fact of it, and the awful meta-irony of the title, never mind the stare-at-it-for-hours monochrome-and-blood-red beauty of the art… it’s unsettling, and disruptive, and did I mention it’s gorgeous to look at? Graphic design as a terrifyingly wordless scream of a short story.

First published in Star Wars: Darth Vader – Black, White & Red #1, Marvel, April 2023

‘John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist’ by Rob Doyle

(k) Short story as obscenely unfiltered literary criticism:

On the Holyhead-to-Dublin ferry, a man called Rob — who may be Doyle, but probably isn’t, but possibly is, either way he’s the narrator, although he barely says anything himself — this man called Rob listens to his friend John-Paul Finnegan as Finnegan sets forth his theory of Irish literature, or more accurate to say his theory of what the Irish people, those who’ve stayed in Ireland at least, think of literature. Which is not a lot, reckons Finnegan, and spends pretty much the entire story bewailing this sorry state of affairs to friend Rob, and at one point to most of the rest of the ferry’s understandably terrified passengers, in a long, repetitive, looping, and utterly foul-mouthed rant. Finnegan uses Ulysses as his case in point, also coincidentally the name of the ferry on which the pair are embarked for home, and look, you could probably make a game attempt to divide Doyle’s story up into Joycean-Homeric chapters if you thought that would be fun, but, again, as previously mentioned, it consists mostly of Finnegan ranting to Rob and saying fuck a lot, so maybe not. The thing is, it’s laugh-out-loud hilarious even as it’s pitch-perfect bleak and sad about the realities of even attempting literature, never mind failing at it, and it’s spot-on about Joyce and his legacy even as Finnegan is furiously wrong-headed about the whole damned thing, and I think of all the current crop of genius Irish writers it’s Rob Doyle who is the true heir of Flann O’Brien, and so there.

Collected in This is the Ritual, Bloomsbury/The Lilliput Press, 2016. Available to read online here

‘A History of Violence’ by Olivia Laing

(l) Short story as art criticism, or possibly the other way around:

Olivia Laing is just about my favourite writer at the moment; reading The Lonely Cityand To the River have played a significant part in keeping me sane over the last two years. So maybe favourite’s not the right word. She is my essential writer at the moment. From 2015 to 2019 she wrote a regular art-cultural criticism column for friezemagazine, and the best of them are weird tales easily the equal of anything else I’ve chosen here. ‘A History of Violence’ begins with a man at a London party coming up to her and just starting to talk:

“My dad was Irish, he said, he worked on the building sites. London was built by the Irish. They all died young. No compensation. It was the asbestos, it got into their lungs.”

Which makes zero literal sense if you actually think about it, but is culturally true. Or, as Laing goes on to elucidate, is capitally true. “Everything is seeping to the surface now,” she writes, “the slow or hidden violence of late capitalism… You can be an accidental connoisseur of snuff movies simply by scrolling through Twitter with a breakfast cup of tea.” In the space of barely three pages she glides through, or rather connects up, the fate of Irish navvies, the tar pit of social media, contemporary French literature, and the blood-soaked art of Ana Mendieta — then takes a final vertiginous step into Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and how “Eichmann’s trial testimony was marked by a constant refrain of looking away.” Except from one thing: a burial ditch from which the blood would not stop seeping.

Eichmann refused to look so he could pretend he hadn’t seen. Laing’s humane genius is to look at everything, to bear witness, and to bring back the stories of what she hasseen.

First published in frieze, June, 2018 and available to read here. Collected in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Picador, 2020

Introduction

A Personal Anthology offers no guidelines on what exactly constitutes a short story for the purposes of constructing your ideal anthology. This is as it should be, because sometimes it seems like there are as many definitions of the short story as there are practitioners of the art form.

For my own part, I have defined a short story as this: a self-contained piece of prose of less than approximately 40,000 words in length. This is quite a bit longer than most would allow, but I cannot stand the strange and slightly dismissive term ‘novella’ (the less said about ‘novelette’ the better) which, for me, tends to mean that the author either does not have the confidence to declare his or her work a novel, or that they are slightly ashamed of having written a short story.

I have chosen these stories based on personal preference and ordered them from the earliest publication (1950) to the last (2022). That I think you should read them all goes without saying, but you should also read the collections of which they are a part. Not one of these represents all a given author has to offer a reader.

I hope you enjoy the stories when you do read them, and I hope they lead to the discovery of more beauty than you expected to find in such short pieces of work. There are stories below which do more with half a page than some novels do with 500. This is the wonder of the short story. The TARDISes of art, they’re always just so much bigger on the inside.

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury

“The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down.”

I’m a big believer in the idea that science fiction is made for the short story form, and the short story form is made for science fiction. The short story gives sci-fi the space it needs to develop a concept without allowing so much time that the concept begins to wear thin. The best examples stay with you, occurring to you now and again with a frequency disproportionate to their length. ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury, is a particularly nice example.

The premise is simple enough. Far in the future, what we would now call a ‘smart-house’ (albeit one which runs on “memory tapes” rather than digital information in a nice example of zeerust) continues its automatic functions like making breakfast, running baths, and putting on video projections to entertain the children, despite the fact that it seems to be entirely empty. We learn, with brutal simplicity, that there has been some sort of explosion which has killed the family who lived there, leaving only their silhouettes outlined in the paint of the house’s walls as evidence they ever existed at all.

The story is effective in large part because of its poignancy. There’s something plaintive about the house as it continues to work through its endless and repetitive list of tasks and, when a sudden house fire starts, it feels to the reader almost like reading a description of the burning of a living thing. The house screams, it tries “to save itself”, but to no avail. In the end all that is left is a single wall repeating the date over and over and over again. The house’s pointless and repetitive life and death mirrors our own as it speaks to nobody, performs tasks for ungrateful ghosts, and eventually dies in obscurity.

Throughout, Bradbury resists the urge to give the reader too much background for his scenario. In this case, it makes the reader feel like an explorer finding the empty world too late to avert the disaster. A wonderful story.

First published in Collier’s Weekly, May 1950. Collected in The Martian Chronicles, Doubleday, 1950

‘Going to Meet the Man’ by James Baldwin

“His mother got in and closed the door and the car began to move. Not until then did he ask, ‘Where are we going. Are we going on a picnic?’

He had a feeling that he knew where they were going, but he was not sure.

‘That’s right,’ his father said, ‘we’re going on a picnic. You won’t ever forget this picnic -!’”

Baldwin is more known for his novels than his short stories, publishing only one short collection in his lifetime. But this, the title story of that collection, does as much as longer works like Another Country (1962) with a fraction of the page-count.

The story begins with Jesse, a white deputy sheriff in a southern town, unable to get an erection in bed with his wife. Giving up, he lies down and begins to remember being eight years old and going on an outing with his mother and his father. At first, it seems to be a pleasant trip, maybe a picnic (food is mentioned), but it quickly becomes clear that it is something more sinister.

The family arrive to watch with their friends as a black man is tied by chains above a fire. The chains are lowered and raised, and the fire allowed to eat away at his flesh. While the white families watch, he is castrated and his penis falls into the flames.

Eventually the body is released, and the white families settle down to eat their picnic and spend time together as the body of the man smoulders on the ground, the proximity of racism to the lives of white Americans bluntly and unforgettably depicted. The endurance of the racism is further emphasised by the horrific final scene as Jesse comes back to the present and finds he is finally able to achieve an erection and have sex with his wife.

Baldwin is always skilled at helping the reader to empathise with his characters, and this talent is stretched to its limit in this story, finally breaking as the cold realisation of just what allowed Jesse to overcome his impotence becomes clear. Bleak and not to be missed.

First published in Going to Meet the Man, Dial Press, 1965