‘Flowers for Algernon’ by Daniel Keyes

A sweetly sad story. Charlie Gordon, who has learning difficulties, has a job as a janitor in a factory, but attends night classes to try to improve his understanding. His teacher, feeling sorry for him, proposes him for an experimental surgery. The surgery has previously only been tried on mice – one mouse in particular: Algernon.

Charlie’s progress reports show his changes in language, personality and emotions following the surgery, as he is tested against Algernon to see who can solve puzzles faster. To begin with, the mouse always wins, but soon Charlie realises changes are happening within his brain. First, he realises his friends at the factory are not true friends; that they have been making fun of him all this time. Then, trying to form an affectionate but intellectual relationship with his teacher, he realises he has unfortunately surpassed her level of understanding. His sense of isolation and despair is complete when his mouse friend deteriorates, losing its intelligence and memory, and Charlie realises he will likely share the same fate.

The unique narrative voice in this story really hooks you in, and though his writing is initially limited, Charlie paints a bigger world than he himself is capable of describing.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1959

‘The Sandman’ (Der Sandmann) by ETA Hoffmann

‘The Sandman’ by ETA Hoffmann concerns madness, horror, and the unheimlich. It tells the story of Nathanael, a young poet, who is haunted not only by his father’s death, but also by his childhood terror of ‘the Sandman’, an evil creature that steals children’s eyes in the night. Nathanael’s life is disrupted when he encounters a mysterious salesman named Coppola, who reminds him of this story. Nathanael then meets Coppola’s daughter Olimpia at a grand party hosted by his tutor Spallanzani. She is a gifted harpsichordist, but her movements are rather stiff, and she can only say, “Ah, Ah!” – nonetheless Nathanael is smitten. It later transpires that Olimpia is an automaton, created by Coppola with the aide of Spallanzani, and revelation of this knowledge drives Nathanael mad!

This is another story I first read at university, and I am uncannily still haunted by my struggles at trying to pin down all the metaphors and relate them to some of Freud’s theories, which the tutor seemed very keen for us to do. I know some people do not get on with these, but I love stories with an unreliable narrator. They are tricky things to make convincing. This story is still making my cogs whir to this day.

First published in The Night Pieces (Der Nachtstücke), 1816, and widely collected; available to read here

‘Rotten Things’ by Kim Lakin

Another awesome writer (and awesome human) I met through Storm. I worked with Kim on her novel Tourniquet for Immanion Press. I had thought I knew Kim’s writing: gothic wonderment; strange steampunk circuses; muscle cars; the smell of diesel and worlds burning… but ‘Rotten Things’ was a total surprise and an utter delight. I read this story a while before it was published and loved it immediately.

Set in the gothic wild of the Louisiana swamp, young Edmée is an unwanted child, too loud and bothersome for her aunt and uncle. When she comes home making a noise about a yellow house on legs, instead of listening to her strange tale they have murder on their minds and throw her under the trailer to where an alligator lies waiting.

The inhabitant of the yellow house, Marie St Angel, hears her death cries and works her magic to bring the child out of still lifelessness in the swamp and instructs her to seek out those she has wronged to enact revenge and clean her spirit.

There is a lushness and verdancy running through the prose. The characterisation is deftly done, and you find yourself rooting for the little monster as she wreaks her horrid vengeance with sharp teeth and tricks those who would be tricksters.

First published in ParSec, 2022. Collected in Sparks Flying, Newcon Press, 2023

‘Clockatrice’ by Tanith Lee

Tanith Lee was an extremely prolific writer, accomplishing over 90 novels and 300 short stories. Her stories feature fairy tale, magical, vampiric, gothic, and mythical tropes; strongly feminist and often spicy. Again, how do you pick a story from a writer who has produced so much?

I have picked this tale which was selected as the lead in Colder Greyer Stones, which was published by NewCon Press to celebrate Lee being honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at that year’s World Fantasy Convention.

Like Lee, I’m fascinated by old clocks, but I don’t trust myself around them. I’m liable to break them, or cause them to warp, or for something to unravel inside. My husband has developed a fascination with watch repair and attempted to try it for himself, but strangely enough it takes… time.

I have one ancestor in my family tree that managed to briefly lift that line of the family from poverty and servitude by becoming a clock maker in the 18^th century, and so who knows, maybe there is clock-making in my blood, but I rather fear I would accidentally conjure something as beastly as the cockatrice/clockatrice in this story, who turns hapless onlookers to stone.

Such is rumoured to be the fate of Diana, an Elizabethan girl who was the erstwhile paramour of Robert Trenchall’s ancestor, Robert Southurst, and therefore the statue in the garden is no statue at all. The modern day Trenchall’s girlfriend, Dru is fascinated by the statue, and also by the story of how Southurst had made a clock featuring these mythical beasts in order to warn visitors to his mansion, and to preserve the story of Diana’s fate. When Trenchall ditches her for a new love interest, Dru has no qualms about repurposing his family history to sell an article with a piece of accompanying art. She has her friends help her build a clock model that she can photograph and enhance digitally. However, her thoughts and dreams have been infected by the story, and she has unwittingly given rise to the mythical monster through the power of dreams.

A story of lost loves, stone hearts, and gothic creepiness.

First published in Fantasy Magazine, 2010, and available to read here. Collected in Colder Greyer Stones, NewCon Press, 2013

‘The Masque of the Red Death’ by Edgar Allan Poe

I’m unsure which edition of Poe’s collected stories I first read this in, as I borrowed it from a friend, but I do remember that the word used in the title was “masque”, as in a type of masked ball, and not “mask”, what one would wear to such a dance. Apparently the first version published used mask.

During the pandemic, when I got sick and my neighbour texted me to say her app had likely picked me up through the walls as a ‘close contact’, this story popped into my head again. Was there no escape from this dreaded plague?

The story’s protagonist, Prince Prospero, hearing of a terrifying “red death” sweeping the land, causing people to bleed to death through their very pores, retreats to his suitably gothic castellated abbey. He invites a thousand wealthy nobles to wait out the disease’s passing through the populace with him. Ensconced behind the walls of the abbey, they think they are safe! They indulge in luxurious parties. For these, Prospero has had each room in the abbey decorated in a different colour, the last of which is black, illuminated in red light, which creeps his guests out so they don’t go in there.

Then a mysterious figure is seen at the party, in a shroud-like robe, looking like they are wearing the costume of a victim of the red death. The sight of this angers Prospero. The figure passes through each room, and Prospero follows them into the last room to confront the figure before dropping dead. The figure is not a human, but death itself, who was not invited but who came anyway.

With all the emphasis on blood and the sickly colours, the abbey never feels like a sanctuary. It’s claustrophobic and oppressive. The story feels like it should be an allegory, full of heavy symbolism, but what might it mean? That is not so clear. Perhaps that wealth cannot protect you from plague. Perhaps the inevitability of death. It’s also one of the few stories I like that only has thin archetypes rather than rounded characters, but it doesn’t need anything more. These characters come from a dark age, and speak to us with the clarity of long-dead ghosts.

First published in Broadway Journal, 1845, revised from a version in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, 1842. Widely available, including online, here

Introduction to a ‘New Review’ Personal Anthology

I’ve lately been doing some research into the poet, editor and biographer, Ian Hamilton, for which purpose I’ve been spending a lot of time with his magazine, the New Review. Though it lasted only four years (1974–8) and fifty issues, no single publication, as far as I’m concerned, has had more of an influence on British literary culture over the past half century. Some of that is down to what it published – the many stories, essays, poems that have gone on to achieve canonical status; just as much is to do with its creation of what Ian McEwan has called “a milieu”. From its second home in the Pillars of Hercules pub on Soho’s Greek Street (the New Review’s actual offices were next door), the magazine became an intellectual meeting point for writers at all stages of their career, but crucially for the young, among them Julian Barnes, Jim Crace, Andrew Motion, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Blake Morrison and McEwan himself. Our bookshelves might look very different had these great writers not found the early encouragement and camaraderie they did here.

Immersed as I currently am in this milieu, I have decided to make my personal anthology a selection of twelve stories that appeared in the New Review. Since I love a great many more than just twelve, I have tried to be as representative as I can with my choices; to select a roughly equal number from each year of the magazine’s publication, and to mix the widely anthologised with the relatively obscure. Without being able to mention any of the poetry, criticism, reportage, interviews or editorials it published, I cannot show all that the New Review has done for our literary culture; but I can at least make a case for its enormous contribution to fiction.

‘A Scandalous Woman’ by Edna O’Brien

The first story the New Review ever published is also one of the best they ever published. Its title refers to Eily Hogan, the most beautiful girl in the village for whom the story’s younger, female narrator will do almost anything. This includes helping Eily conduct her assignations with a bank clerk, but doesn’t extend to admitting her own role in the affair when Eily gets pregnant and is forced into marrying the man. The resulting rupture in their friendship is heartbreaking, and the unhappiness into which Eily sinks in her loveless marriage a savage indictment of Catholic Ireland. “Ours indeed was a land of shame, and a land of murder, and a land of strange sacrificial women,” the story ends despairingly.

First published in the New Review, April 1974. Collected in A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974

‘Annie, California Plates’ by Jim Crace

If you weren’t personally acquainted with Jim Crace when you encountered this, his first published work of fiction, on its initial publication in the New Review, you’d have every reason to think he was American. It had this John Denver-esque title. It was accompanied by an author photo of, so far as I can tell, David Crosby. And then there was the story itself, which traverses both the landscape and language of the States with effortless authority and has for its subject that most American of things, a car. But the guy’s from Hertfordshire!

I struggle to think of a more accomplished start to a publishing career. It really is a perfect story that, when Hamilton produced a ‘Best of the New Review’ anthology in the mid-eighties, he put in pride of place right at the beginning.

First published in the New Review, June 1974. Collected in The New Review Anthology, Heinemann, 1985. Available online here

‘Mr Sookhoo and the Carol Singers’ by Shiva Naipaul

Mr Sookhoo has a “master plan”. “All them children you does see singing carol singing for charity” – what if the money were never to reach the charity? Left in no suspense as to the outcome of so great a deception, we read on not for the plot but for Naipaul’s dialogue, which is as charming as it comes. Here is our protagonist, a Hindu, explaining his newfound interest in Christianity to the local headmaster in a bid to conscript pupils to his choir:

    ‘I don’t know how to say this, Head – it going to sound funny coming from a man like me – but, all the same, I think I finally see the light.’
    ‘What light?’
    ‘Head! How you mean “what light”? That don’t sound nice coming from a man like you, a man of education.’
    Mr Archibald’s vanity was touched. ‘Sorry, Mr Sookhoo. But, as you yourself said, coming from a man like you…’
    ‘Sooner or later a man have to set his mind on higher things’, Mr Sookhoo intervened solemnly.

First published in the New Review, September 1974. Collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth: Stories and Pieces, Hamish Hamilton, 1984

‘Last Things’ by Malcolm Bradbury

Observing in its prefatory note how Muriel Spark’s obsession with “fiction and death” has been “making her novels shorter and shorter”, this very short, very funny parody announces itself as “not an excerpt from, but the entirety of, her newest, shortest, and most deathly work, The Nuns of Terminus”.

And you could almost believe it, Bradbury captures Spark’s voice and mannerisms so well. From the start, we know that Sister Mercy, “who is famous for being stupid … will die, in distressing circumstance”, and are fairly sure how it’s going to happen: “‘I hope you are both keeping an extremely careful eye on the weather,’ says Sister Felicity, who is small and fat, with a shrewd mouth. ‘It is perhaps the commonest way available of procuring our downfall.’”

While we wait for the inevitable strike of lightning, Bradbury takes the opportunity to make some more general points about fiction. “‘You must understand, Mercy, I have been in a novel before’”, says Felicity, who indeed appeared in Spark’s novel of the previous year, The Abbess of Crewe. “‘It is extremely uncomfortable, unless one manages to stay entirely peripheral to the main line of the action … the best way is to be a member of the servant classes.”’ The founder of UEA’s Creative Writing Course and writer of all those great campus novels never could quite take off his teacher’s hat.

First published in the New Review, March 1975. Collected in Who Do You Think You Are?, Secker & Warburg, 1976

‘In Isfahan’ by William Trevor

An unusually exotic work from Ireland’s laureate of small-town disappointment, this story concerns the almost-romance of two tourists in the Iranian city of Isfahan. The tourist to whom Trevor’s camera predominantly cleaves is Mr Normanton. Middle-aged and greying, Normanton takes an immediate liking to the thick-lipped, “sensuous”, thirty-something Iris Smith when he first sees her in the office of a guided bus tours company. He likes her rather less when they begin to talk, for Iris is suppressing a “Cockney twang” and he is a snob.

Nevertheless, as two people alone in a foreign city (and alone in life, it is revealed), they continue to meet, and the rest of the narrative sees Normanton trying and failing to overcome his prejudices to make the connection he so desperately needs. He was never going to succeed, being a William Trevor character, but that futility is what makes the story so moving.

First published in the New Review, June 1975. Collected in Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories, The Bodley Head, 1976, and The New Review Anthology, Heinemann, 1985

‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ by John McGahern

McGahern began his relationship with the New Review as early as its second issue, when it published an extract from his brilliant novel, The Leavetaking. It is this self-contained piece from a year later, however, that I really love.

Composed, like its title, of three parts, it starts with the accidental death of an Irish worker on a London building site. Then it moves to County Leitrim, to the moment when the man’s family learn of their loss. Then it’s several weeks later, and we’re at a dance held to raise funds for the family, who have bankrupted themselves flying their boy over from England. All this, which says so much about Anglo-Irish relations at that time, and manages to be first shocking, then devastating, then heartwarming – all this in just a few pages. It’s a masterpiece of concision.

First published in the New Review, October 1975. Collected in Getting Through, Faber & Faber, 1978

‘Pornography’ by Ian McEwan

Besides Hamilton, there is probably no one more closely associated with the New Review than Ian McEwan. First appearing in Issue 4 with his story ‘Solid Geometry’, he would contribute six stories in total (more than any other writer), as well as serve as an occasional reviewer, interviewee and, when his first books began to come out, subject for review.

All six stories are exemplary and would be worth discussing here. I have chosen ‘Pornography’ for its mise-en-scène. Set in and around a Soho pornography shop, the story plays out a stone’s throw from where it was published, in the New Review’s offices in Greek Street, a reminder to those who only know the area as it is now that high literary culture wasn’t exactly what it was known for back then.

Not that we are given much cause to mourn Soho’s gentrification in ‘Pornography’. Bleak, sordid and, in its final pages, leg-crossingly uncomfortable, it is Ian McEwan at his most Ian Macabre.

First published in the New Review, February 1976. Collected in In Between the Sheets, Jonathan Cape, 1978

‘One Day in November’ by Cora Sandel, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan

Although it mainly ran Anglophone fiction, the New Review also published a number of stories in translation. This one, by the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel, I confess to knowing very little about, other than it appeared in the magazine two years after Sandel’s death, was translated by Elizabeth Rokkan and is a very fine story indeed. (I’d be grateful to anyone who can tell me more.)

The November of the title refers to November 1918, the month of the Armistice. This is not your usual war story, though. As tenants of “a splendid, but very antiquated, very ramshackle country estate” in rural Brittany, the family at its centre live well away from the fighting, only encountering it all when they offer hospitality to passing soldiers. But this is still too close for comfort. When they catch scabies from, they presume, one of their guests (“Scabies was rife in the trenches”), “at peace” is the last thing they feel when the Armistice is announced at the end of the story, and we leave our narrator abandoning the celebrations in search of a desperately needed bath. It’s a powerful metaphor for the irreparability of war.

Published in the New Review, November 1976