I realise on looking through this list that few of the stories I’ve selected have a plot twist of the kind that, growing up, it was impressed on me a good short story ought to have (it’s probably hard to teach a child about a gradual dawning realisation or a shift in perspective that casts previous details in a new light). “Evie” is an exception: a brilliant and alarming narrative that builds and builds before a devastating revelation transforms it into an entirely different kind of story. It starts small, with the narrator startled when his wife, the titular Evie, scoffs a bar of chocolate despite not having much of a sweet tooth. Gradually, Evie’s appetites intensify and expand, and soon she is exhibiting wilder hungers. Seeming to pick up her husband’s mild, almost genial sense of marital frustration, she begins behaving in ways that eerily reflect, even anticipate, his idle sexual fantasies. What begins as a kind of wish-fulfilment for her husband – the wife as wanton – becomes ever more dangerous. Unnerving, too, is the growing sense that even this “good man”, who’s on the verge of boasting about this change in his circumstances, thinks on some level of Evie as property to be commodified. Desire itself, personified, is overtaking the characters, warping them into new shapes … and then the twist comes. The wonderful tension here is between the storyline’s almost outrageous eroticism – how far is Evie going to go? How implicated is a reader titillated by the frank and graphic descriptions of Evie’s suddenly boundless sexuality? – and Hall’s always meticulous writing, her precise sentences and alertness to detail.
First published in The Sunday Times, July 2013, and available to read here; collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017; also in Sex and Death, ed. Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs, Faber, 2017
A Personal Anthology 