Tessa Hadley once said that when you’re writing a short story you should feel “slightly anxious and almost ashamed”. I don’t know how Tom Vowler felt about writing this one, but reading it takes you inside experiences that don’t bear thinking about.. The best short fiction alway forces the reader to participate; with great subtlety, Vowler leaves those gaps for you to fill — gaps that in some ways stand for memories the protagonist is trying to suppress. Gradually you realise that he and his ex are using conflicting strategies to cope with the long aftermath of their child’s unexplained disappearance. All the usual awkwardness between an ex-wife and the husband’s new family are magnified by a situation in which ultimately there is no consolation. If that makes the story sound like heavy going, I promise you it isn’t.
Collected in The Method, Salt 2010; reprinted in Head Land: Ten Years of the Edge Hill Prize edited by Rodge Glass, Freight/Edge Hill University Press, 2016
A Personal Anthology 