‘You Go Where it Takes You’ by Nathan Ballingrud

He did not look like a man who would change her life. He was big, roped with muscles from working on offshore oil rigs, and tending to fat. His face was broad and inoffensively ugly, as though he had spent a lifetime taking blows and delivering them. He wore a brown raincoat against the light morning drizzle and against the threat of something more powerful held in abeyance. He breathed heavily, moved slowly, found a booth by the window overlooking the water, and collapsed into it. He picked up a syrup-smeared menu and studied it with his whole attention, like a student deciphering Middle English. He was like every man who ever walked into that little diner. He did not look like a beginning or an end.

Winner of numerous accolades including the Shirley Jackson Award, and a game changer for horror fiction, Ballingrud’s astonishing collection North American Lake Monsters is an achingly real tapestry of the sort of fears, mistakes, regrets and inabilities to change that curse us as human beings. The stories could easily have rested on their laurels as pieces of realism, but instead dare to be expertly seasoned with the downright weird. These stories do not need to be horror, but horror – here’s the thing – elevates them and makes them sing. The prose is breathtaking, but, more importantly, here is someone who knows what horror is for. He sees horror as the only way to express the lives of people, deep down, and reinvigorates genre concepts by using an unflinching eye and consummate control of language. For instance, in ‘Sunbleached’ he describes a vampire as ‘a dancer pretending to be a spider’ and I’m damned if you need any more than that. Vitally, Ballingrud is quoted in a recent interview saying: ‘I believe self-interrogation is a key to strong fiction. You should write about what you are ashamed of. You have to be merciless with yourself. That’s why I like to write about characters so easy to hate. Writing fiction is, in no small part, about practicing empathy: and if there is a noble purpose in literature, it’s (that).’ Exactly the philosophy I aspire to. Horror is there to desolate, yes – but it is there to show humanity, even as, sometimes, it shows inhumanity. Ballingrud also knows that the real game is: ‘What’s the least I can do to make this horror?’

First published on SCIFICTION July 13 2003; collected in North American Lake Monsters, Small Beer Press 2013. The story can be read here

‘The Signal Man’ by Charles Dickens

In a word, I should have set this man down as one of the safest of men to be employed in that capacity, but for the circumstance that while he was speaking to me he twice broke off with a fallen colour, turned his face towards the little bell when it did NOT ring, opened the door of the hut (which was kept shut to exclude the unhealthy damp), and looked out towards the red light near the mouth of the tunnel. On both of those occasions, he came back to the fire with the inexplicable air upon him which I had remarked, without being able to define, when we were so far asunder.
Said I when I rose to leave him: ‘You almost make me think that I have met with a contented man.’
(I am afraid I must acknowledge that I said it to lead him on.)
‘I believe I used to be so,’ he rejoined, in the low voice in which he had first spoken; ‘but I am troubled, sir, I am troubled.’

I am not unique in being a ghost story writer highly influenced by BBCTV’s Ghost Stories for Christmasseries which was broadcast throughout the 1970s. The best of these were directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark, and the best of those, adapted as it was by Andrew Davies (now notorious for ‘sexing up’ the classics), was The Signal Man (1979), boasting in its cast list Denholm Elliot, whose performance the director has described as “wound up like a coiled spring”. The Dickens story is no less taut or perfectly realised than its small screen cousin. Only a year before its publication, he himself had been involved in the Staplehurst rail crash of 1865, when his train jumped a gap and plunged off a viaduct, hanging in the void. Dickens had helped in the rescue of passengers, but it is said the experience had a traumatic effect on him – Peter Ackroyd opines it hastened him to his death in 1870 – and it is not hard to see panic disorder and horrific flashbacks pervading the short story that emerged from it. Dickens also knew that the best ghost stories operate not with unequivocal belief but with doubt as their engine. Is it true, or all in the mind? The Signal Man, then, is a struggle between rational thinking and the lure of the supernatural. It is tempting for us to think of Dickens and M. R. James as writers of cosy, even quaint and innocuous terrors, but we should remind ourselves their times were not antiquarian, dusty and distant when they were writing. Their world was modern and real. A train wasn’t a symbol of nostalgia of a bygone age: to the Victorian imagination it symbolised death, the very real fear of disaster. Dickens was not only using the emblem of his trauma, but a contemporary fear of hurtling, out of control, technology – the same thing that inspires much contemporary fiction today.

First published as part of the ‘Mugby Junction’ collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round; collected in The Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens, Wordsworth Classics 1998 It can be read online here

‘The Pike’ by Conrad Williams

There never seemed to be any great stretch between closing his eyes and opening them again. He couldn’t remember his dreams anymore. It was his skin, rather than the alarm clock, that brought him back. Skin so tight and dry it must belong to another body. It itched constantly, no matter how much of the cream he applied, or how often. The doctor wanted him to go for surgery, but Lostock had a thing about scars. Scars changed the way you looked. You became someone else, and he was only just coming to terms with the person that he had been shaped into. But then, maybe, it would be for the best if he did change. To be physically altered, to be at some part removed from the cast of his ancestors. The slightly prominent forehead. The downward slope of the mouth. It would help him to forget that he was the sum of a number of parts that were at best defective.

Conrad Williams’s use of language at the service of works of the uncanny is second to none. I know he has written crime thrillers such as Blonde of a Stick, full of the gnarly linguistic invention I’d expect, but I would hail him as being one of the authors most inspiring to me in terms of pushing the literary boundary of what horror means, or can achieve. His stories always startle as well as sparkle. There is wit in the wounds he inflicts. And rarely is there a story in his magisterial collections, such as Born With Teeth or I Will Surround You that doesn’t take the breath away or stick in the craw of your complacency. Like many of the best writers, he paints a truthful landscape, then leaves the most horrific thing off screen, bidding you to picture it on your own. In the dark. Forever. Yes, he really is that nasty. But I love him for it. More than that, though, he shows that there can be beauty in the agonizing, seeds of survival in the bleakest of places, and gut-twisting terror in the most mundane. As his brilliant novel One shows, every shadowy path can be lit by hope, and in ‘The Pike’ his superbly evocative language records, unerringly, yet again, who we are as human beings, as vulnerable to what is inside our heads as we are to the world around us.

First published in the collection Born With Teeth, PS Publishing 2012; can be read online at Nightmare (Issue 72) Sept 2018. It can be read online here

‘Playing With Fire’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It was John Moir (the well-known senior partner of Moir, Moir, and Sanderson) who had originally turned our attention to occult subjects. He had, like many very hard and practical men of business, a mystic side to his nature, which had led him to the examination, and eventually to the acceptance, of those elusive phenomena which are grouped together with much that is foolish, and much that is fraudulent, under the common heading of spiritualism. His researches, which had begun with an open mind, ended unhappily in dogma, and he became as positive and fanatical as any other bigot. He represented in our little group the body of men who have turned these singular phenomena into a new religion.

I’m a sucker for a séance scenes. I admit it. I’ve written them as often as John Ford filmed gunfights, and this story is the culprit, I think. The theatricality of it. The absurdity of it. The deep emotion of what is at stake, contrasting with the naff nature of the human contraption purporting the deliver the miraculous. I love those contradictions. Comic, tragic, unbelievable – but at the same time aching to be believed. I saw a televised version of ‘Playing with Fire’ way back in 1967, part of the Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle series, directed by Piers Haggard and adapted by John Hawkesworth, a steady hand on the Sherlock Holmes tiller. Of course, Holmes had been the supreme rationalist, dismissing Sussex vampires and phantom hounds in his casebook. Doyle himself proved not so dismissive. He became embroiled in the Cottingly Fairies fiasco, insisting fairies really did exist, opening himself to accusations of gullibility (and worse) ever since. In the 1920s he toured the USA as an evangelist for Spiritualism, even converting his fictional character Professor Challenger, of Lost World fame, to the cause. But before that he was keenly interested in occult fiction, and it is interesting to see, given his later faith, that in this story, from 1900, he is wise enough to employ scepticism as an element. Believers and non-believers gather in an artist’s studio to sit with a medium. A spirit is contact and unearthly energy made manifest, with catastrophic and shocking results. It’s notable that Doyle, at the end of the tale, chooses to give us the opportunity to wonder if what happened was real, rather than accepting it as fact. It’s a fascinating glimpse not only into the séance room he knew so well but also into his avid interest in the hidden mysteries of science, nature and, in this case, the creative process – how the imagination, his own imagination, makes a thing, a thing in the mind’s eye, real and tangible.

First published in The Strand magazine March 1900; collected in The Conan Doyle Stories, John Murray 1929) It can be read online here

‘The Monkey’s Paw’ by W. W. Jacobs

“I’d like to go to India myself,” said the old man, “just to look round a bit, you know.”
“Better where you are,” said the sergeant-major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass, and sighing softly, shook it again.
“I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers,” said the old man. “What was that you started telling me the other day about a monkey’s paw or something, Morris?”
“Nothing,” said the soldier, hastily. “Leastways nothing worth hearing.”
“Monkey’s paw?” said Mrs. White, curiously.
“Well, it’s just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps,” said the sergeant-major, offhandedly.
His three listeners leaned forward eagerly. The visitor absent-mindedly put his empty glass to his lips and then set it down again. His host filled it for him.

Like Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Occurrence at Own Creek Bridge’, Aickman’s ‘Ringing the Changes’, Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’, and Roald Dahl’s ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ is, in a way that eradicates naysayers, simply a perfect story. However there is nothing simple about it. It contains multitudes. My friend the writer Steve Lockley does a talk to students about its many layers, and tells me it easily lasts two hours, sometimes three, as discussion can spin off in so many different directions, from fairy tales to numerology, from possessed objects to Darwin, from Freud’s return of the repressed, to Tales from the Crypt. The story’s plot is well known. Deceptively anecdotal. The three wishes format sits solidly its core, the magical paw a symbol of desire and greed, appealing to our human compulsion to selfishly grasp what is unattainable, what is wrong in the natural order, and the consequence therein. It could be a Biblical parable, and would not be out of place set in the Holy Land. The genius is that Lazarus, mangled, unspeakable, voiceless, remains out of shot, making it the most cinematic of short stories, and one of the most contained. It begins on a dark and stormy night with that supremely rational pastime, a game of chess. But after a tale of far off lands takes grip by the fireside, reversals from elation to shock, hope to desolation, keep us on our toes. Nothing is more brutal than the phrase ‘Caught in the machinery’. And, according to William Friedkin, who directed The Exorcist, nothing more scary than ‘a slow tracking shot towards a closed door’ – which this classic story, in fictional terms, proves, to a tee.

First published in The Lady of the Barge 1902; collected in Antologia de la Literatura Fantástica, ed. Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo, Argentina 1940, English edition revised and expanded as The Book of Fantasy, published in Great Britain by Xanadu Publications Ltd 1988. It can be read online here

Introduction

These are stories that I return to when I forget what it is that I love about storytelling, and so this is the anthology of stories I would give myself if I had forgotten how to write, or if I were feeling very desperate about the world. They are mostly Australian and American, because those are the two countries between which I have divided my life. They have the same unique yet hard-to-define quality: they turn the colour-dial up on the world.

‘The Night The Prowler’ by Patrick White

I must have read this novella when I was in high school, when my father gave me a then-out-of-print copy of The Cockatoos. The Cockatoos was the first book White published after he won the Nobel Prize in 1973, and ‘The Night The Prowler’ is its crowning triumph. I have returned and re-read it once a year ever since. It is a story that starts from one character’s perspective – the mother’s – and then shifts halfway through to the daughter’s, who is the story’s heart. It is a story about unruly girls, and one of the best depictions I have ever read concerning the life of the body.

From The Cockatoos, 1974, Jonathan Cape

‘Break It Down’ by Lydia Davis

I first read Lydia Davis when I bought her Collected Stories the year after I finished university. She completely changed the way I thought about writing, about what stories and sentences could be, and of what was worthy of being written about. Shortly thereafter I changed how and what I wrote, writing with more purpose, and more often, and the first fully-formed short story I wrote as an adult was a poor rip-off of ‘Break It Down.’ It continues to be one of the most formally exciting and moving pieces of prose I have ever come across.

Originally published in The Paris Review, Summer 1983 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Break It Down, 1986, FSG, and in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, FSG, 2009/Hamish Hamilton, 2010

‘Horse Latitudes’ by Josephine Rowe

When I was in my early twenties I was leery and ignorant of much of the writing being produced in Australia. I had a bad case of what is referred to as ‘cultural cringe.’ Then I read Josephine Rowe and everything changed. Her stories were sharp and controlled and formally exciting. She has grown into one of the world’s greatest short story writers, and this one, ‘Horse Latitudes,’ is my favourite. It is a road trip story, a man and a woman fleeing the woman’s bad relationship in Perth, driving across the Nullabor Plain. There is heartache and danger and violence, all the hallmarks of the American roadtrip story, but Josephine renders it differently, using the hallmarks and signifiers of what is uniquely Australian, to create something beautiful and deeply felt, a story that seemed to me like I had been looking for it all my life when I first read it.

From Here Until August, 2019, Blank Inc/Catapult

‘First Love’ by Ben Marcus

A couple of months after I moved from Sydney to New York I went to the Franklin Park Reading Series in Crown Heights where Ben Marcus read excerpts from two stories in Leaving The Sea. I did not as yet have a job, so could not really justify buying many more books. But the stories kept niggling away at me until eventually I trudged to my local bookstore in Greenpoint during a blizzard to buy a copy of Leaving The Sea. ‘First Love’ remains my favourite of these stories, and was such a shock to my system I found myself reading pieces of it out loud. The story is at once a reflection and a manipulation of the mechanics on which human language depends, and a deeply disorienting meditation on sex and the body of the beloved. When I eventually studied with Ben Marcus at Columbia a few years later, I was vastly too cowardly to ever tell him how much this story meant to me.

From Leaving the Sea, Knopf/Granta, 2014

‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’ by William H. Gass

This story was assigned by Sigrid Nunez in a class on autobiographical fiction that I took in my very first semester at Columbia. The ‘Heart’ of which Gass writes is at once the vast breadth of the American Midwest, and the soft, vulnerable centres of the human heart. The story, as I understood it from Nunez’s class, came out of a travel article Gass had been asked to write about his hometown in Indiana. But he was heartbroken, and so the story is a piece of formal strangeness, assembled from the detritus of the article, a collection thirty-six discrete vignettes addressed to a ‘you’ who has broken our writer’s heart, a portrait of his town and a portrait of his heartbreak. It is, in short, a kind of essay-story, and to that end it made me hugely excited about the possibility that one could combine the two. I also highly recommend Etel Adnan’s 2004 response to Gass, In The Heart of the Heart of Another Country, published by City Lights.

First published in New American Review, 1967. Collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, 1968, available in the NYRB Classics edition, 2015. Available to read here

‘Ghosts, Cowboys’ by Claire Vaye Watkins

I return to this story again and again when I don’t know what or how to write. It gallops through time and history, from story to story, from the Comstock Lode and the very founding of Reno, Nevada, to Spahn Ranch where the narrator’s father came to live with the Manson family, and the narrator’s mother witnessing the Nevada nuclear tests in the 1960s. Much of it is autobiographical (Watkins’ father was indeed in the Manson family), and much of it is non-fictional. The incorporation of the essay form into the short story is one of my favourite things to read.

Originally published in Hopkins Review, Spring 2009 and available to read here. Collected in Battleborn, 2012, Riverhead/Granta, 2013

‘The Chosen Vessel’ by Barbara Baynton

I read some of Baynton’s stories at university and was struck by how modern and contemporary her voice was, despite the fact that she was a woman writing in the extremely masculine environment of Federation-era Australia. The whole collection is worth reading, but the last story, ‘The Chosen Vessel,’ was one I read in bed several years ago, and found so troubling I couldn’t sleep afterwards. It is a story about a woman and her baby, alone in a shack in the middle of the bush, and a man who is set on hunting and hurting her. It is a masterclass in high third person and change of perspective, and it is also one of the best stories I’ve read about women on their own.

First published in The Bulletin on 12 December, 1896, subsequently published in the 1902 collection, Bush Studies. The collection is available to read in full on Project Gutenberg, here

‘Morning, 1908’ by Claire-Louise Bennett

I read this entire novel-in-stories in one sitting on the fire escape of my old apartment one summer, and it was perfect. All of Bennett’s stories in Pond are about nothing, and books where nothing happens tend to be my favourite kinds of book. In this story, the narrator goes for a walk. She is dressed a little strangely, there are cows in a field, a young man is coming down the road. She is terrified, or she enters the feeling of terror and passes through it. We bear witness to all the thoughts in real time, as she documents them and questions them. I have not thought about writing in the same way since I read Pond, and this is, for me, the peak of the collection.

First published in the Winter 2012-2013 issue of The Stinging Fly, collected in Pond, Stinging Fly, 2015/Fitzcarraldo, 2016. Available to read here