‘The Frozen Fields’ by Paul Bowles

Reading Paul Bowles’s Collected Stories, it was this tale that stood out. While containing nothing fantastical, it does have little sprinklings of magic. It could almost be a fairy tale. In this story, a six-year-old boy called Donald, who lives with his parents in New York City, visits the New England farm of his maternal grandparents at Christmas. There, he fantasizes that a wolf smashes through a window and carries away his bullying and physically abusive father. Donald views the farm as an enchanted and magical place, a place where perhaps his rebellious spirit can take the form of a wolf and rid him of his father for good.

First published in Harper’s Bazaar, 1957, and collected in The Time of Friendship, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, and then in the Collected Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009

Except from Autobiography, by Morrissey

As a life-long fan of The Smiths and Morrissey solo, I obviously couldn’t wait to get my hands on Autobiography. Largely, it didn’t disappoint. Maybe throw in a paragraph break here and there, why don’t you? And what’s with all the alliteration? I expected the book to make me laugh, cry, maybe roll my eyes occasionally – which it did. What I didn’t expect was to be sleeping with the light on after reading it. That’s because, embedded within the book, is one of the best and most chilling ghost stories I’ve ever read. I’ve often thought that this section of the book, if removed, would make a brilliant addition to a collection of ghost stories. For me, it’s with this section that Morrissey proves that in another life he could be a celebrated fiction writer.

It purports to be a true story, about a jaunt Morrissey took with some friends one evening in the late 80s onto Saddleworth Moor (Morrissey’s fascination with the Moors Murderers is well known). Returning after dark along a windswept moorland road, they see a figure “rising-up from the black earth…standing upright and then throwing his arms towards our lights.” It’s an apparition worthy of an M.R. James story: “a boy of roughly 18 years wearing only a humiliatingly-short anorak coat that was open to the rest of his body.” Between them the four friends search for an explanation, then at the first phone box they come across they call the police only to be told to keep an open mind. To my way of thinking that’s the last thing anyone in that situation wants to hear from the police!

First published by Penguin, 2013

‘One Warm Saturday’ by Dylan Thomas

A young man goes to the beach, having spurned his friends because he’d decided he wants to spend the day alone. Once there, “among the ice-cream cries” he’s lonely and bored. He falls in love with a young woman “willing and warm under the cotton” who smiles at him in a communal garden. But he is too shy to talk to her. Luckily, they encounter each other again later that day in the pub where he’s been kicking himself for his shyness. After getting acquainted, they head back to her room, taking a party of people from the pub with them. She tells him the others won’t stay long and that he must be patient. Once in her room, he starts to fantasise about the time they’ll spend together, not only that night but for the rest of their lives. He’s sure the two of them are made for each other. It all seems too good to be true. But don’t worry, the only climax on offer is the devastating kind. Stepping out of the room to use the toilet, the young man gets lost in the dark hallways of the house. After disturbing many of the occupants of the other rooms, tearing up and down the halls shouting the woman’s name, and almost falling to his death down a shaft, he fails to find his way back to his lover. The horror!

Perhaps what appeals to me about this story is that Thomas sets up a kind of fantasy for the retiring type (of which I count myself), wherein despite being too shy to talk to the woman in the garden the young man gets a second chance (which never happens in real life, let me tell you!) and looks set to spend the night with her, only for this fantasy to be cruelly dismantled at the end. It’s almost as if I can hear Dylan Thomas laughing in my face.

The young man, we can only assume, will be haunted by this missed opportunity for the rest of his life, and will be forever wondering ‘what if?’ As, of course, is the reader. By this, and by his or her own lifetime’s worth of missed opportunities. How delicious. Right?

First published in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Dent, 1940

‘The Headless Hawk’ by Truman Capote

In ‘The Headless Hawk’, Vincent – an art gallery employee – has a painting presented to him by a girl with “trancelike eyes” who he initially dismisses as being “dressed like a freak”. The painting, though lacking “technical merit” nevertheless has “that power often seen in something deeply felt, but primitively conveyed”. Entranced by the painting, which the girl possibly painted while housed in some kind of institution, Vincent buys it for himself. Somehow, the painting conveys all Vincent’s life’s failures, which leads him to a fascination with the painter, as he wonders “who was she that she should know so much?”

He embarks on an affair with the woman, though he is ultimately disgusted by both her and the painting, possibly because he sees himself reflected in both.

This might be a study of psychosis or insanity. If the girl is crazy, does that mean Vincent is too, given that he sees himself in her painting? Is his appearance of sanity simply an act? Though there’s something dark and unpleasant at the heart of this story, it remains elusive. It’s a puzzle that the reader can return to over and over again, trying to figure out its meaning.

First published in The Tree of Night and Other Stories, Random House, 1949, and collected in The Complete Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2005

‘The Bottomless Hole’ by The Handsome Family

The horror of the human mind when it won’t rest, eh?

Given their association with the TV series True Detective (their song ‘Far from Any Road’ was the theme tune of its first series), it shouldn’t be too surprising to find The Handsome Family on this list. In fact, many of their songs function like short stories. Take ‘The Snow White Diner’, in which the occupants of a diner watch a car containing a deceased mother and children being hoisted out of a river, or ‘So Long’ in which the narrator bids adios to all the pets he ever owned, as well as “whatever was in that hole that I raked over”, and lists the manner of their deaths.

In ‘The Bottomless Hole’ a farmer discovers “the mouth of a deep dark hole” behind his barn. He tests the depth of the hole by chucking stuff in – broken tractors and dead cows, that kind of thing -– but never hears anything hit the bottom. So, unable to stop wondering if what he has here is a bottomless hole, he does what any reasonable person would do in that situation and makes himself “a chariot” using ropes and “a rusty clawfoot tub”. He then bids his wife and kids goodbye and rides down into the hole. Having cut himself free when he ran out of rope, he’s singing to us as he falls. He can’t remember his name. All he knows is that he must satisfy his mind as to whether or not this damn hole he’s in is, as he suspects, bottomless.

From the album Singing Bones, Carrot Top Records, 2003

‘Stone City’ by Annie Proulx

To my mind this is a ghost story, although it doesn’t contain any actual spooks or spectres. What it does have is a family so bad, born bad, that though they’re long dead, or driven off, they continue to haunt and terrorise the people of Chopping County where the story takes place. An abandoned farm, once known as Stone City, a place where “the buildings were gone, collapsed into cellar holes of rotting beams” and “blackberry brambles boiled out of the crumbling foundations”, is their castle of Otranto. “There are some places that fill us with an immediate loathing and fear,” as Proulx puts it. And Stone City has “something evil tincturing the light”.

The farm was once home to the Stones, a family group led by Old Man Stone, the worst of the lot, “a dirty old tyrant” as one character has it, a man said to “have kids who were his grankids” and who “ought to have had nails pounded into his eyes and a blunt fence post hammered up his asshole.” Yep, he’s that bad. And even though he died a long time ago, his evil still permeates.

The story’s narrator is new to the area, and all this is related to him by Badger, a local man foolish enough to have gone hunting on the Stones’ property when he was a kid. “My dog,” he tells the narrator one day when they meet at Stone City “All I got in the world, ain’cha, Lady?”

Badger will come to wish he’d kept this thought to himself, at least while he was on this land, because somewhere in those cellar holes are the lingering spirits of the Stone family. And they are listening.

First published in Grey’s Sporting Journal, 1979, collected in Heart Songs and Other Stories, Scribner, 1988

‘Prey’ by Richard Matheson

Okay, so we’re edging into genre territory now, but at this point I think we need some light relief and this story, well, it’s hilarious.

It’s the story of Amelia, a young woman who one day brings home a package. Inside is a wooden box resembling a casket. Inside the box is “the ugliest doll she’d ever seen. Seven inches long and carved from wood, it had a skeletal body and oversized head. Its expression was maniacally fierce, its pointed teeth completely bared, its glaring eyes protuberant.” Also in the box is a tiny scroll which states “This is He Who Kills. He is a deadly hunter.” We, the readers, already know that this isn’t going to end well.

The doll, we’re told, is a rare Funi fetish doll which Amelia found in a curio shop, which is supposed to have the spirit of a Zuni hunter trapped inside, and which is a present for her boyfriend, Arthur. Instead of casting the damn thing out of a window, which is what anyone in their right mind would do, Amelia sets in on the coffee table and heads off for a bath. Once she’s gone, though, the doll falls off the table and the silver chain wrapped around it which prevents the spirit trapped inside it from escaping, slides off. Ah, shit. Here we go.

When she returns from her bath, Amelia is unable to find the doll. She goes into the kitchen and finds that a small knife is missing from the knife rack. We know what happens next. She’s pursued about the flat by the doll, which is intent on stabbing her to death. Even when she locks herself in the bathroom, she sees the knife blade being jabbed beneath the door. My favourite moment in the story comes when Amelia traps the doll inside a suitcase – this thing is only seven inches long, remember – and we breathe a sigh of relief and think she might survive this ordeal after all. But uh oh she hears a cutting sound and when she looks at the suitcase she sees a knife blade “protruding from the suitcase wall, moving up and down in a sawing motion.”

I wonder if James Cameron read this story before he wrote his script for The Terminator. Remember Kyle Reece’s line in the film? “Listen, and understand. That Terminator is out there, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop… EVER, until you are dead!”

First published in Playboy, April 1969, and collected in Shock Waves, Dell, 1970 and a couple of Matheson Collecteds; also widely anthologised, including in American Fantastic Tales: Terror & The Uncanny From Poe to Now, Library of America, 2009

‘Wingstroke’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov

‘Wingstroke’ is a fabulously strange and over-looked piece of weird fiction. It concerns a man named Kern who, reeling from the suicide of his wife, finds himself at a European ski resort where everything appears to be loaded with meaning and coincidence. There is also a touch of the fantastical about his surroundings, as well as with his fellow skiers. Marooned in the hotel, he notices himself being watched by “some pale girl with pink eyebrows”, and at dinner he encounters a “man with goat eyes”; whilst his creepy acquaintance, Monfiori, is described as having “pointed ears, packed with canary-coloured dust, with reddish fluff on their tips.” Kern appears to have entered a new reality, one where when it snows the hotel seems to “float upwards”. The perfect setting then for a supernatural encounter.

Also at the hotel is Isabel – known about the resort as ‘Airborne Isabel’ – an attractive and popular young woman whom Kern befriends and quickly becomes obsessed with. She inhabits the room next door to Kern’s. Much to Kern’s disbelief, Isabel likes to stay out on the slopes after dark, leaping, as she says, “right up to the stars” and encountering who-knows-what in the snowy darkness.

One night, unable to sleep, Kern hears guitar music, laughter and strange barks coming from Isabel’s room. The next night – drunk, half-crazed, and suicidal himself – Kern notices that Isabel’s key has been left in the door. What Kern does next, bursting into the room and telling Isabel that he needs her love, sets off the chain of bizarre and unexplained events which reach their sad conclusion the next day when Isabel takes part in a skiing competition.

The sudden intrusion of the supernatural into this story is what, for me, makes it such a great read. There’s a chance, obviously, that what Kern encounters in Isabel’s room could be a figment of his increasingly unhinged mind. Told in vivid and descriptive prose and packed with unsettling imagery, ‘Wingstroke’ is one of the finest weird fiction tales I’ve read. We’re left feeling as if the ending hasn’t been adequately explained, whilst at the same time secretly understanding everything. What hasn’t happened is that what we understand about the ending hasn’t been confirmed, which is of course what makes it so memorable.

First published in Russian, as ‘Udar krïla’ in Russkoye Ekh, 1924, and then in English in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf, 1995

‘The Pipe’ by Jack Pendarvis

Some years ago I went through a McSweeney’s phase – collecting the McSweeney’s editions, and the short story collections of authors whose work I discovered in those pages. Jack Pendarvis was one such author. In his story, ‘The Pipe’, a radio DJ has been buried underground for 46 days “to break some kind of record”. The frightening thing about this story is that guarding the DJ’s air pipe on the midnight to 6am shift are a security guard and a paramedic, two people – it quickly becomes apparent – you wouldn’t trust to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.

On the first night they smoke dope and discuss what things they could drop down the pipe, such as fire ants or cotton balls. Some nights the paramedic doesn’t turn up (he’s writing a rock opera), leaving the security guard to whisper to the DJ and force sandwiches down the pipe when he worries the DJ might be hungry. One of my favourite moments is when the paramedic plays a self-penned song for the security guard called, “Half-Hearted’, and we realise why no one has ever written a song with that title. “Half-hearted when you told me that you love me,” the song goes. “Half-hearted when you told me that you care.” (Try singing it and you’ll understand.)

I remember not being able to stop reading as the days counted down, increasingly concerned as to what would be found when they eventually dug the DJ up, given that he’d been under the not-so-watchful eye of these two imbeciles. Had Pendarvis actually provided an answer to that question, I probably wouldn’t still be thinking about this story all these years later.

First published in The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure, MacAdam/Cage, 2005

‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard

A very Aickman-esque tale. I’ve heard it suggested that Aickman actually wrote this story when he and Howard were in a relationship together, which seems like a misogynistic viewpoint. It could be that this is Howard trying to out-Aickman Robert Aickman. Whatever, this is an extraordinary story with just the right amount of weirdness and ambiguity to leave the reader haunted and having to come up with their own conclusions.

‘Three Miles Up’ concerns two friends, John and Clifford, as they embark on a barging holiday. Following a furious row they pick up a mysterious but friendly young woman called Sharon. We realise something is not right about Sharon because when John and Clifford speak to a small boy who’s watching them from a tow path, she emerges from the cabin and the boy gives “a sudden little shriek of fear…and turned to run down the bank the way they had come.” Whatever spell Sharon has cast over John and Clifford to veil her true self, the boy obviously sees her for what she is. After they encounter a turning on the canal not shown on their map, which Sharon gently encourages them to take, they soon discover that they’ve made a terrible mistake.

First published in We are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (a collaboration with Robert Aickman), Jonathan Cape, 1951. Collected in Mr. Wrong, Jonathan Cape, 1975 – more latterly Picador, 2015 – and in Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories, Tartarus Press, 2003

‘The Familiars’ by Micaela Morrisette

With only a handful of short stories to her name (only four that I’m aware of) Micaela Morrissette was, for a time, one of my favourite writers.

‘The Familiars’ is a beautifully written tale of a mother vying for her son against the imaginary friends who keep appearing from under his bed. The great thing about this story is that there is so much detail and such ambiguity that it can be read and enjoyed anew again and again with the reader noticing different things each time. I’ve read ‘The Familiars’ about five times now and I still haven’t quite grasped what’s actually going on in this story. Are the boy’s friends real or only imaginary? There does seem to be some sort of magic going on. In one scene the mother visits her dead husband’s grave, then goes to a stream and casts away some of his belongings. Yet we are never told why. This made me wonder if the friends are actually the father returning in a different form, and this was the mother’s way of trying to be rid of him/them. Or perhaps the story is about the mother’s attempts to rein in her son’s imagination before he starts school and enters the real world. Or perhaps it’s merely about loss and mourning, and the ways that people deal with it. That’s the beauty of this story, it seems designed to make you ponder and speculate; an approach that in the wrong hands could simply frustrate the reader, but here it keeps you coming back again and again to re-read.

First published in Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realities, 2009

Introduction

Print advertising is expensive. When I started CB editions in 2007 I took a cheap option, placing a classified ad in the LRB: ‘Imagine yourself, dear reader, sitting in your favourite chair with your book and “your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array”, and every so often you look up and say, even if there is no one else in the room but the dog, Hey, switch off the TV and listen to this – and you start reading aloud.’ I offered a free CBe book to the first six readers who could name the story from which the nine drinks were quoted, and I was going to start there, with ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne’ by Donald Barthelme, but I’ve reread it and decided that Barthelme is one of those writers who for me was liberating when first encountered – Oh, you can do it that way! – but I’m now in a different place. Writers are ruthless.

‘At Hiruharama’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

Reading aloud remains important. Publishing has been a way of doing this. I used to read aloud to a friend who for more than forty years ran a tiny bookshop in Notting Hill, more shed than shop, when she was in a care home and we knew from the first few paragraphs whether or not we wanted to carry on. Penelope Fitzgerald flew past that test. A number of the review quotes on her short novels express both deep admiration and bafflement – and that’s another test the writing I like best has to pass: however much I study it, I cannot work out how it’s done. I’ll offer ‘At Hiruharama’ from Fitzgerald’s posthumous collection of stories, The Means of Escape: genealogy, a remote homestead in New Zealand (“Don’t picture a shack, though. There were two rooms, one with a stove and one with a bedstead, and a third one at the back for a vegetable store”), a home birth for which the doctor arrives late but not too late to rescue a twin daughter the father had put in the waste with the afterbirth – “whereas the first daughter never got to be anything in particular, this second little girl grew up to be a lawyer with a firm in Wellington, and she did very well” – and Brinkman, visiting, who is hungry:

Two more women born into the world! It must have seemed to him that if this sort of thing went on there should be a good chance, in the end, for him to acquire one for himself. Meanwhile, they would have to serve dinner sometime.

The receptionist on Sunday afternoons at the care home where I read this story aloud was a Polish woman called Mrs Boyle. I said to her: ‘Maybe we were married, once.’ She gave me long look: ‘I don’t think so.’

First published in New Writing, Minerva/Arts Council, 1992; collected in The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000

‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ by Mavis Gallant

Two self-imposed rules: no writer I have published with CBe; and no Chekhov, no Isaac Babel, no Alice Munro, no certain others who I’d like to believe can be taken as read (and re- and re-read). I sincerely believe that Mavis Gallant belongs in the latter gang, and she is here only because she seems to have a cult rather than a wide following. ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ is one of her best-known stories; but really, there are no duds.

No, begin at the beginning: Peter lost Agnes. Agnes says to herself somewhere, Peter is lost.

But that’s the end, the final sentences. This is the beginning:

Now that they are out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, ‘Everybody did well in the international thing except us.’

‘You have to be crooked,’ he tells her.

‘Or smart. Pity we weren’t.’

But no, the real beginning is at the top of the page, the words of the title, the ice wagon going down the street. “When I was a kid I would get up in the summer before the others, and I’d see the ice wagon going down the street.” That’s Agnes speaking. The street was in Saskatchewan. Agnes’s family was not rich. Agnes is Peter’s boss in the office in Geneva, a girl, twenty-three at most. “The people he worked with had told him a Scandinavian girl was arriving, and he had expected a stunner. Agnes was a mole: She was small and brown, and round-shouldered as if she had always carried parcels or younger children in her arms.” Peter is afraid: “He saw the ambition, the terror, the dry pride. She was the true heir of the men from Scotland; she was at the start. She had been sent to tell him, ‘You can begin, but not begin again.’”

Agnes, who never drinks, gets drunk at a party and tells Peter about the ice wagon while, under orders from the hostess of the party, he is escorting her home. And while Peter’s wife, Sheilah, back at the party, is starting an affair with a man who will get the Fraziers out of Geneva and onto “the Oriental tour that should have made their fortune”. They reach Agnes’s apartment: “The room was neat and belonged to no one.” She showers and puts on a dressing gown and rubs her cheek on his shoulder. “He thought, This is how disasters happen.” Nothing happens. He goes home.

But something has happened, something that will have Peter still wondering, years later, “what they were doing over there in Geneva – not Sheilah and Peter, Agnes and Peter. It is almost as if they had once run away together, silly as children, irresponsible as lovers.” Something to do with the ice wagon – which he imagines seeing in the place of Agnes, and “the weak prairie trees and the shadows on the sidewalk”. He could take that morning that belongs to Agnes for himself, if he wanted, “but what can Peter do with the start of a summer day? Sheilah is here, it is a true Sunday morning, with its dimness and headache …” Peter has always been lost.

First published in The New Yorker, 1963, and available online to subscribers; variously collected, including in Paris Stories, NYRB, 2002, and Collected Stories, Everyman, 2016