‘Fear’ by Lydia Davis

This short story is a paragraph long and captures Davis’ exceptional minimalist craft. I read it in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis in the summer following my first year at university. Moving from a Northern working-class village to enrol on an English Literature and Creative Writing course in an unfamiliar city, I felt like an imposter. I was close to leaving and returning home to work at a bar that I loved. A bar which held weekly open mics, where people from all walks of life shared stories that felt to me so honest, so far from pretence. I hadn’t really felt connected to the literature studied during the course, but a tutor I admired gave me this text, and as I read, I felt that maybe I could do this writing (and university) thing. Davis’ stories are complex and intelligent, though they are also subtle and highly relatable. Her minute observations on being human in all of its joy, humour and tragedy, are exceptional. In her story, ‘Fear’, a woman runs from her house calling:

“‘Emergency, emergency,’ and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to quiet us.”

Events in Davis’ short-short fiction may seem small and inconsequential, though it is within these snapshots that she pulls together those intricate moments that compose our daily lives. Still, when I struggle with my writing, I go back time and time again to this collection feeling similarly seen, understood and whole-heartedly inspired.

First published in Conjunctions 24, Spring 1995, and available to read online here; collected in Almost No Memory, FSG, 1997. Included in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, FSG/Hamish Hamilton, 2009

‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin

A cold December day. An empty student flat. The light dimming in shadows around me. My impressions of reading ‘Sonny’s Blues’ during my second year of university are still very much alive, the sound of Sonny’s song still distantly playing.

In Baldwin’s controlled and beautiful prose, the emotional impact of this tale of complex brotherly love and loss is amplified. The narrator, the older brother, begins with a shard of ice in his chest where his heart once was. The two brothers have become distant due to their separate ways of dealing with the trauma of their impoverished childhood and their daily lives as young black men in 1950s Harlem. Sadness and oppression permeate this story in its sound and silence. The older brother ‘freezes’ himself as survival, the younger (Sonny) turns to face it – crafting his suffering and failures of communication into his music. We follow the older brother as his icy front begins to thaw with time. He experiences the loss of his daughter and, in feeling this deep grief, he seeks to reconnect with his brother. They argue about how one should live their life, though their words continually fail to say what they mean – this inability drawing thick lines between them. Still, when Sonny invites him to hear his music, the older brother agrees. He enters Sonny’s world and watches as, in the story’s artful crescendo, Sonny plays his blues. He struggles with control initially, but then it pours from him like water.

“Sonny’s finger filled the air with life, his life.”
His brother listens.
His brother hears.
“I understood at last that he could help us be free if we would listen and that we would never be free until we did.”

First published in the Partisan Review, 1957, and widely collected, including in Going to Meet the Man, Dial Press, 1965, which was published as a Penguin Modern Classic in 1991. The story was also published as a Penguin 60 in 1995

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado

Machado’s collection, Her Body & Other Parties, was passed between women I knew over the years – sisters to friends to lovers – to land in my lap. Before reading, I already understood a wisdom had been shared: of how to be a woman of want in a world created by another gender. And of how to put a shape to the intangible fear of being a woman disbelieved.

The first story in this collection, ‘The Husband Stitch’, is part horror, part folk tale, part magical realism – a genre-expanding story that subverts expectations so often considered unchangeable within “our known world”. We follow a narrator’s tale of becoming/unbecoming as she falls in love with a man “she knows she will marry”, as she exerts her deep-rooted sexual desire, as their love deepens, as she becomes pregnant, as she is tricked by those thought she could trust: her doctor her husband, as she bears her son, as she gives herself to her lover without her desire, as she navigates women’s time-old stories of not being believed, as she is betrayed by her husband who cannot bear her having one secret – her green ribbon – being kept from him, who, in the story’s ending, unties this final part of who she is.

“‘Do you want to untie the ribbon?’ I ask him. ‘After these many years, is that what you want from me?’
His face flushes gaily, and then greedily, and he runs his hand up my bare breast and to my bow. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
I do not have to touch him to know that he grows at the thought.
I close my eyes. I remember the boy at the party, the one who kissed me and broke me at that lakeside, who did with me what I wanted. Who gave me a son and helped him grow into a man himself.
‘Then,’ I say, ‘do what you want.'”

First published online in Granta in 2014 and available to read here. Collected in Her Body and Other Parties, Graywolf/Serpent’s Tail, 2019

Sisters by Daisy Johnson

Edgar Allan Poe defines the short story as a literary work capable of being read “in one sitting”. Though Daisy Johnson’s Sisters is a novella, I’m including it in this anthology as I read it on a single stormy evening, fittingly in the North of England. The brevity of this tale adds to its intensity and underscores its gothic horror themes of things being hidden, unknown, not quite as they seem. After closing the book, the story quickly found its way into my dreams. I remember the nightmarish quality of that night. Torrential rain against the skylight in Huddersfield. Memories of the novel flickering in and out of my broken sleep.

I could see the opening scene, the young sisters with their fairy tale names (July and September), sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the back seat of a car “sharing air”. Their single mother driving them up the bone of the country. Oxford to Yorkshire. Escaping an unspoken incident that happened in their school to make a “new start” in the North. Sister July spotting an arrow of light from the sunroof pooling between them, thinking how she and September are so close, it wouldn’t have surprised her if, “slit open, we shared organs… a single heartbeat”. I could see the isolated Settle House in Yorkshire, alive and kaleidoscopic. Shadowy shapes inside resembling bodies, ants shifting behind broken glass, corridors repeating, activity happening “just out of view”. I could see the sisters’ liminal days spent under the blue light of the TV or sharing bathwater or playing make-believe games like September Says – straddling the line between violence, mimicry, love. I remembered the mother always elsewhere, existing like “furniture” in a distant dark room. I remembered the outside blurring in and, with it, a haunting seeping between. July getting caught in the space between the house’s inner and outer walls. September’s disembodied sound, unable to be found. I remembered the change in the air. Time losing its “line”. I remembered the truth of the incident from school coming into view. I could see the sister’s caught breath. The girl-shaped hole. The family’s centre removed.

First published by Jonathan Cape, 2020

‘Colour and Light’ by Sally Rooney

How can we connect with another? How do we relate to ourselves? To what extent can our conversations communicate what we mean, how we feel?

In ‘Colour and Light’, we follow hotel worker Aidan, his business-orientated, hard-to-relate-to brother, Declan, and the mysterious screenwriter, new-to-town, Pauline. Before the present of the story, the boy’s mother has died, a person Aidan deeply related to, “the person on earth who loved him most”. When he thinks of her, “the thought creates a feeling – the thought might be only an abstract idea or memory, but the feeling follows on from it helplessly”. This proximity to her characters’ inner turmoil and complex psychology often draws me into Rooney’s stories. Aidan is self-reflective and hyperaware of how he inhabits the world, of how he sees others and how he is seen; he yearns to understand what things mean and how he can relate to the ‘social’ world of adults and expectations. Meeting Pauline is a hot flash of colour in the grey of his daily existence. People hang on her every word and desire to be with her, while, conversely, he feels utterly alone: “If I dropped dead the only people who would care are the people who would have to cover my shifts”.

Through a series of chance meetings, Aidan and Pauline’s lives intersect. Their conversations are lively, playful and almost reach an honesty that Aidan yearns for. In an interview with The New Yorker, Rooney explains, “I tend to write characters who are roughly as articulate and insightful as I am about what they think and feel. In other words, they are sometimes perceptive but more often crushingly unable to describe or explain what is going on in their lives”. Aidan and Pauline epitomise this idea; the two attempt to voice their similar feelings of alienation and loneliness, but there is a barrier to their intimacy. Their own selves getting in the way. They speak of sex, but it seems this isn’t exactly what they desire; the root, it feels, is connection. Ultimately, they part, and like Aidan, we are left to wonder what it all meant.

First published by The New Yorker, 2019, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Being Various, Faber, 2019

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

In every room I have lived in, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is one of the first books I place on the shelf. Between cities, countries, situationships, relationships, work in hospitality and lecturing jobs around the world, I have continually sought a space which may have the conditions I wish to write, to think, to dream. Because, as Woolf explains: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write […] Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.”

There have been many times when I have almost given up on this pursuit. Coming from where I have, the concept of being a writer has always been said to be somebody else’s dream, and within a series of low-paid, highly-skilled jobs and somewhat elite art events, this notion has been reproduced time and time again. Yet, inspired by Woolf and the others noted in this anthology, I continue to try. I want to read fiction about the characters and experiences I would have identified with when first starting university all those years ago. I want to add to those voices on the shelf that speak about women’s representation and class in a nuanced way. In her essay, Woolf explores the effect of the negation of women’s voices in history how, in this absence, women become othered, placed inferior, misrepresented. I hope to continue to write so my specific story does not remain unspoken or misunderstood, and in my teaching, I hope to encourage diverse students to put a name to their experience, too. Because, as Audre Lorde puts it, in the process of articulation, individuals can “put a name to the nameless so that it can be thought”.

First published by Hogarth Press, 1929, and widely available today, including in the Penguin Great Ideas series

‘Talking to Myself, Talking to You’ by Kathleen Fraser

When working on my first novel, I was obsessed with modernist and neo-modernist authors from Woolf to Fraser to Watson to McBride. I was attempting to depict a second-generation, working-class girl’s coming-of-age tale in its specificity and felt guided by these writers. I know it can often be understood that “experimental” literature seems to be a way of setting a boundary between the author and the reader. However, whilst engaging with this work, I found the absolute opposite. Through their innovations, I felt I was able to get closer to understanding the complexities of the female experiences they were depicting; I was drawn to consider how plain language has felt “a brutal tool” (Watson) that cannot, as James Joyce explains, render those parts of human existence that do not fit within “wideawake language, cutanddry grammar, goahead plot”.

Kathleen Fraser’s critical and creative work, influenced by the tradition of modernism, directly and playfully confronts women’s “dis-ease” with language, literature and authority. Her narrative piece, ‘Talking to Myself, Talking to You’, addresses a key tension in her writing. Namely, how she can represent a specific female reality within a “structure that gagged me”. In this story, we follow a female narrator as she attempts to communicate with her absent male lover. But, “I had to stop because I couldn’t begin. Too much prelude”. She seamlessly shifts in her stream-of-consciousness style between memory and reflection as she hopes to put a name to her reality in a way she might later explain to him. However, repeatedly, she fears male judgement – a directness, a logic – where her internal experience cannot reside.

“I suddenly feel exposure. Unable to present something firm and clear … a logical extension of the productive person you’ve known me to be. Will you find me out? … No answer surfaces.”

At the end of this piece, the narrator does not find the words but ends with a promise that she will continue to try. At first, this ending may seem like the narrator’s failure. However, I believe in inhabiting this specific story of a woman’s inability to speak, Fraser achieves in showing the reader (in an embodied way) what it feels like to be alienated in a language system you are forced to perform daily.

First published in Each Next, The Figures, 1980 and also in Feminist Studies, Summer 1981

Queenless by Mira Marcinów, translated by Maggie Zebracka

“Queenless – a honey bee colony without a queen.”

Like Johnson’s Sisters, I read this short novel in one breathless sitting. Composed of poetic-prose style vignettes, Queenless tells the story of a daughter’s mixed love for a mother she is losing. The narrative traces their coming together and their eventual separation in a structure akin to a tide breaking. We are left with a young woman learning to live without her gravitational centre (her ‘queen’).

Marcinów is a Polish writer who is also renowned for her critical work in psychology. What stood out to me most when reading was her skill in depicting an honest, potent love between two women. Carl Jung writes, “Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life”, and I believe Marcinów succeeds in showing in her prose that the paradox is the closest tool we have in comprehending the “fullness of (love)” in its hungry, messy form. A daughter speaks of her mother’s flaws and toxicity, naming their relationship “unhealthy”, but she could not love her more; she could not want to leave her more. The form of this story magnifies its emotional content – comprised of fragments, lyrics, scenes, and sparse, sometimes single sentences. In the white space of the page, we collate these fragments into a whole whilst also having the time to reflect and thoughtfully participate. We grapple with the narrator to consider how we might put a shape to our own love for our mothers, our own inarticulate griefs, our own desire to live in the face of it all.

Queenless will be published in the UK on July 30th by Héloïse Press and can be pre-ordered at bookshops now

‘Overnight’ by Saba Sams

Sams’ powerful stories of teen girlhood in all of its confusion, intense emotion and inchoate self-shifting reminded me of those times my heart felt wide open to a dangerous world, one that I could not help but feel a wide-awake addiction to. In ‘Overnight’, her lucid descriptions immerse the reader in a 00s world of nightclubs, blue WKDs, Smirnoff Ice and Red Stripe. The strobe light and phone camera screen select what we see as we inhabit young Maxine’s perspective. She “saw [George] first in the viewfinder of her Snapchat”. As the story progresses we zoom in to who he is and how he relates to her. In the beginning their relationship being one of innocence, listening to George’s iPod shuffle (Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls”) and finding comfort away from their single mothers’ struggles and working-class lives. However, it’s clear from Maxine’s avoidance and almost paralysis in seeing him again that something passed between them. Sams artfully executes the reveal of this event. A car light in the dark slowly coming into stark focus.

First published in The Stinging Fly, 2018, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Send Nudes, Bloomsbury, 2022

1961 Triptych by Remedios Varo

Neil Gaiman says short stories are “tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner”. My final selection for this anthology is an unexpected one. It is not a short story but, in fact, a triptych: a series of three paintings which tell a story, one which allows us to, briefly, enter another world, another mind, another dream. Remedios Varo was a Spanish surrealist painter concerned, like others in this anthology, in using her art “as a way of communicating the incommunicable”. Her work is otherworldly and concerned with liberating the self from the confines, like Machado, of “our known world”.

In the first panel, ‘Towards the Tower (Hacia La Torre)’, we see a group of uniformed young women led away from a bee-hive-like structure by Mother Superior. The women pedal in time, gazing ahead in their trance-like states. However, one of them is still awake. She dares to look outward. A sparkle in her eye. In the second panel, ‘Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (Bordando El Manto Terrestre)’, the women sit in a high tower directed by the Great Master to work – weaving the fabric of reality. The tapestry of the earth threads from their hands and out of a small gap in the wall, creating a world they are integral to but cannot participate within. Looking closely, we see the woman who is awake stitching a small detail, unseen by the others. She creates a boat, a lover, a new reality for herself beyond the confines of these walls. In the final panel, ‘The Escape (La Huida)’, the heroine is steering her boat away from the tower, her lover by her side, a dark cave symbolising her new world ahead. It is important to note the lover has not saved her, but she has fabricated her liberation alone.

Will she make it? What will this new passage entail? Comparable to the short story, the ends in Varo’s sequence are not perfectly tied up. We are left with questions, wordless interpretations, and I believe a message on the potentiality of women’s creative expression. The heroine can use the tools that once enslaved her to articulate (and thus live) her newfound freedom.

Varo’s work is included in IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism (2024-2026). Beginning at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, the show travels to Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

Introduction

Though I consider myself a horror writer, I’m not a big reader of genre fiction. My definition of what constitutes a horror story is quite broad. Broader than most people’s. I look to find horror or strange stories or weird fiction or whatever you want to call it in unexpected places, often written by authors not associated with genre writing. All I ask is that the story be disturbing and odd and chilling. That it might make me laugh with some horrible black humour while at the same time thinking, ‘Should I really be laughing at that?’ That it might stay with me. That it might haunt me not because of ghosts or vampires or zombies, although those things might be present, sure, but rather because some unwelcome truth has been exposed. Something that resonates with my own life. For me, this is what makes a horror story work best. And ambiguity. Tons of ambiguity.

There are a few writers missing from my list who I would’ve liked to have included. Robert Aickman sets the tone but has too many wonderful stories to choose from. Andre Dubus’s stories didn’t quite fit the theme. And then there’s Rebecca Lloyd, Robert Pope, and L.S. Johnson, three great short fiction writers currently working.

The stories listed below would, in my opinion, make a wonderful anthology of strange tales. Some are very dark and serious, some are more fun (but still dark). These are stories that, if I’m being honest, I’ve tried to emulate over and over again, arriving at my own versions, hopefully unrecognisable from what inspired them. Isn’t that the biggest compliment one writer can give to another?

‘Vision’ by Alistair MacLeod

While there are quite a lot of weird goings on in Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod’s wonderful collection ‘Island’, I was surprised by the supernatural elements found in one story, ‘Vision’. Like all the stories in the book, ‘Vision’ is set in Cape Breton, Nova Socia. While sea fishing, a father recounts to his son a tale of a trip he and his twin brother took as children to Canna Island. They were paying a surprise visit to their grandparents, but got lost and ended up in the filthy, cat-infested home of an old blind woman. They eventually find their grandparents house, but their connection to the old blind woman runs deeper than they realise, and she will end up saving one of their lives on the beach at Normandy during World War II, many years after her own death.

I also have to mention the opening story in this collection, ‘The Boat’, which is my favourite in the book. It’s a fantastic story but not one for this anthology.

First published in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories, McClelland & Stewart, 1986, and collected in Island, McClelland & Stewart, 2000, and again in Island: The Collected Short Stories, 2017

‘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