‘Noël parmi nous’ (‘Christmas With Us’) by Marie Darrieussecq

Selected by Nicholas Royle

This is an exquisitely subtle ghost story published, as far as I am aware, only in the original French. The translation of the title is mine and has no official status. Another translator might well have gone for ‘Christmas Among Us’. The narrator, unhappy in her job and in need of a break, intends to spend a few days in her family’s second home in the apparently fictitious town of Céranges. She will be on her own, since her husband doesn’t like the house; he finds it “chilly”. It is an intricately constructed, deceptively simple story of ominous allusions and artful repetitions with a deep well of pain at its centre. For those with even a little knowledge of French, the language is not too difficult. There are even five lines in English. The collection, Zoo, contains fifteen stories and is very good overall. Darrieussecq’s novels, which I highly recommend, and a recent memoir of insomnia, which I have not read, are available in English translation.

First published in different version in Vogue, December 2002. Broadcast on France Culture in 2004 in version collected in Zoo, P.O.L, 2006

You can read Nicholas Royle’s own personal anthology and other contributions here

‘The White Cot’ by Jackie Kay

Selected by Dyani Sheppard

I love Jackie Kay’s short story collection Why Don’t You Stop Talking – the stories are witty, sharp and perceptive, largely focusing on the lives of women. We meet the protagonists in their everyday realities and their emotional interiorities are used to take speculative turns with the narrative. I was excited to come across ‘The White Cot’ to see what Kay does with the ghost story, and I think her narrative structure lends itself perfectly to the genre. The story centres on Dionne, who needs a relaxing weekend away with her partner, after feeling down and ‘going through the change’. As they enter the house they have rented for the weekend, they instantly feel unsettled, an atmosphere intensified by the creepy white cot that stands in the bedroom. At night, Dionne struggles to sleep in the unfamiliar room and in the blurriness between sleep and wakefulness meets the presence haunting her. Dionne drifts further from her partner and from sanity and a real trepidation is built as the ghostly activity intensifies. The story primes us to expect the paranormal, establishing a creepy setting and an unreliable narrator who carries an unresolved sorrow. The use of these classic tropes alongside a modern storyline creates a truly unsettling story that feels more sinister in its relatability.

Published in Reality, Reality, Pan Macmillan, 2012

‘Foreboding’ by Kamila Shamsie

Selected by Lauren O’Donoghue

Like ‘The Breakthrough’, ‘Foreboding’ is set primarily in a workplace—in this case Kenilworth Castle, where the main character, Khalid, works as a security guard. I’m always interested in depictions of work and labour in fiction, and I think they’re particularly fascinating as sites of haunting in ghost stories. We often wonder why inhabitants of haunted houses don’t just leave. When your job depends on staying right where you are, that question answers itself.

‘Foreboding’ feels like a very traditional ghost story until it doesn’t. Taking place in a nine-hundred-year-old castle, where “queens had danced and plots had been laid and kings had been insulted”, it’s easy to think that we know where the story is going. When the ghost arrives in earnest, however, the truth proves far more devastating. It’s a deft narrative volta, the rather quaint terror of the haunted house paling against the tangible horrors of war. It made me think about the term haunted, and how often we use it to speak of trauma, as well as ghosts.

First published in Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories, September Publishing, 2018. Read online at Lithub here

‘Lo! He Abhors Not the Virgin’s Womb’ by Robert Shearman

Selected by Gaynor Jones

To my shame I only discovered Shearman’s short fiction a couple of years ago as part of a horror fiction course, but ‘horror’ doesn’t even begin to describe his work. I’ve never read pieces so disturbing, or so utterly affecting. The ‘ghosts’ that haunt the edges of this particular festive story are varied and many – the eerie balloon friends, the stable family members trapped in stasis between life and death, and even the lost Christmas traditions of ‘the old times.’ If that sounds like an odd mix, then it is, and I haven’t even mentioned the disappointing return of Jesus Christ or the snow that burns your skin on landing. I highly recommend seeking out this incredibly dark alternative Christmas tale.

Collected in We All Hear Stories In The Dark Volume III, 2020

You can read Gaynor Jones’s own Personal Anthology and other contributions here

‘Here We Come A-Wassailing’ by Terri Potvin

Selected by Gaynor Jones

The Molotov Cocktail is one of my favourite online publications and I have a particular fondness for their regular themed contests. This shortlisted piece is a favourite of mine, and a much more traditional tale than the Shearman piece. I love stories that meld horror with folklore, that legitimately seem like they could have been passed down through the years, and such is the case here with the ‘wassailers’.

The story itself has quite a childlike, almost fairy-tale telling, as befits an oral folk tale, with simple language and even a song. The wassailers are ghastly, ghostly creatures who change before the narrator’s eyes. But there’s a couple of moments that heighten the horror for me, beyond the description of the wassailers, notably the almost throwaway line early on, “I haven’t had a sister since then.” And then the almost comically blunt description of poor Mrs Miser who, for whatever reason, did not meet the wassailer’s requirements. “I followed the bloody footprints to Mrs Miser’s house and witnessed the gruesome aftermath of the wassailers’ last visit. She was everywhere.”

First published in The Molotov Cocktail, November 2022 and available to read here

You can read Gaynor Jones’s own Personal Anthology and other contributions here

‘The Something’ by Abi Hynes

Selected by Jo Howard

A young woman buys her first house and becomes aware of a presence, at first helpful, then gradually more controlling.

This tale of suburban obsession is worth reading for its crisp prose alone, but it’s also a cracking yarn. Hynes subverts the traditional ghost story. The setting, a modern home, complete with burglar alarm and double glazing, is the antithesis of gothic. The uncanny presence, far from creating a sense of unease, seems friendly, providing freshly folded towels and steaming mugs of tea. But Andrea soon realises ‘The Something’ rewards and punishes her in equal measure. A series of post-its charts her descent into a relationship characterised by coercive control; her love affair building to its ultimate conclusion when the house leaves her a final note.

Published in Hynes’ collection Monstrous Longing, Dahlia Publishing 2023

Introduction

At the start of 2023 I set myself a target to read 365 short stories, which I’ve now done – and which is why Jonathan asked me to contribute to this ongoing project.

It’s a big number, 365. But when you do the sums, it’s not really a lot of reading. If we assume the average collection of short stories contains ten pieces, it only equates to about 37 books. The time was easy to find: I just spent less time refreshing Twitter, and more time with a paperback in my hand.

The biggest challenges were, first, deciding what to read and, secondly, accumulating the necessary books.

As someone who mostly writes stories of varying degrees of weirdness, I crowdsourced a list of spooky stories on Twitter and Mastodon as a starting point, which nudged me to acquire collections by Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith and Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Next, I went on a spree picking up anthologies of short stories from charity shops, community bookswaps, and bookshops. One of the great bargains was a hardback collection of stories published in The New Yorker between 1950 and 1960, including writers who have gone on to become part of the canon, and others who are quite forgotten.

This new habit also gave me the shove I needed to subscribe to some magazines, such as the long-running science fiction publication Interzone, and buy zines like Cloister Fox and Lunate. (Disclosure: I’ve had a story in Cloister Fox.)

As for my relationship with short fiction, it’s been up and down over the years. As a dorky teenager I read a lot of short stories and wrote plenty, too. After university, though, when I started writing seriously, I skipped straight to novels, because that was the prescribed path to publication.

Then, in 2017, I read a snarky blog post by author Owen Booth entitled ‘24 Rules for Writing Short Stories’ which flipped a switch in my head. It simultaneously makes the case for the sheer variety possible in short fiction, and catalogues its cliches.

The pandemic was another trigger. I finished writing a novel in autumn 2020, somehow, but once that was out of the way, I found myself itching to write short stories again. Perhaps because they better suited my scattered attention as we struggled through successive lockdowns and waves of infection.

I published one story, ‘Modern Buildings in Wessex’, as a chapbook in the style of an architectural guide from 1968 and it went very gently viral, among the sort of people who enjoy both M.R. James and Ian Nairn. It formed the basis of an entire collection, Municipal Gothic, with which I’ve had more success, and apparently excited more readers, than anything in the preceding (wasted?) 20 years.

The list below is a mix of stories I read for the first time this year, along with some all-time favourites. I’ve tried not to overthink it but could, of course, easily have listed three times as many stories below.

‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ by Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne

Film critic Kim Newman is a prolific author of fiction. His trademark is mashing up characters from the works of others, as well as historical figures, in alternate histories. His novel Anno Dracula, for example, asks what might have happened if Dracula had not been defeated and became king of an imperial Britain ruled by vampires. You might call it clever-clever fan fiction but I often find it dazzling. How many pop culture connections can one brain hold?

‘Teddy Bears Picnic’ is a particularly thrilling example. It has Bob and Terry from The Likely Lads fighting with the British Army in Vietnam, alongside Frank Spencer and Blakey from On the Buses. And in the sky overhead, between cricket games, psychotic special forces officers Jennings and Molesworth blast ‘The Teddy Bears Picnic’ from their helicopters, to terrify the enemy. William ‘Just William’ Brown, meanwhile, has gone mad in the jungle.

Years later, Bob writes a book which Michael Powell wants to adapt into an epic movie to be called It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum…

You get the idea, there’s a lot going on.

First published in Interzone, August and September 1997, and then collected in Back in the USSA, 1997

‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ by Joyce Carol Oates

This isn’t a horror story but is certainly horrific. Arnold Friend is a monstrous fake teenager fashioned from hair lacquer and denim. When he decides to take Connie, a teenage girl, he stalks, seduces and seizes her while her well-to-do parents are out at a barbecue. It distils a huge amount into a few thousand words, making small town America a menacing, sickly place.

I came to it via The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (ed. Tobias Wolff, 1994) but knew the story obliquely from Don Moser’s 1966 newspaper article ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson’, about the real-life murderer Charles Schmid, which inspired Oates. Schmid uses to put crushed drinks cans in his shoes as makeshift lifts and similarly Oates has her Arnold Friend standing and walking strangely, as if he’s a simulacrum of a human.

This year also happened to see the resurfacing of Joyce Chopra’s 1985 excellent film Smooth Talk, the final act of which is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Oates’s story, with Treat Williams as Arnold Friend and Laura Dern as Connie.

‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ is also a story that makes you look askance at Arthur ‘The Fonz’ Fonzarelli – gritty Happy Days reboot for Netflix, anyone?

First published in Epoch, Autumn 1966, and frequently anthologised since

‘The Pennine Tower Restaurant’ by Simon K. Unsworth

Another idea I had for this list was to identify 12 stories to form an anthology of ‘municipal gothic’ – that is, weird fiction set in everyday post-war British environments such as council estates and shopping arcades.

Unsworth’s story is just such a modernist horror built around a quirky 1960s building at Forton services on the M6 near Lancaster. A ghost story of an antiquary this is not.

Unsworth, perhaps inspired by Fargo, opens the story with: “This is not fiction.” He insists that everything that follows is perfectly true, and makes the narrator a version of himself for added verisimilitude. The premise is that a 1960s motorway services restaurant can be haunted, or possessed, like a British Amityville.

He piles up the evidence and the urban legends one after another – missing people, murders, strange noises, unexplained phenomena. And provides footnotes, too, in case you should want to continue the research yourself.

It’s especially interesting to read as Danny Robins’s podcast and TV show Uncannytakes people’s personal ghost stories into the mainstream. If this was really a true story, he’d be all over it.

First published in Lost Places, Ash Tree Press, 2010

‘A Snowy Night on West Forty-Ninth Street’ by Maeve Brennan

Not a story so much as a snapshot of a moment in time, like the street photography of Saul Leiter given voice. It is snowing and New York City is subdued, as Brennan captures in long, ornate sentences:

“At night, when the big Broadway lights go on, when the lights begin to run around high in the sky and up and down the sides of buildings, when rivers of lights start flowing along the edges of roofs, and wreaths and diadems begin sparkling from dark corners, and the windows of empty downtown offices begin streaming with watery reflections of brilliance, at that time, when Broadway lights up to make a nighttime empire out of the tumbledown, makeshift daytime world, a powdery pink glow rises up and spreads over the whole area, a cloudy pink, an emanation, like a tent made of air and color.”

Lonely, the narrator goes to a French café and sits alone observing the regulars and staff playing their roles. Michel the charmer, Betty the secretary, Mrs Dolan the faded beauty, ‘Mees Katie’ the exhausted manager… This is nothing, this is not the New York people will want to remember or preserve, she says, but of course she records it anyway. I’m glad she did.

First published in The New Yorker, January 1967 and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in New York Stories, ed. Diana Secker Tesdell, Everyman, 2011

‘Night Fears’ by L.P. Hartley

I could have picked several stories from this collection, many of which foreshadow a mood we now think of as ‘Aickmanesque’. Something strange happens, it’s not always clear what, and the protagonists are left changed, and darkened, by their experiences.

This little vignette is an early bit of ‘municipal gothic’, perhaps, with a working class character at its centre, which was unusual for the time. He’s a nightwatchman on a building site, with a wife and child at home. On a cold night, when he feels especially lonely, he engages a loitering stranger in conversation and invites him to sit with him by the dwindling brazier.

The stranger asks him a series of snide, undermining questions. Is he certain his wife is faithful? Is the job worth it for the poor money they pay? Couldn’t he do any better? We begin to suspect that the stranger is Death himself, but don’t hope for a tale of redemption after A Christmas Carol:

“The stranger seemed to have said his say, his head drooped a little more; he might even be dropping off to sleep. Apparently he did not feel the cold. But the night-watchman was breathing hard and could scarcely stand…”

Rather than death, I wonder if the stranger might not be that self-doubting voice we all hear in the fretful small hours.

First published in Night Fears, 1924. Collected in The Travelling Grave and Other Stories, 1948

‘It’s a Good Life’ by Jerome Bixby

A small masterpiece and justly famous, mostly as a result of being adapted for an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1961. It does something I really love in a short story: drops us in at the deep end and makes us race to catch up. We know we’re in a small town in America and that everything is just fine, just wonderful… by why is the word ‘sun’ in quotes in the second line?

Little Anthony is a toddler and a powerful, petulant monster who can make things happen with his mind. Even when he means to help, it rarely goes well. We slowly realise that he is the apocalypse that has befallen this town, with its dwindling supplies and rusting cars.

So, his family and neighbours, stranded somewhere in space, have learned never to express a wish, or even to think about anything being different or better. Because Anthony will respond and the chances are someone will die, or the world will end up a little more broken.

It’s also clearly a product of nuclear paranoia – what might life be like in the rural Midwest after the cities have been destroyed? Would survival be desirable, or hell on earth? It also probably, I think, suggested the plot of the Japanese science fiction manga series and anime feature Akira.

First published in Star Science Fiction Stories No.2, 1953. Collected in various anthologies including The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964, ed. Robert Silverberg, 2005

‘Love of Life’ by Jack London

Reading 365 short stories was a great opportunity to dip into authors I’d previously missed or avoided. This particular story is famous as one of those London was accused of plagiarising from a factual article that appeared in the same magazine four years earlier. London said: “I plead guilty… I took the facts of life contained in it, added to them the many other facts of life gained from other sources, and made, or attempted to make, a piece of literature out of them.”

Whatever its genesis, it is a gruelling, thrilling story of survival in the cold, wolf-infested northern wilderness. Our hero, a prospector, is abandoned by his mate when his crocked ankle begins to slow them down. Left with an empty rifle and an empty stomach, what keeps him moving, to his own amazement, is his desperate desire to live.

Obstacle after obstacle, pain after pain, I found myself rooting for him, and completely immersed in a beautiful but hostile landscape. By the final act, it has become a story of suspense. Rescue is at hand, but does he have the strength to crawl that final mile?

“The patience of the wolf was terrible. The man’s patience was no less terrible. For half a day he lay motionless, fighting off unconsciousness and waiting for the thing that was to feed upon him and upon which he wished to feed. Sometimes the languid sea rose over him and he dreamed long dreams; but ever through it all, waking and dreaming, he waited for the wheezing breath and the harsh caress of the tongue.”

First published in McClure’s Magazine, December 1905. Collected in Love of Life and Other Stories, 1906, available online via Project Gutenberg