‘Evening Primrose by John Collier

Collier was a British writer in Hollywood whose stories are often saucy and somewhat smart-arsed. This particular tale, however, is considered a classic of weird fiction, and deservedly so.

A poet, struggling for money, decides to move into a New York department store. After all, it’s got everything a man needs to live a comfortable life. Only it turns out he’s not the first person to have had this idea and, after dark, sinister squatters emerge from their hiding places:

“I looked, and it was empty. I looked, and there was an old lady, clambering out from behind the monstrous clock. There were three girls, elderly ingenues, incredibly emaciated, simpering at the entrance of the perfumery. Their hair was a fine floss, pale as gossamer. Equally brittle and colorless was a man with the appearance of a colonel of southern extraction, who stood regarding me while he caressed moustachios that would have done credit to a crystal shrimp. A chintzy woman, possibly of literary tastes, swam forward from the curtains and drapes.”

It’s not just this store, either. Every shop in New York has its night creatures, including delicatessens and even funeral homes.

Collier walks the line between overblown gothic melodrama (Poe, Ray Russell) and wit. My one-word review on first reading the story was “Ghastly.” It’s one of those pieces of writing that feels wrong, and touched with genuine madness.

First published in 1940. Collected in Fancies and Goodnights, 1951

‘A Flower in her Hair’ by Pauline C. Smith

Before a long train journey I grabbed a copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Book of Horror Stories, a cheap paperback anthology from the early 1980s. My intention was to read some stories that aren’t part of the canon and perhaps make a discovery or two. Frankly, most of the contents were pretty terrible, but this piece of forgotten folk horror made it worth the slog.

It’s similar in tone to Thomas Tryon’s cult 1973 novel Harvest Home and is about a young woman, known only as ‘the girl’, who goes to visit distant relatives in the country. The matriarch of the clan, Aunt Abbie, collects human hair in different colours, which she is slowly weaving into a beautiful wreath of flowers. She covets ‘the girl’s’ red hair – a rare colour:

“‘See?’ Aunt Abbie’s long finger pointed. ‘I ain’t got that rose in yet.’ Reflectively, she gazed at the girl in the chair. ‘I just got the rose left.’”

But as a point of principle, she only uses hair from dead people. So how else can this go? Art is art, after all.

First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1968. Collected in various Alfred Hitchock story collections over the years

‘The Swords’ by Robert Aickman

It’s as if Aickman thought, “Where’s the least spooky place on earth?” and took Wolverhampton as a challenge.

I could have included any number of Aickman stories here, having first read Cold Hand in Mine as a student 25 years ago and feeling as if I’d been initiated into a cult. He’s having a well-deserved moment now, on a similar trajectory to H.P. Lovecraft. Aickman’s great power is in recording how nightmares feel, in drab contemporary settings, and refusing ever to explain what is going on.

Here, we get a lonely young commercial traveller eager to lose his virginity. Wandering the streets of Wolvo, avoiding the miserable boarding house the firm has dumped him in, he finds a fairground on a bombsite. There’s a grotty tent with a seedy show in which men first stab then kiss a pretty girl, who is also available for private shows to respectable men like him. Over tea and pies in a cafe, he gives into temptation, and agrees to bring her back to the boarding house after dark. But his first time with a woman doesn’t go quite as planned.

First published in The Fifth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, ed. Robert Aickman, 1969. Collected in Cold Hand in Mine, 1975

‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard

This story first appeared in a shared collection with three early stories by Robert Aickman and is similar in style and mood to his work. Like Aickman, Howard insists on her nightmare horrors taking place in recognisably modern settings, without distancing Victoriana and cosy gaslight.

‘Three Miles Up’, like Aickman’s ‘The Trains’ from the same collection, starts with a relatable real-world horror: you’ve agreed to go on holiday with a friend only to realise that perhaps you don’t get along quite as well as you’d imagined. Here, it’s two chaps exploring Britain’s neglected canals on a narrowboat, snapping at each other and bickering. Then they come upon a young woman sleeping on the bank and convince her to join them, hoping her presence might change the dynamic.

She’s a prototypical manic pixie dream girl, I suppose, except in British mythology pixies are famous for tricking travellers and leading them to their doom:

“To the left was the straight cut which involved the longer journey originally planned; and curving away to the right was the short arm which John advocated. The canal was fringed with rushes, and there was one small cottage with no light in it. Clifford went into the cabin to tell Sharon where they were, and then, as they drifted slowly in the middle of the junction, John suddenly shouted: ‘Clifford! What’s the third turning?’”

The inconclusive ending of the story only adds to its power. Where has this third channel taken them? Have they slipped through time, or into another plane of existence? I wonder if it’s some other aspect of The Beyond from Lucio Fulci’s 1981 film of that name.

First published in We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories, 1951. Collected in Mr. Wrong, 1975

‘Like Mother Used to Make’ by Shirley Jackson

Many of Shirley Jackson’s stories would fit just as well in horror anthologies as literary collections. Even in a novel called The Haunting of Hill House it’s hard to say for sure that anything supernatural has really happened.

James Harris, a recurring character in several short stories, might be the devil – or perhaps we just need to accept that ordinary men can also be controlling – and gleefully, pettily wicked.

In this story, David, a pernickety young man, has his neighbour Marcia over for dinner in his neat little apartment. He doesn’t earn much but what he does have goes on silver cutlery and other small things that make bedsit life tolerable. Then Marcia’s colleague, Mr Harris, shows up. Without explanation, Marcia begins to act as if David’s flat is hers, and as if she has cooked the gourmet dinner on the table. David, trapped in a game of manners, plays along:

Eventually, he leaves his own flat, defeated:

“He went down the hall and let himself into Marcia’s apartment, the piano was still awry, the papers were still on the floor, the laundry scattered, the bed unmade. David sat down on the bed and looked around. It was cold, it was dirty, and as he thought miserably of his own warm home he heard faintly down the hall the sound of laughter and the scrape of a chair being moved. Then, still faintly, the sound of his radio. Wearily, David leaned over and picked up a paper from the floor, and then he began to gather them up one by one.”

First published in The Lottery and Other Stories, 1949

Introduction

The bit of Borges that has always stuck most firmly in my head (and let’s be honest, everyone has a bit of Borges stuck in their head; even if — perhaps especially if — they’ve never actually read him) is the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In his 1942 essay ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’ — which is indeed an essay, not a short story — Borges describes the real-life 17th century philosopher’s actual and historically documented attempt to create a universal language based on the categories, subdivisions, and yet further subdivisions of all known things. This ambitious yet essentially arbitrary systemisation of knowledge Borges judiciously compares to the list of animals in “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia”:

“In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”

Borges then states, in the very next paragraph, that this encyclopaedia (not, of course, directly seen by Borges himself, but attributed to the further attribution of the very eminent sounding, and most recognisably initialled, Dr Franz Kuhn) is apocryphal; and indeed no other reference to it has ever been found. Because Borges, obviously, and deliberately obviously, made it up for the purposes of his essay (I mean, come on: “those that have just broken the flower vase”?). Which is why ‘John Wilkes’ Analytical Language’ is probably actually my favourite Borges short story, but since this is the Introduction it doesn’t count.

Anyway. I think that this, or something very like this, works equally well as a set of criteria for what constitutes an includable-in-my-personally-curated-short-story-anthology ‘short story’. Curator is an interesting job description, after all. Curate, curious, cure, curare. A choosy person who chooses; chooses which artefacts to preserve, to fix in amber, to paralyse. And every choice, however discriminate, is also partially indiscriminate, because informed or framed or fed (or poisoned) by personal experience. Every act of curation has something particular to say; it is its own story, and it’s usually mostly about the curator.

And there are hundreds, obviously; thousands, tens of thousands if you cast the net of ‘what is a short story?’ wide enough. Curating that down to twelve is like paring an iceberg down to a handful of cubes for your gin, then looking over your shoulder to find you’ve made a whole other, very different-looking iceberg with all the shavings.

And so:

‘The Bet’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

(a) Short story as premature existential challenge:

For years, I was convinced this story was by Guy de Maupassant. As it is, it’s the only Chekhov I’ve ever read, and it turns out I haven’t read any Maupassant at all.

A rich and arrogant banker bets an idealistic young lawyer a small fortune that he, the lawyer, can’t spend fifteen years in solitary confinement. This is at a party, you understand: there was rich food, plentiful alcohol, hijinks of manifold sorts, and a dangerously sloshed intellectual argument about whether capital punishment or life imprisonment was the more (or less) humane judicial sentence. We’ve all been to a party like that, right? The lawyer says that to “live somehow is better than not to live at all” and the banker says, basically, prove it mate, and here’s two million roubles on the table. “‘I accept!’ says the lawyer. ‘You stake your millions, and I stake my freedom!’” Which is a little rash of him, considering.

It doesn’t go well. The banker spends fifteen years losing enough of his fortune that paying out the two million will ruin him. The lawyer spends his time cut off from contemporary human contact, but has access to books, musical instruments, writing materials, and alcohol and tobacco. He drifts in and out of madness, learns half a dozen languages, alternately sates himself and goes on hunger strike; spends a year playing the piano constantly, another talking to himself, another in silence.

He reads everything.

The night before the final day, the banker is desperate. He only has one option. But, it turns out, so does the lawyer, who has made a final, modest testament:

“‘I know that I am more intelligent than all of you. [Okay, not that modest.] And I scorn your books, I scorn all the world’s blessings and its wisdom. It is all paltry, fleeting, illusory, and as deceptive as a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and beautiful, but death will wipe you from the face of the earth the same as cellar mice, and your descendants, history, the immortality of your geniuses will freeze or burn along with the terrestrial globe.’”

To a book-loving fifteen year old who’d just lost his father to a random heart attack, this came as a cosmically chilling revelation. I mean, it’s like positing Chekhov as precursor to Lovecraft. Be smart and read all the books, sure; just don’t read all the books or this existentially abyssal plain will open up and lose you in its heart forever. I felt so small reading that, and yet somehow so absolutely powerful.

It wasn’t till reading it again recently that I fully appreciated the subtle ironies that perfuse, or perhaps irradiate, ‘The Bet’s ending. Bankers are, after all, bankers. And yes, you short story purists who blanched at the first paragraph of this section, I am now reading more Chekhov.

First published in Russian as ‘Пари’ in Novoye Vremya, January, 1889. Collected in Fifty-Two Stories, Penguin Classics, 2020. Available to read on Project Gutenberg in an earlier translation

‘William Wilson’ by Edgar Allan Poe

(b) Short story as doubling of one sort or another, or several sorts all at once:

In his essay-cum-flowchart ‘Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories’ (which bears more than a passing resemblance to Borges’s Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), Roberto Bolaño boils it down to ‘just read everything by Poe.’ If you want to boil that down further, just read ‘William Wilson’, a story which manages to be both the essence of Poe and at the same time, somehow, something quite different from the Poe most people have read. It’s a perfect short story that shouldn’t be nearly as good as it is. It’s a deadly serious comedy and a life story in ten pages.

Mainly though, it’s a doppelgänger story. I’d argue it’s the doppelgänger story, except I haven’t read all the other doppelgänger stories ever written, so I can’t. But it feels like it should be, and has certainly been claimed as prime influencer for many subsequent doppelgänger tales by many different writers. A man relates the sorry tale of his life, and for the purposes of convenience (he says) he’ll call himself William Wilson, his real name being, by now, absolute dirt. At school he discovers there is another William Wilson (presumably also not his real name), whose birth and school-starting days exactly match his own. This other WW becomes both friend and foe, equal and superior, until a final yet ambiguous confrontation sends them both on their individual ways. Years pass. Their paths cross again, and again, and then again, and while the narrator slides inexorably towards debauchery and dissolution, his enigmatic double never fails to shine a searing light on his sins. It doesn’t go well, not least because Poe’s narrator is, as so many of Poe’s narrators are, clearly bonkers. But he tells his tale as a sort of one-sided diacritical discourse with himself playing both parts, and it’s too rationally told to be a straightforward case of madness à la Tell-Tale Heart. As more than one commentator has noted, ‘Will I am, offspring of Will’ is hardly a randomly chosen pseudonym under the circumstances.

First published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, October, 1839. Collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Lea & Blanchard, 1840, and The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, Penguin Classics, 2006. Available to read online here

‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ by JG Ballard

Talking of doubling: there is a chapter in Ballard’s 1967 fix-up-collection-collage-novel-anomaly-thing The Atrocity Exhibition titled ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ which is entirely different to this 1976 story; and yet also, because it’s Ballard, isn’t, quite. This ‘Notes’ though is probably my all-time favourite Ballard story, because it is made entirely of footnotes, and I love footnotes. Or possibly it’s that I love footnotes because of this story. Whatever.

An eighteen-word synopsis is all that remains of an “undiscovered document” detailing the final breakdown of one Dr Robert Loughlin, and events associated therewith (and just pause there a second to consider that whole “undiscovered document” notion). The story consists of those eighteen words and a paragraph-long footnote for each one of them (including for the two ‘a’s, two ‘his’s, and an ‘and’) that gradually eke out the details of the various characters’ tragic final meeting at Gatwick airport. Each of the characters is named for an aircraft manufacturer, except for Loughlin’s lover who is called Leonora Carrington (but who isn’t the Leonora Carrington, or at least I don’t think so). About halfway through is it noted of Loughlin, who is obsessed with man-powered flight, that “for some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination.” By this point, it’s clear that Ballard is having fun with his own mythology. We are then told that the obviously bonkers Dr Loughlin had a habit of meticulously footnoting every single word of large pharmaceutical indexes, usually with “imaginary aviation references”, and it is at this point you realise that you’re in an ouroboros of a story and that there’s no way out.

First published in Bananas, issue number unknown, 1976, and in RE/Search, No. 8/9, 1984. Collected in War Fever, Paladin, 1991, and The Complete Short Stories Volume Two, Flamingo, 2001

‘Something by the Sea’ by Jeffrey Ford

(d) Short story as infinite and unending dream:

I remember reading an interview once in which Jeffrey Ford raved about the unique perfection of ‘William Wilson’, but by that point there was very little that could make me love either that one Poe story or any of Jeffrey Ford’s stories more than I already did. How no one has yet chosen a Jeffrey Ford story for A Personal Anthology, I have absolutely no idea.

‘Something by the Sea’ is a gorgeously convoluted hymn to Oneiros that starts very simply, with an elderly man leading his niece and her dog to a perfect spot under a willow tree for a bit of family storytelling. There are fireflies and lanterns and sweet treats. And a hookah. And the dog is called Mathematics, and speaks. Or maybe we’re into the dream by now, it’s (delightfully) unclear; as is whose dream it might be. There are pirates and goddesses and wars in strangely-named-yet-entirely -believable lands, and questions like “When you eat a brain, what does it taste like?” (and answers like “Bittersweet”), and most of it happens on or under or over the sea, and all of it is Uncle Archer’s story for Maggie, and the hard, awful truth in the cracks of it is to do with Maggie’s mother’s madness. It is beautiful and sad and immense and endless, and completely insane and entirely dream-logical, and Jeffrey Ford is a magician, and you should read him.

First published in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, Golden Gryphon Press, 2002, then in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October-November, 2002

‘Settling the World’ by M John Harrison

(e) Short story as sacred physical artefact:

Someone — I forget who; certainly not me — once said that Jeffrey Ford was the American M John Harrison. Which, like most such comparisons, sort of works and also almost entirely doesn’t. ‘Settling the World’ is a case in point. It has the wonky, left-field, yet entirely natural-seeming inventiveness of Ford’s early stories, mixed in with a sort of John-Buchan-meets-Saki archness, and topped off with something incurably bitter. But it’s Harrison’s preternatural precision that marks it as entirely his own.

“With the discovery of God on the far side of the Moon, and the subsequent gigantic and hazardous towing operation that brought Him back to start His reign anew, there began on Earth, as one might assume, a period of far-reaching change.”

As one might assume, indeed. Oxlade, our Departmental hero, an odd cross between Harry Palmer and Richard Hannay, is sent out to investigate goings-on along God’s Motorway, the mysterious miles-wide divine link-road that has formed ex nihilobetween the Thames Estuary and the industrial Midlands (Harrison does love to traumatise genre tropes, in this case the beloved Big Dumb Object of hard sci-fi). Oxlade’s nemesis, retired foreign spy Estrades, is also there, digging around and causing trouble. It’s all a bit of an old school cloak-and-dagger hoot with extra weirdness thrown in, until they get onto the Motorway itself and Estrades’s real plan is set in motion. It doesn’t go well. Trying to blow up the Umwelt of God never does, and even that is far from the end of Oxlade’s travails.

This is easily one of my favourite Harrison stories, even though, like the Poe, it’s a bit of an odd one out for him (it was originally written for an anthology of ‘utopian science fiction’ but Harrison really doesn’t do topias, whether u or dys; what he does do is something that stretches the grimy mundane and the gnarly weird directly across each other and as far as either will go without quite snapping; sometimes even further). But it’s also my favourite because it’s in my copy of The Ice Monkey that cost me £5.99 in the mid-90s and that the man himself signed, with great down-to-earth friendliness and aplomb, at a reading at The Horse Hospital in London in 2013. While, as per Oxlade, it’s almost never good to meet your God, it was, in this case, a sheer and genuine pleasure to meet my writing god.

The book itself is, of course, now in a hermetically sealed bulletproof glass case in a time-locked vault in Zürich.

First published in The New Improved Sun, Harper & Row, 1975. Collected in The Ice Monkey and Other Stories, Unwin, 1988, Things That Never Happen, Gollancz, 2004, and Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, Comma Press, 2020

‘Down by the Water’ by PJ Harvey

(f) Short story as weird gothic blues confessional rock ballad:

In a blog post about ‘interesting sf & good fantasy’, M John Harrison cites PJ Harvey’s 1996 B-side ‘Who Will Love Me Now?’ and it’s a fair point: songs can be epic dark fantasies too (I mean, have you listened to Tom Waits’s ‘What’s He Building in There?’?). I prefer Harvey’s ‘Down by the Water’ though, a dirge-like thing of wheezing guitars and Hammer-horror violins that follows a woman who drowns her baby girl in the river and then pleads with the river’s deities to bring her back in one piece. Or rather, to bring back all the pieces of her, so that the deranged woman can herself commit the required resurrection?

“Little fish, big fish, swimming in the water
Come back here, man, gimme my daughter”

To be honest, it’s all a bit unclear, which is what makes it all the more horrifying and grimly compelling. It’s a beautiful song about ugly things, and it makes you crave to read the story it’s based on, and then you listen to it again and realise you’ve just heard the whole thing, entire.

First published as the lead single from the album To Bring You My Love, both Townhouse Records, 1995. You can watch the video online here

‘The Women Men Don’t See’ by James Tiptree Jr aka Alice B Sheldon

(g) Short story as manifest sleight of hand:

Another spy story that becomes an alien story, except this time neither of those is actually the point, because the spy telling the story is really the alien, at least from the point of view of the people he’s telling the story about, and the aliens are the spies and are a tiny bit lame, to be honest, like out-of-their-depth Boy Scouts lost in the jungle, or in this case the mango swamps of Belize.

Alice Bradley Sheldon wrote critically and commercially successful science fiction under the pseudonym of James Tiptree Jr, and no one knew for a decade. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ is written utterly convincingly from a standardly privileged 1970s man’s point of view: the women in the story are there, he unthinkingly assumes, for his benefit, to be interested in him, to be attracted to him, or at least seduced by him, to care for him when he’s injured, to back him up when he recounts the tale of their adventure, etc; the women are there to see the men, not the other way around.

Except the women — Ruth Parsons and her daughter Althea — are in fact the tale’s true protagonists, and ordinarily arrogant, blinkered, out-of-his-depth Don Fenton is an unwanted sidekick, barely a bit-part in their story. We just happen to be listening to his (hopelessly skewed) version of events. The best part of this is that all the macho male genre critics of the time assumed Tiptree was a man, and praised ‘his’ writing for its Hemingway-esque qualities, its eloquent capturing of the true male spirit, and so on, completely missing that they were being perfectly skewered just as much as pointless feckless Fenton. As Sheldon’s biographer Julie Phillips notes, ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ is about the psychic damage caused by having to see the world through men’s eyes, and thereby to understand how little you are, yourself, truly seen.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December, 1973. Collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, Gollancz, 2014

‘Nurse’s Song’ by Louise Glück

(h) Short story as lyric poem:

“As though I’m fooled. That lacy body managed to forget
That I have eyes, ears; dares to spring her boyfriends on the child.”

It’s impossible to do this one justice in a commentary that’s going to end up three times longer than the poem; really I should just quote the whole thing, but I don’t think that’s allowed. It’s a classic kitchen-sink, upstairs-downstairs tale of Edwardian melodrama, ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ set in pre-WWI Bloomsbury, except it’s told from the nursemaid’s point of view and with stunning economy. If a short story is a novel with all the unnecessary words taken out, then this poem is a short story with all of its unnecessary words utterly excised. Glück’s body of work encompasses many of these stripped-down narratives — ‘Archipelago’ for instance is The Odyssey reset as a terrifying 11-line micro-horror-story. ‘Nurse’s Song’ hovers on the edge of jealousy and vengeance without descending into either, and in ten lines of good-hearted plaint (but with a stinging kick at the end) tells a whole tale of decadence and deceit and hubris, and of what that might do to a child of such a marriage, and of how only the unnoticed servant can see the damage or care enough to do anything about it.

Collected in Firstborn, The New American Library, 1968, and in Poems 1962-2020, Penguin Classics, 2021