Category: Ian Critchley

Ian Critchley is a freelance editor and writer. His fiction has been published in several journals and anthologies, including Best British Short Stories 2025, The Mechanics Institute Review #15, Structo, The Fiction Desk, Lighthouse and Litro. He has won both the Hammond House International Literary Prize and the HISSAC Short Story Prize. His story ‘Removals’ is published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press. His journalism has appeared in the Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review.

Introduction

I recently stopped reviewing books. After more than thirty years writing for various publications, I felt that I’d run out of things to say. So I was a bit hesitant to offer up this anthology, in case it felt too much like reviewing. Once I got started, though, I found I had quite a lot to say about short fiction. I’ve tried to pick stories that mean something to me personally, that have influenced my own writing or thoughts, or that have lodged themselves in my mind for one reason or another. They are in no particular order.

In all those years of journalism, I was rarely commissioned to review a collection of short stories – an indictment of the way the publishing industry and the media undervalue the form. I believe that things are slowly changing, that there is a whole ecosystem of writers, readers and publishers who do value short stories, and A Personal Anthology is a very welcome part of that. Long may it continue.

‘The Fix’ by Percival Everett

Influx Press brought the American writer Percival Everett to wider recognition in the UK by republishing much of his work, including the brilliant short story collection Damned If I Do. They are one of several independent publishers who deserve a great deal of credit for championing short stories.

In ‘The Fix’, sandwich shop owner Douglas Langley rescues a man named Sherman Olney from a beating. He takes Sherman in and Sherman offers to fix Douglas’ fridge then his plumbing. Soon Sherman is fixing everything – a foot massager, a toy car, a razor. Word soon gets around the neighbourhood and Sherman is bombarded with requests. Then he brings a woman back to life. Everett’s story is a perfect example of George Saunders’ dictum about short fiction: “always be escalating”. I love how this story, which begins in a downbeat, fairly ordinary way, takes on a mythic, parable-like quality. Sherman becomes a Christ-like figure, but like Christ his gift threatens his downfall.

First published in New York Stories; collected in Damned If I Do, Influx Press, 2021

‘A Partial List of the Saved’ by Danielle McLaughlin

Being Various, edited by Lucy Caldwell, is an excellent anthology of recent Irish writing. I could have picked several of the stories, including Kit de Waal’s ‘May the Best Man Win’ or ‘Mikey Mullholland’ by Wendy Erskine, but Danielle McLaughlin’s story is the one I keep returning to. It won the Sunday Times/Audible Short Story Award in 2019. A man flies back from the United States to his native Northern Ireland for his dad’s eightieth birthday. He invites his ex-wife to go with him because he hasn’t told his father about their divorce. His sister, who has been looking after their dad, is at her wits’ end. Meanwhile the old man appears to be in a relationship with the housekeeper. McLaughlin imbues this messed-up family dynamic with humour, tension and underlying resentment and love. A visit to the Titanic museum in Belfast and a sighting of a memorial to four men who died during the War of Independence place the drama into wider contexts in this beautifully restrained story.

Published in Being Various, edited by Lucy Caldwell, Faber, 2019; read online here

‘Paymon’s Trio’ by Colette de Curzon

The story of how this came to be published is a tale in itself. Colette de Curzon wrote it in 1949 when she was 22, but because she didn’t know anything about the publishing world, she put away in a folder until her daughter found it 67 years later. She lived long enough to see it published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press in 2017 before passing away in March the following year.

Nightjar Press specialise in publishing stories that editor Nicholas Royle describes as having “something of the uncanny or the gothic or the dark, strange, weird, wonderful” about them. ‘Paymon’s Trio’ is a perfect example: a musician buys a mysterious black book from a second-hand stall and finds tucked into it a piece of music that may or may not be demonic. The music is for a trio – a pianist, a violinist and a cellist – and there is a growing sense of doom as the narrator gathers two friends and they settle to play the three parts.

First published by Nightjar Press, 2017; republished in Best British Short Stories, edited by Nicholas Royle, Salt, 2018

‘The Cast’ by Nicholas Royle

Speaking of Nicholas Royle, I’ve read more stories either written, published or anthologised by him than by anyone else. A staunch advocate of the short story, he has done as much as anyone to promote the form in this country. I’ve greatly enjoyed his most recent collections, the trilogy London Gothic, Manchester Uncanny and Paris Fantastique (Confingo) but I’ll go with this earlier story, included in his collection Mortality and first published in 1992. It’s a tale of love, betrayal and football – all of which are guaranteed to pique my interest – but what I admire most about it is the way Royle blends realism and surrealism – the cast of the title is something completely unexpected. The image of a goalkeeper frozen in mid-air as he makes the save of his life is one that has lodged in my brain for years. It was an early lesson for me in how the short story can be the perfect vehicle for seeing reality at a slant, for encompassing the bizarre.

First published in Interzone #63, 1992; collected in Mortality, Serpent’s Tail 2006

‘The Two-Body Problem’ by Ruby Cowling

Another thing that the short story does really well is experiment with different forms. But the best stories don’t merely use unusual forms for the sake of it – they marry the form to the content. Ruby Cowling’s story, from her collection This Paradise, has two narrators and their texts are laid out side by side on the page. So far so interesting, but it’s only when we learn that the two narrators are twins that the story starts to take on added significance. Their different stories echo and fight each other, come together and part as the twins navigate their way through childhood and adolescence and into adulthood.

First published in I Am Because You Are, Freight Books, 2015; collected in This Paradise, Boiler House Press, 2019

‘This Place is No Vegas’ by K.M. Elkes

“Tommy’s at poker night getting thrashed again. He’s had nothing but hand after hand of utter dross until these two kings. Now the feels are on him, the same as when his dead father shows himself with a soft thud in an empty next-door room…”

I first came across Ken Elkes’ writing through his excellent flash fiction collection All That Is Between Us (Ad Hoc, 2019). But I think his short stories are even more impressive. Tommy plays poker every Wednesday with two mates. They dream of going to Vegas, seeing the bright lights, but are stuck in a dead-end British town. When Tommy almost literally loses the shirt off his back he wheels away from the poker game and wanders this town he has known all his life, memories crowding in. It’s a story that hits you with quiet force: has Tommy folded his life’s last hand, or is there another deal to come?

Published in The Mechanics Institute Review #16, 2019

‘The Pickling Jar’ by Lucie McKnight Hardy

A short sharp shock of a story that deals with death in a highly unusual way. When Gaynor’s partner Dave is given a terminal diagnosis, she throws herself into making pickles. At first this seems like a distraction – she has previously been obsessed with The Great British Bake Off – but it soon takes on another dimension entirely, as one of the ingredients of the pickle is extracted after Dave’s death. At the wake, her work is tested and judged. There are echoes of Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ in the way a community comes together for a macabre ritual, but Lucie McKnight Hardy takes the idea and makes it all her own.

First published in The Ghastling No. 9, edited by Rebecca Parfitt; collected in Dead Relatives, Dead Ink, 2021

‘Empty Air’ by Richard Smyth

Let’s take a moment here to appreciate the work of all the literary magazines that tirelessly publish and promote short stories and which are more often than not a labour of love. Structo has for some years been one of the best, but it seems to have been on hiatus since 2023. Hopefully that won’t be a permanent state of affairs because it has introduced me to several excellent contemporary short story writers, including Richard Smyth. In ‘Empty Air’, a man spends his spare moments climbing various buildings around a city trying to set the clocks to the correct time. In teasing out the reasons for this, Smyth beautifully marries his narrator’s inner and outer lives. It’s a brilliant evocation of loss, isolation and loneliness.

Published in Structo #16, Autumn/Winter 2016; read online here

‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley

“. . . not for nothing am I the great-grandson of that Ts’ui Pen who was the governor of Yunan province and who renounced all temporal power in order to write a novel containing more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and construct a labyrinth in which all men would lose their way . . .”

I know I’m not the first to choose Borges in A Personal Anthology and I doubt I’ll be the last. I thought about not including him for fear of duplicating what others have said, but the fact is that his work has excited and influenced me more than any other writer. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is a story that begins like a John Buchan spy tale but becomes a dizzying but equally thrilling contemplation of time and infinite pathways. Reading him for the first time in my late teens I was struck by the way he opened up whole new possibilities for writing beyond the social realism that I was used to reading at that time. The fact that I then spent most of my twenties trying and failing to emulate his style is of course not his fault.

First published 1941; collected in Collected Fictions, Allen Lane 1999

‘Relief’ by Peter Ho Davies

Peter Ho Davies was named as one of Granta’s Best British Young Novelists in 2003, but he built his early career on short stories. ‘Relief’ was included in his debut collection, The Ugliest House in the World.

Claire Keegan has said that “a short story begins after what happens happens”. I’ve never been entirely sure what that means, but Davies’ story is perhaps a good illustration, in that it features two famous historical people a while after the event for which they are renowned. Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard are enjoying dinner in the mess tent in Natal, South Africa in the spring of 1889. Three months have passed since their defence of the British mission station at Rorke’s Drift, in which around a hundred men held off an army of five thousand Zulu warriors. Davies isn’t interested in glorifying the British soldiers’ exploits, though: Bromhead and Chard’s retelling of the event is interrupted by a bout of flatulence suffered by another soldier at the mess table. There’s broad humour here, but the story becomes a compelling examination of embarrassment, compassion and different kinds of bravery.

First published in The Paris Review Issue 141, Winter 1996 – subscribers can read it online here; collected in The Ugliest House in the World, Granta, 1997

‘Eastmouth’ by Alison Moore

A young woman travels with her boyfriend to his parents’ house in a seaside resort. She gets a warm welcome, but insists she isn’t intending to stay long. As the days pass, she feels increasingly uneasy – about her boyfriend, his parents, the town and the locals. Will she ever leave?

At first glance, there is nothing unusual about this seaside town and even by the end it’s hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong about the place, but Moore plants subtle details – for instance the rust that comes away on the young’s woman’s palms when she grips the promenade rail – that gradually build to a climax. There’s no blood or gore, no jump scares, but the creeping sense of dread is even more powerful.

First published in The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, Spectral Press, 2014. Collected in Eastmouth and Other Stories, Salt 2022

‘Elite: The Dark Wheel’ by Robert Holdstock

This story is a bit of an outlier, as it was first published as a booklet to accompany a computer game release. It was probably the first ‘grown-up’ short story I ever read.

Elite is a space exploration game that came out in 1984, initially for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. I was 14 back then and my twin brother and I became totally hooked on the game. God knows how many hours we spent together playing it. Robert Holdstock became a bit of an obsession of mine too: his stunning novel Mythago Wood, published that same year, remains one of my all-time favourites.

My brother passed away in 2022. At the funeral, I spoke about our shared love of the game as teenagers. Afterwards, one of his friends wrote to say that they still played Elite (it has been adapted for modern consoles) and that players could give names to space stations in the game’s universe. They had named one after my brother. So somewhere out there in cyberspace is a fictional space station carrying my brother’s name. One day I will play Elite again and go in search of it and imagine that he and I are 14 again, wasting too much time but not really wasting it.

Published by Acornsoft Ltd, 1984