Introduction

These stories each use ideas of place differently, whether to signal class or status, insecurity or transience, human connection or violence, satire or sincerity. Some feature what were once called ‘non-places’ – airport lounges, barns, motorways, tube stations, malls. Even the settings with the most potency – cathedrals, cottages, abbeys, housing estates – are rendered to suggest something unexpected in their familiar forms. I’ve ordered this list according to solidity – why not? – beginning with the most grounded and ending with the most allusive. By the end the whole concept of place will have dissolved utterly, taking with it the very foundations of this list. I can’t apologise enough.

‘Kilbride’ by Frank Ronan

All of the stories in Ronan’s 1996 collection are uncomfortable. ‘Kilbride’ concerns Helen, who still holds a candle for her ex-lover Michael, a man just fallen for a country and western singer named Michelle Kelly. Helen, now married with kids, resents her role in getting Michael together with Michelle, at what she had intended to be a joke of an evening in a flat-roofed pub in Kilbride. The story crackles with unreasonable desires, ugly snobbishness and uncomfortably recognisable behaviour, all amplified by the setting. Ronan usually dispenses with description of place swiftly in his stories, but in this one setting and character are intimately entwined. Michael is up ladders fixing windows in Michelle’s mother’s rackety house; Helen is weeping with derisive laughter at the purple and gold scallop-shaped sink in the new lover’s bathroom; the Starlite Lounge, where the lovers meet, is only redeemed in Helen’s eyes by having an older country pub attached to this vast modern extension. Class, lust and responsibilities are all illuminated here by descriptions of buildings and what they represent in our most heated and unreasonable moments.

First published in Scripsi, Australia. Collected in Handsome Men are Slightly Sunburnt, Hodder and Stoughton, 1996

‘Alight at the Next’ by Eley Williams

Williams’s writing communicates the same sort of joy in inventing and sharing sentences that makes reading, say, Ali Smith or Hilary Mantel such a delight. Unpredictable thoughts spill out: “my spirit animal is probably a buttered roll” or “For example, we’re missing a snail insisting that he’s in the haulage business.” It captures a moment, as the doors on a District Line train open, accompanied by the semi-drunken rush of thought of our narrator, travelling with someone they hope to invite home. To their own astonishment, as they hesitate to ask, the narrator also reaches out and places a hand on the forehead of man on the platform to prevent him from boarding. In the staggered layout of the text, the thoughts within thoughts, Williams gives us the euphoric, confused, overwhelming feeling of falling for someone, and of doing something completely out of character, trying to control everything in one perfect second, in a place that feels crushingly familiar. I think I’m the third person on here to cite this story, after CD Rose and Naomi Frisby. [In fact the fourth: Joanna Walsh also picked it – Ed.]

First published in 3:am Magazine, 2014, and available to read here. Collected in Attrib., Influx Press, 2017

‘The Wall in the Head’ by Lynsey Hanley

“The wall is about not knowing what is out there, or believing that what is out there is either entirely irrelevant to your life, or so complicated that it would go right over your head if you made an attempt to understand it.”

I’ve been so inspired by this stand-out autobiographical essay in Hanley’s first book. It’s a vivid, moving, personal story of class and the barriers facing a council-estate child when meeting the world beyond. She writes so brilliantly about Chelmsley Wood, the Midlands housing estate of her youth, and the opportunities and limitations such a place afforded her. After reading it, the idea of the wall in the head haunted me for years, so similar were our backgrounds, but here was someone with a much sharper and more politically focussed mind explaining the effects of those circumstances back to me in ways I had not fully understood. But beyond that that, those personal moments she shares – in relationships or education – have a vertiginous quality, making the reader feel like they’re falling back into a half-remembered youthful world of malleability and uncertainty.

First published in Estates: An Intimate History, Granta, 2007

The 199 Steps by Michel Faber

I read this while I was in Whitby, and it was one of those rare moments where I allowed myself to experience the place and the writing as one. A kind of ghost story, a cunning mystery and a romance, it follows Sian, who joins an archaeological dig in the ruined Abbey, and who uncovers secrets that lead her into all sorts of unexpected danger. The town is entirely integral to the whole story, and the writing has a kind of energy and momentum that suggests Michel Faber was swept up in the place, much as Bram Stoker had been over a century before. His descriptions of running up those precarious stone steps has a kind of exhausting visceral quality that makes you crave your fish and chips even more.

First published by Canongate Books, 2001

‘New Zealand Gets Nuked, Too’ by Douglas Coupland

Among all of the zeitgeisty commentary, slacker chic and cultural insights in Generation X come snappy descriptions of the landscape of post-Reaganite America, which Britain was swift to copy. Is it a novel? Is it linked stories? Yes. One of the tales, ‘New Zealand Gets Nuked, Too’, features some terrific descriptions of the Mojave Desert, where we hear that nuclear scientists once came to get drunk, crash their cars and get eaten by desert rats. Dag, one of the central trio in the book, tells a story of Otis, a man who goes to explore the atomic bomb craters of New Mexico. On his way back Otis spots a landscape of malls. “He was idly thinking about the vast, arrogant block forms of shopping mall architecture and how they make as little visual sense in the landscape as nuclear cooling towers.” He then drives by a new yuppie housing development, equally shocking in coral pink. Otis thinks “‘Hey! These aren’t houses at all – these are malls in disguise.’” It’s a tale told in the flat blankness of slacker style, withheld and arch, and its descriptions of landscapes are informed by Coupland’s other career as a graphic designer, all surfaces and image. And it is no less powerful and moving for that.

First published in Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, St Martin’s Press 1991

‘Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains’ by AL Kennedy

There is a kind of mania in this story. The narrator’s voice appears on one level calm and reasonable, but as the story unfolds it seems a control mechanism for appearance’s sake, and a smokescreen for her loss of agency. The narrator lightly details her husband’s infidelities in a way that becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the reader, but for our masochistic central character life appears to be a series of preordained patterns, and everything seems as important as everything else. Never more so than in her strange obsession about how the trains terminate at Garscadden, the stop before hers, despite how few people ever get off there. She comes to blame the trains for the failure of her marriage, and for almost killing her husband, a kind of chaos theory of relationships.

“I went down, as usual, to stand on the westbound platform, this time in a hard, grey wind, the black twigs and branches over the line, oily and dismal with the damp.”

And she finally drags that oily and dismal world back to her cheating spouse.

First published in Beloit Fiction Journal Vol 5, No. 1, and collected in Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Polygon, 1990

‘Barn Burning’ by Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum

Murakami stories are kinetic affairs, events leading to events entirely under their own volition and with little recourse to logic or reality. And that’s why they remain so exciting to read. ‘Barn Burning’ revels in unlikeliness (a student of pantomime; sudden trips to Algiers; regular disappearances), not least when the narrator sets out to find five potential barns near his home in Tokyo for his rich arsonist friend to burn down. He spies them on his morning run, describing their suitability, relative dilapidation and isolation. Here place feels as significant and lightly held as any of these other plot points or motivations, everything on the verge of floating away, like ash from a fire.

First published in The New Yorker, October 1992, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Elephant Vanishes, Vintage, 1993

The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark

Another novella about an abbey! Perhaps I have A Thing. Who else would, in 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, have the wit and invention to reimagine Richard Nixon’s downfall as a farce in a convent? It takes the strange supernatural imagination of Muriel Spark to do that. Here a secret has been stolen from a sewing box and the poplars have been bugged, as a nun attempts to steal the election of Abbess from her rival. The allegory works because of the setting, the closed and claustrophobic convent in Crewe, where the eyes of God have been translated into recording devices hidden in the walls throughout the building. The convent is a different kind of White House, a setting simultaneously sober and absurd, making the insane farce within seem ever more extreme.

First published by Macmillan, 1974

‘Modern Buildings in Wessex’ by Ray Newman

Told as a series of gazetteer entries written by Stewart Brayne, a prissy architectural historian touring a number of modernist buildings in Wessex in 1968, this story felt as though it were written just for me. I’m an avid reader of genuine architectural guides from this period, and Newman’s tone is spot on: part Ian Nairnish grumping about ‘cultural poverty’, part Pevsneresque lofty technical detailing. But within that sensible framework a darkly sinister narrative begins to emerge. On his way Brayne is seeking out nine buildings designed by Hungarian émigré Hälmar Pölzig, in a pattern pre-ordained by the architect. En route he lists the artists who produced work for each of these buildings, and after a while you begin to notice a pattern there too, in the dates of their deaths and the openings of the buildings. Soon he – and we – are rattled by “moving shadows that play thrilling tricks on the eyes” and “the dark sense that something of the building followed me down those dark medieval streets”. Like the rest of the collection the story is funny and genuinely chilling in places, stepping back from the obvious in the manner of Robert Aickman and letting your imagination do its worst.

First published in a limited edition pamphlet in 2020. Collected in Municipal Gothic, 2023

‘Arrival at the Zone’ by JG Ballard

These linked micro-tales are the moment we saw the emergence of a new, enduring voice from JG Ballard: no longer just one of a generation of visionary British science fiction writers, but now also a prophet of apocalypse and place, modern technology and pop-culture, violence and dislocation, sex and death. This book would lead on to his not-quite-trilogy of Crash, Concrete Islandand High-Rise, the books that today define his reputation and style. A short 12-line piece from the book, ‘Arrival at the Zone’, perfectly captures the tone.

“They sat in the unfading sunlight on the sloping concrete. The abandoned motorway ran off into the haze, silver firs growing through its sections. Shivering in the cold air, Talbot looked out over this landscape of broken flyovers and crushed underpasses.”

And then, three lines later:

“Against the drab concrete the white fabric of her dress shone with an almost luminescent intensity.”

Within pages we are seeing lurid visions of Monroe, of the Kennedys, of Elizabeth Taylor, in a world of ruined concrete and violence. The effect of these fractured shards is cumulative. The Atrocity Exhibition is the most frightening, dread-drenched book I have read.

First published in The Atrocity Exhibition, Jonathan Cape, 1969

‘Cathedral’ by Raymond Carver

There’s really no point recommending a short story by Raymond Carver to someone on this site, is there? So, assuming you have already read it, the amazing thing about this one for me is the ending. The narrator is trying to describe a Portuguese cathedral to Robert, a blind man, firstly though words, and then by trying to draw it with him. It is a cathedral neither of them knows, and which the narrator has only glimpsed on TV. The result is, of course, tremendously profound in its brevity, a brilliant exploration of how curiously abstract the idea of physical place can be.

First published in Best American Short Stories 1982. Collected in Cathedral, Knopf, 1983

‘Rockpools, Oaks’ by Timothy Thornton

“In brief: the secret of the dream, which he carried around with him now, was that certain words have an extra element to them. This extra element is, perversely, missing. Absent. … It is not written, and it is not sounded.”

‘Rockpools, Oaks’ is a shaggy dog story about language and indescribable things. Two friends, lovers, get drunk and share almost hallucinatory thoughts on the things they can barely describe at the edges of their perceptions. Yet in all of those abstract thoughts comes the real world too, the things they are describing formed of the shadows or imprints or absence of things. What’s so brilliant about this – story? recollection? – is it opening possibilities to the stuff we don’t see around us, a different landscape shifted in a scale we have yet to fathom.

First published on Horses Noise Substack, 2023