Introduction

By way of an introduction, what introduction can there be, that you, dear reader, since you’re visiting here, will not have heard before? All the quotes, the eulogies, the paeans to the short story form, you’ll be familiar with. You won’t want to read them again. Nor will you want to hear what brilliant pieces I’ve left out, or how I feel strangely guilty about omitting some of my favourites. But I’ll say this: that, in the largely bookless working class household in which I was brought up, stories, orally delivered, were colour, excitement, thrill, even transgression; sitting shock-headed at the knees of my grandparents and absorbing their tales of war, of the old countries, of ghosts and the restless, garrulous dead, the world seemed at once comprehensible and less confusing but also more terrifying and ineffable. What a strange power narrative has.

‘Evie’ by Sarah Hall

I can hear your groan: this one, again? How many times? Yes, but its reappearance is testament to its brilliance. It’s a perfect piece. Jonathan Gibbs, of this parish, has written a precis which I cannot better, so all I’ll say is that the gutpunch I felt on first reading it, the knowing that, from now on, I’d have to undergo some harsh and hurtful self-examination, will forever be a component of my personal luggage.

First published in The Sunday Times, 2013, and collected in Madam Zero, Faber, 2017

‘Some Rain Must Fall’ by Michel Faber

This is the title story of Faber’s first collection of short pieces and it is a grenade. It works like a booby trap; or, rather, like one of those aposematic creatures that draw you towards them with their beauty before you realise, too late, that their iridescence is a warning, not a lure. The way it combines dismay at the brokenness of humanity with awe at its resilience and capacity for care and love is supremely, almost ecstatically done. I first read it alone in the corner of an Edinburgh pub, steaming with people sheltering from a storm: part of me is still there.

Published in Some Rain Must Fall and Other Stories, Canongate, 1998. Winner of the Ian St James Award

‘Be This Her Memorial’ by Caradoc Evans

Darker, as the saying goes, than a coal miner’s arse at midnight. Evans, praised in England and reviled in Wales at the height of his fame during WW1, still shocks; his Welsh peasantry are not noble or rawly pure; the corruption of the Liberal non-conformist hierarchy has polluted all of the society Evans examined. Here, all is venal, rank with hypocrisy; this tale of ‘Nanni, who was hustled on her way to prayer-meeting by the Bad Man [and] who saw the phantom mourners bearing away Twm Tybach’s coffin, who saw the Spirit Hounds and heard their moanings two days before Isaac Penparc took wing’, is a forebear of today’s folk horror. And horrible (and glorious, and grotesquely funny) it is.

First published in My People, Andrew Melrose, 1915, and in My People, Seren, ed. John Harris, 1987

‘Acid’ by James Kelman

Yes, here it is again. This little uppercut of a story has, I notice, appeared on several of these Personal Anthologies, but I could not omit. It’s, what, 500 words or so? A paragraph? Two minutes to read and a lifetime to get over. Kelman’s mastery of the short form is truly astonishing.

First published in Not Not While the Giro, Polygon, 1983

‘Thanksgiving’ by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates can command any genre in which she chooses to write, it seems (or which chooses her through which to express itself}, yet her tales of the weird are often overshadowed, in the collective critical eye, by her more politically engaged, directly accessible stuff. To this reader, however, her ‘dark fiction’ pieces are amongst the very best in the field. In this, a young girl, through whose eyes we see, is taken by her father on a Thanksgiving shopping trip in a world which has somehow slipped sideways into pure nightmare. In a supermarket lifted out of an insane brain, the girl hopes her father is not muttering a prayer under his breath because ‘it would have made me disgusted to hear. The age I was, you don’t want to hear any adult, let alone your father, yes and your mother, maybe most of all your mother, praying aloud to God to help them, because you know, when you hear such a prayer, there won’t be any help’.

Shudder.

First published in Omni, December 1993, and then in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, E. P. Dutton, 1994

‘Soprano Home Movies’ by Diane Frolov, Andrew Schneider, David Chase and Matthew Weiner

A perfect piece of narrative. When this episode appears, we know these characters, we know how they relate to each other, we’ve seen clearly the interconnected grid of their psychodramas, yet this episode works as a standalone piece; still we get backstory, introduction, the careful explication and examination of their enmeshing. The entire basic premise of the show is encapsulated here. Tony and his wife go on a cabin lakeshore holiday with one of Tony’s lieutenants, Bobby, and his wife, who happens to be Tony’s insufferable sister. There is envy, a toxic emotional stew, a type of terrible blackmail, awful violence. The closing scene – Bobby, shattered, holding his baby daughter tight to him as ‘This Magic Moment’ swirls and soars – is shattering, moving in a million ways, even strangely heroic. One of the very best episodes in one of the finest items of television.

Sopranos Season 6, Episode 13, first broadcast April 2007, HBO

‘Roma Kid’ by Kevin Barry

A gypsy child leaves ‘the chalets of the asylum park’ next to one of the frantic arteries that serve Dublin and she walks and trains across Ireland until she is taken in by a strange anchorite, a ‘ferny, mossy, twisted old thing’ who takes her with him into his trailer in the woods. Barry’s language, as always, is astounding, his grasp of concision and of what is best to leave unsaid is exemplary. Something bad is going to happen here, you’ll be thinking, and your nerves will be tautened, zinging, waiting for that badness to come down. Does it? Well, on finishing this story, my beam could’ve been seen from space. I hovered three feet off the ground.

First published in The New Statesman, then The Berlin Quarterly, and collected in That Old Country Music, Canongate, 2020

I paraphrase…

‘He was the best cat. He was my favourite. He knew things. If I was upset or scared or the heart was across me he’d stay by my side all night. He wouldn’t leave my side until I felt better. White, he was mostly, with a black patch on his head and he wore his wars in his fur. The best mouser. Paws on him the size of plates. He was very old at this point, this night I’m after telling you about, and I was very young, and I was sitting by the fire with him for the warmth against the storm outside and he was sleeping, the very perfect picture of peace, contentment in that way cats have. Came a knock at the door, my Daddy answered it, it was the feller from the cottage down the lane. Wet through he was. Looked not right in himself. A funny thing just happened, he said; he came across a black cat in the lane, just sitting there in the storm. As he passed, he could’ve sworn he heard the cat talk, and it said: you can tell the king to come home now, it’s safe for him to do so. And he said this and my white cat jumped off my lap and straight up the chimney he went, flames and all, and that was the last anyone ever saw of him’.

First heard at my granny’s knee, circa 1973

‘Pages From Cold Point’ by Paul Bowles

An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, but wonderful nonetheless:

When Bowles sent this story to his British agent, he was told that it just would not find an outlet in the UK. Bowles asked why, and the agent is alleged to have said: “because your English readership may take the incest. They may take the buggery. But, by God, they will not take the blackmail”.

How can you resist?

First published in Wake, 1949, then in The Delicate Prey, Random House 1950, now in Collected Stories, Penguin, 2009

‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’ by Tim O’Brien

The title story of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is heavily anthologised and studied and pored over but, for me, this is the collection’s standout tale. A young medic in Vietnam, Mark Fossie, smuggles his all-American sweetheart Mary Anne into his jungle camp. All is oddly frolicsome and gambolling, there is a wedding proposal, Mary Anne learns to cook and dress wounds and then things go tar-black dark. Haunting and unforgettable. ‘Build Your Own Gook’. My skin still crawls.

Published in The Things They Carried, Flamingo, 1991

‘The New Mother’ by Lucy Lane Clifford

A much, and unjustly, neglected writer, Lucy Clifford was, in her time, friend to such writers as Kipling and Hardy and Henry James and Darwin. The only affordable collection available, it seems, is the clumsily printed Oneiros one, with the grotesque phantasmagoria of d m mitchell to accompany the tales. They’re ostensibly children’s stories, cautionary and fabular, but boiling within them is a kind of terrible dread; in ‘The New Mother’, children called Blue Eyes and Turkey, and an unnamed infant, live with their mother in a woodland cottage – the father is away at sea. Returning from the village one day, after another fruitless quest for a letter from the father, they come across a curious, feral girl (who declares herself ‘very rich’) who speaks to the little people she says live in her strange musical instrument (which she calls a ‘peardrum’) and who she will reveal only to naughty children. Blue Eyes and Turkey announce their intention to be naughty to their mother, who says she would then have to leave them and ‘send home a new mother, with glass eyes and a wooden tail’. And that is what happens. That is exactly what happens. The closing paragraphs left me aghast.

First published in The Anyhow Stories, McMillan, 1882 and in The New Mother and other stories, Oneiros, 2012

‘Mary’ by Liadan Ní Chuinn

Ordinarily, I find the work of new writers as hyped as Ní Chuinn underwhelming, to say the least, but in this case, do believe the hype. Ní Chuinn continues the long line of writers out of Ireland (Barry, Barrett, Erskine etc) who shake up the short form and explore voice and structure with a confidence and ingenuity that staggers. ‘Mary’ is a second person address to the partner of one Christy, who, we are told in the opening sentence, is ‘gentle’. What follows is an examination of squalid compromise, of good people being forced, through circumstance, to do not-so-good things. Needless to say, this is not the Ireland of rolling green and jolly fellers singing in bars; this is a land of exploitation and trafficking and awful anger and a marrow-deep sorrow that can never be eradicated. That such a place consistently produces writers of immense skill and stature is a mystery the world cannot do without.

First published in The Stinging Fly, 2024, collected in Everyone Still Here, Granta, 2025