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.