‘“Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”’ by M. R. James

For me, as no doubt for many readers, this story is inextricably tangled up with memories of the 1968 TV adaptation, in which Michael Hordern manages to pivot so skilfully from high-handed, bumbling professor to terrorised victim of the spectre he’s unwittingly summoned.

Professor Parkins sets off from Cambridge for a working holiday at the coastal town of Burnstow. Walking on the beach near a ruin that his colleague has asked him to inspect, he finds an old whistle, then begins to make his way back to his lodgings:

He quickly rattled and clashed through the shingle and gained the sand […] One last look behind, to measure the distance he had made since leaving the ruined Templars’ church, showed him a prospect of company on his walk, in the shape of a rather indistinct personage, who seemed to be making great efforts to catch up with him, but made little, if any progress.

It’s hard to know which is spookier: the “indistinct personage” on the lonely beach, or what later transpires in Parkins’s twin-bedded room…. The fact that the links between the ruins, the whistle, and the personage are themselves indistinct compounds the unease. What I find especially powerful are the elements that escape the story’s boundaries: living on the coast, I know that uncanny sense of believing there’s someone walking behind me on the beach at dusk; and I’ve never felt completely comfortable sleeping in a room where there’s an empty bed. Tucked away in the back of my copy of Darryl Jones’s excellent annotated edition, I found a cutting from the Guardian with some comments from Sarah Perry that resonate with me:

The conventions of ghost stories (the bespectacled don by the fireside! The anxious governess!) don’t seem to me cliched, any more than the presence of a detective in a crime novel is cliched. […] Their familiarity is a comfort, which of course makes the chill they deliver even colder.

First published in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Jones, 1904. Collected in Collected Ghost Stories, ed. Darryl Jones, Oxford, 2011. Available online here

‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield

I used to teach Mansfield on an undergraduate module that covered the first half of the twentieth century, having somehow managed not to read her work up until then. Better late than never – the seminars on Mansfield were the ones I used to look forward to most, though I can’t imagine the students got much out of them. It was basically me reading out particular paragraphs and saying: “Isn’t this brilliant? How does she do it?” ‘Bliss’, ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and ‘The Garden Party’ all came in for that treatment, but it’s the final lines of ‘The Doll’s House’ that I still find myself wondering about four years after I last taught it. Having shown it off to everyone else in her class, Kezia Burnell invites two working-class girls, Lil and Else Kelvey, to have a look at much-vaunted doll’s house that’s been gifted to her and her sisters. The house sounds pretty unappealing, though the girls are more than willing to overlook its peculiarities:

There stood the doll’s house, a dark, oily, spinach green, picked out with bright yellow. Its two solid little chimneys, glued on to the roof, were painted red and white, and the door, gleaming with yellow varnish, was like a little slab of toffee. Four windows, real windows, were divided into panes by a broad streak of green. There was actually a tiny porch, too, painted yellow, with big lumps of congealed paint hanging along the edge.

But perfect, perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell? It was part of the joy, part of the newness.

It also has “a little lamp”, which we’re assured is “real”. The Kelveys, not considered suitable friends for the Burnell girls, are almost immediately shooed away by the Burnells’ Aunt Beryl. Was the glimpse they got of “the little lamp” a victory, something that will sustain the Kelveys through hard times ahead? Or is this it for them, the summit of experience reached before the age of ten, never to be bettered?

First published in The Nation and Athenaeum, 1922. Collected in The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, John Middleton Murry, 1923, and then in Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Angela Smith, Oxford, 2008. Available online here

‘The Accident’ by Marjorie Bowen

There’s a famous case from 1930 known as the ‘Burning Car Murder’: Alfred Rouse was hanged for killing an unidentified man whose body was found in Rouse’s Morris Minor, which had been set alight. It was suggested at trial that Rouse had offered a lift to a tramp and then committed the crime, thinking that the body would be mistaken for his own, and that he’d be able to start a new life under an assumed name. (Rouse, having initially confessed, later claimed that his passenger’s death was accidental. Attempts at identifying the victim using DNA have so far failed.) Bowen’s tiny story, no more than half a page long, seems uncannily to pre-echo that case – as well as anticipating the recent popularity of flash fiction. We don’t know what’s gone on between Murchison and Bargrave, and Murchison himself, escaping from the burning car, can’t remember why they argued: “the fright had seared his memory”. But immediately, this micro-drama takes a supernatural turn, managing, in its short space, to raise big questions about subjectivity and masculinity.

First published in the Mathematical Gazette, 1923. Collected in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby, 1987

‘The Leopard Lady’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers edited a number of anthologies in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably three substantial volumes of short stories of “Detection, Mystery and Horror” for Victor Gollancz, who became the publisher of her novels at around the same time. Sayers put in a lot of hours leafing through back issues of magazines to find stories to include and, for the first volume, did all the admin as well, contacting authors and their agents, attempting to negotiate over fees, and finding alternatives if the costs were getting out of hand. As a result, her selections range from the canonical – Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ is in there – to works that were obscure at the time and remain so now. Sayers was pessimistic at this period about the future of the short detective story, wondering why anyone would waste a good plot that could potentially be spun out to fill a novel. But she continued writing short stories herself, albeit sporadically, and ‘The Leopard Lady’ has stuck in my mind since I first read it.

The conceit is an unusually sinister one for Sayers: an organisation called Smith & Smith agrees to undertake “removals” – that is, murders – on their clients’ behalf, to reduce the chances of detection. Sayers initially thought she could write a series of linked stories all based around ‘Smith & Smith’, but appears to have decided the whole idea was too discomforting. The fact that the intended victim is a child makes ‘The Leopard Lady’ particularly disturbing. Though Sayers is thought to have written it in 1928, it wasn’t published until some ten years later. There’s some striking description in the opening pages of the central protagonist’s journey across London, guided by a clue he finds in a literary journal – exactly the sort of publication in which a story like this might have first appeared.

First published in In the Teeth of the Evidence, Victor Gollancz, 1939

‘English Climate’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Second World War gave something of a boost to the short story in the UK: wily magazine editors managed to work the paper rationing system and authors were often able to respond relatively rapidly to current situations and concerns. This means that some stories from this period hinge on details of cultural history that can now seem obscure, but the best authors manage to convey the pressures and anxieties of the moment without getting bogged down in explanation. In Townsend Warner’s story, a young man goes home on leave. During his departure from his army camp, and as we follow him on his journey, we learn how much he’s looking forward to browsing the small library he’s accumulated in his bedroom at his parents’ house. When he arrives in his home town to find that a “Salvage Drive” is in progress, including a “Book Mile” laid along the road, it’s hardly a surprise to the reader that his treasured volumes are among those destined for pulping. And then, before he can go and rescue them, it starts to rain… Exhorted to be part of the war effort, and not affected by bombing, the town’s residents want to do what’s expected of them. But the son, the combatant, wants everything to remain unchanged, not understanding the complexities of what it means to be part of the ‘Home Front’. It’d be easy enough to condemn the mother who gave away her son’s precious books for recycling: but the lack of understanding in this story is multi-directional.

First published in The New Yorker, 1943. Collected in The Museum of Cheats and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1947

‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’ by Rose Macaulay

Another war story and all the sadder for being based on Macaulay’s own experience of losing her belongings, included a cache of love letters, when her London flat was bombed. A story that’s drenched in melancholy and regret, and which perfectly conveys how things, artefacts, can provide a sense of security even if they’re shut away, never used or looked at.

First published in London Calling, ed. Storm Jameson, 1942. Collected in Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War, ed. Anne Boston, Penguin, 1989

‘Look at all those Roses’ by Elizabeth Bowen

I’ve taught and written about a number Bowen stories over the years – ‘Mysterious Kor’, ‘The Cat Jumps’, and ‘The Disinherited’ come to mind – but ‘Look at all those Roses’ is one that I’ve gone back to several times since I started trying to write short stories. Claustrophobia, repression, and the classic scenario of the traveller forced to ask for help from strangers (which I see crops up in elsewhere in my choices), are combined in a story that manages to be creepy while remaining inexplicit. But it’s also very of its moment: Lou and Edward, the couple who get stranded, are living together, but he is married to someone else, a detail that serves to add an edge of anxiety to proceedings. Edward goes for help – will he actually come back, or will Lou be left for good with Mrs Mathers and her injured and immobilised daughter Josephine? Would she mind if she was?

First published in Look at all those Roses, Cape, 1941. Collected in Collected Stories, Penguin, 2012. Available online here

‘Crazy Crowd’ by Angus Wilson

Jennie takes her boyfriend Peter to meet her family, the self-described ‘crazy crowd’, and subjects him to the full glare of their idiolect, eccentric habits and sheer bad manners. “It was impossible to sit down, for the chairs and sofas were filled books, sewing, workboxes, unfolded newspapers and in one case a tabby cat and two pairs of pliers. […] It was clear that the chairs and sofas were each the favourite of some member of the family, had indeed been overlong lived in.” Later, Peter finds that his reward for politely feigning an interest in Jennie’s father’s research into the impact of the Black Death on the locality is for him to be presented with offprints of the father’s articles as bedtime reading. But typically for Wilson, it’s not all played for laughs; Jennie’s discomfortingly close relationship with her “fascist” brother Hamish isn’t the least of it.

First published in The Wrong Set, Martin Secker and Warburg, 1949. Collected in The Collected Stories, Penguin, 1980

‘The Daemon Lover’ by Shirley Jackson

When I was deciding what to include in this anthology, I remembered being troubled by a Jackson story about a woman knocking at a door and not being admitted to a party. I’d completely forgotten the set-up, which involves her getting ready for her lover to come and collect her so that they can go and be married. When I was reading this story again, I wondered if my memory of it was mistaken, because the description of her choosing her dress, deciding what to eat or not, and becoming gradually more anxious was rather tiresome, irritating, a bit patronising. Then she goes to try and find him, and that’s when the anxiety becomes existential. There’s an awful inevitability about how the narrative unfolds and it’s not a spoiler, I think, to say that the wedding doesn’t happen. But the real kicker is in the final couple of sentences, when Jackson drops us and her character into a horrid abyss. I don’t enjoy this story, but I do admire it.

First published in The Lottery, or The Adventures of Jim Harris, Farrar, Straus, 1949. Available to read online here

‘The Dachau Shoe’ by W. S. Merwin

I first came across this in an anthology of gothic short stories, but I’ve seen it described elsewhere as a prose poem. It’s a Holocaust story, but one that’s concerned with aftermaths. The narrator’s cousin Gene has brought the shoe home from the war. It sits on his mantelpiece for a time, but is eventually packed away in the cellar. The voluble narrator assures us that Gene will tell us all about it if we ask. We might not be so sure. Gene, I’m guessing, is traumatised, but the real victim is whoever owned that shoe. However long he contemplates it, Gene will never know that person or grasp what happened to them; hiding the shoe in his cellar won’t stop it nagging away at him. The narrator can spill out, without too much difficulty, a version of Gene’s story, but Gene remains opaque to them and to us, while the original owner of the shoe is at a still further remove. A reader might ask why Gene would have taken the shoe home in the first place. It could seem like a morbid or inappropriate thing to do. I don’t disagree, but such a reaction itself raises the question of what might constitute appropriate behaviour in an unprecedented situation. It’s probably apparent by now that I like a story with a plot. This one is more of a character study, I suppose, or so it seems on the surface. In fact, it contains enough plot for a long novel, but chooses not to spell it out.

First published in The Miner’s Pale Children, Atheneum, 1970. Collected in American Gothic Tales, ed. Joyce Carol Oates, Plume, 1996. Available to read online here

‘Dido’s Lament’ by Tessa Hadley

A story built around a chance encounter, a tentative reconnection, and then, four-fifths of the way through, there’s a turn in the form of a switch in perspective. Lynette, annoyed at being barged into on crowded Oxford Street, follows the guilty party down into the tube, only to find, when she reaches him, intending to remonstrate with him, that it’s her ex, Toby:

She realized in that moment, to her surprise, that he’d been only a boy when they separated and then were divorced. They had seemed so ancient to themselves in those awful days, so darkened and wizened by experience and bitterness. It hadn’t quite occurred to her, in the time since they’d parted—and the parting had been all her doing, he had just suffered it intensely, with a white, fixed, wronged stare and outbreaks of baffled protest—that he might have had all this growing left to do.

Toby, it turns out, is now married again, with two daughters. Lynette tells him that she has a boyfriend, while reflecting that she would never normally use that word about “the man she saw sometimes”. They end up going back to Toby’s house for a drink – his wife and children are away – and Lynette can’t avoid being envious of his evident prosperity and comfort whilst reflecting, again, on why things didn’t work out between them. Then, when Lynette leaves, almost at the end of the story, we get Toby’s perspective, witness him taking a decisive action that, unbeknownst to Lynette, makes a mockery of her fragile hopes. Hadley makes switches, or turns, of this kind elsewhere, including in her novels. Sometimes, it takes the form not of a different character’s point of view but of a leap many years forward in time, denying us what we thought we were going to be shown next, keeping us on our toes. It could become a mannerism, but it forces the reader to reconsider what they’re reading for, challenging expectations without falling into gimmickry.

First published in The New Yorker, 2016, and available to subscribers to read online here. Collected in After the Funeral, Vintage, 2023

‘The Junction’ by Alison Moore

When Paul is driving back to his mother’s house after a visit to Paris during which his girlfriend has broken up with him, his car is shunted by Neville, who lives near by and offers to help arrange for the damage to be repaired. What makes this a really creepy story is that Paul doesn’t seem to mind too much when obstacles to his departure start cropping up, making it seem inevitable that he’ll give in to Neville’s gentle insistence that he should stay. I saw this described somewhere as a moving story about two lonely people; but I suspect I may not be alone in finding the abdication of agency at the centre of the story highly disturbing. And never has a tin of shortbread had such sinister resonance.

First published by Nightjar, 2024. Collected in Best British Short Stories 2025, ed. Nicholas Royle, Salt, 2025