‘Small Animals’ by Alison Moore

I first came across Alison Moore in another Nightjar chapbook, ‘When the Door Closed, It Was Dark’ and I’ve been a fan ever since. Having said that, for full disclosure, I should perhaps own up to the fact that the one time I was given a shortlist to judge anonymously that included one of her stories, I somehow managed to pass it over altogether in the year before she was shortlisted for the Booker. The moral is, don’t ask me to judge your competition.

‘Small Animals’ is the story of friends Heather and Marilyn going to visit a third woman, Kath, who lives in a house built into the rock with a sheer cliff edge up one side of the road and a sheer drop on the other. Heather is a child psychologist, and it turns out that Kath has a troubled child, Nina, who seems to have been behaving disruptively. Heather suspects that Kath has invited her there to assess Nina. However, what actually turns out is far more sinister and a hell of a lot weirder.

In the world of Alison Moore, everything would be fine were it not for that brooding sense of unease that pervades everything. The power of her writing, I think, comes from the fact that there is a lot of bad stuff going on, but it’s going on out of shot: to the side of the action or even after the action finishes. It’s left to the reader to fill in the gaps, if they dare.

First published in 2012 as a Nightjar Press chapbook and included in The Pre-War House and Other Stories, Salt 2013

‘The Exploding Boy’ by Nick Parker

OK, let’s lighten the mood a little, with a story that has possibly the greatest opening of all time.

We only call him the Exploding Boy now, of course; retrospectively. For most of last year he was known as Ticking Boy, which wasn’t nearly so dramatic and led mainly to teasing by us, I’m ashamed to say.

Honestly, find me a better one.

I first came across Nick Parker at a flash fiction event in Bristol, where he proceeded to blow the rest of us off the stage. Despite having written more than my fair share of flash, I still have my doubts as to whether it’s a form that promotes quality. Sometimes it’s a bit too easy to toss off something that sounds profound but doesn’t add up to much in the end.

That said, it doesn’t half lend itself to comedy. It can be a bit of a challenge to come up with something funny that stretches to anything over a thousand words, but in a shorter piece, you can get in, crack the gag, and get out again before it has time to go off. It’s the Fast Show approach to fiction, and ‘The Exploding Boy’ is an excellent example of this. It’s a page long – a small page at that – but the story still manages to be very funny as well as a perfect allegory about how gloriously callous kids can be.

First published on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, August 2004, and available to read here. Collected in The Exploding Boy and Other Tiny Tales, spigmitebooks 2011

‘Forty-Eight Dogs’ by Tania Hershman

So having trashed flash fiction with my comments on ‘The Exploding Boy’, I’m going to include another one. Not only that, but – God help me – it’s a dementia story too. Now everyone who’s ever judged a competition or read submissions for a magazine knows that the three favourite subjects of every single tyro short story writer are the three Ds: Death, Disease and Dementia. There’s a simple reason for this: it’s too easy to use them as a short cut to emotion.

So if it’s a dementia story, it had better be a bloody good one.

Fortunately, ‘Forty-Eight’ dogs is a bloody good one. It’s a deceptively simple story of a woman who is obsessed that her back yard is full of stray dogs, and how her husband gently tries to convince her she’s wrong. But right at the end, in the third paragraph, we get a glimpse of something else:

When he came back with the tea, her husband sighed to see her softer now. He added milk and spooned in sugar and as he leant towards her with her cup, from the corner of his eye he caught the garden, shifting slightly. And in that one blink he saw it. A tail, wagging.

First published in Metazen and collected in My Mother Was an Upright Piano, Tangent Books, 2012

‘Gossamer’ by David Gaffney

What, more flash fiction? Not quite. I’m being a bit perverse here. I could have chosen almost any story from Gaffney’s Sawn-Off Tales collection, because every one is a gem, especially the barber story, ‘Last to Know’. Also, I think it was the first time I’d ever come across flash in the flesh, so to speak, setting aside the single, paleolithic example in that Graham Greene collection (‘Proof Positive’ is a thousand words long at most).

‘Gossamer’ is actually a full-length story and I like the way it allows Gaffney to stretch out a bit. It’s the story of beta male Damien, a legal consultant, who puts on a disguise to work a second shift in the evening as ‘Kev’, a cleaner at the same firm, in order to spy on his colleague Emma, who he secretly fancies. Inevitably, ‘Kev’ finds out some uncomfortable truths about what Emma really thinks of Damien and he is forced to re-examine his life. So far, this isn’t a particularly original concept, although it’s very nicely handled, but what elevates it into a higher plane is the ending, where we enter pure Gaffney territory and find that Damien may not be the only one who’s leading a double life.

Here’s ‘Kev’ cleaning Damien’s desk:

It was strange to see his desk from a new perspective. It looked dirtier than he’d expected. Why has he left it so untidy? Case files all over, some gaping open, innards disgorged, revealing confidential case information for anyone to read. How was he expected to clean a desk in this state? How thoughtless the daytime Damien was.

First published by East of the Web, included in Aroma Bingo, Salt 2007

‘Defending the Pencil Factory’ by Adam Marek

Adam Marek’s stories are very approachable, but there’s also an odd quality to them that makes you not entirely sure what you’ve just read. ‘Defending the Pencil Factory’, a one-off chapbook, is a good example of his work. The situation is that a small group of martial artists are holed up in a pencil factory. They are under constant attack by an army of monsters, but it turns out that they have accidentally discovered that the monsters’ only weak point is their skulls, which can be pierced by something sharp – say, a pencil.

Suddenly our situation changed. We were no longer in a pencil factory, but in a weapons store.

The only problem is that the gang only have one pencil sharpener and it takes 32 turns to make it sharp enough to kill. So when the next wave arrives, will they be ready or will they finally be overrun?

I have absolutely no idea whether this is a martial arts story or if it’s a story about metaphorical monsters being slain with writing implements, or even – given that there is a long sequence at the end describing the controversial finale of a martial arts film that their leader is particular fond of – if it’s a story about how we tell stories. I don’t think it actually matters, because it’s massively entertaining either way.

Published as a Guillemot Press chapbook 2018

‘The Redemption of Galen Pike’ by Carys Davies

This is a magnificent story about good and evil in the old West. Patience Haig, a Quaker, spends her time sitting with the occupants of Piper City jailhouse while they await the hangman, including the revolting Galen Pike, who has killed and eaten his four companions on a failed gold-digging expedition. We observe the relationship that grows up between Haig and Pike through their own eyes and also those of Knapp, the jailer, who has a considerably less nuanced view of humanity than Haig.

The portrait that Davies draws of Haig, who tries to see the good in everyone – even Pike – is touching and utterly believable, especially in Knapp’s description of her at the hanging:

It was hard not to tell, Knapp said later to his wife, what effect this short speech of Pike had on Patience Haig, but when the burlap bag came smartly down on Pike’s black eyes and repulsive ravenous features and the floor opened beneath his feet, he was certain Miss Haig struggled with her famous composure; that behind the rough snap of the cloth and the clatter of the scaffold’s wooden machinery, he heard a small high cry escape from her plain upright figure.

When we find out at the end about the unexpected consequence of Pike’s crime, it’s hard not to cheer out loud.

From The Redemption of Galen Pike, Salt 2014

‘Dermot’ by Simon Bestwick

Well, my subconscious was definitely at work when it pinged this story into my head straight after the last one, but I’ll leave it to you to find out how.

This is one of the most disturbing and thought-provoking stories I’ve ever read and it concerns the eponymous Dermot, an unprepossessing individual with special powers that enable him to predict where crimes are being planned, thus providing the local police with a near one hundred per cent clean-up rate. The problem is that Dermot has unusual needs that have to be fulfilled in order for him to perform. Unusual is perhaps too small a word to describe them: utterly horrific would perhaps be a better description.

We see all this through the eyes of Abbie, the rookie cop who is acting as Dermot’s minder for the first time. We see how the rest of the force regard the whole Dermot thing with disgust and how her boss tries to convince her that it’s a rite of passage and will give her a fast track to promotion. And we are left to contemplate how much she will be damaged in the process, and how much everyone is damaged by the trade that’s been made and whether it really is for the better good.

First published in Black Static 24, and collected in reprinted in Best Horror of the Year #4, Night Shade, 2013 and Best British Fantasy 2013, Salt

‘Winter Break’ by Hilary Mantel

The sheer literal weight of the Wolf Hall trilogy can sometimes obscure the fact that Hilary Mantel was equally at home writing punchy, short fiction such as this story. What a loss her recent death was.

‘Winter Break’ is a brisk story of a childless couple visiting an unnamed country – probably Greece, given the name of the hotel they eventually arrive at. On the way there in a taxi, they bicker and moan about each other in the way that long-term couples do, and I just want to pick out one fantastic phrase here that says so much about their relationship:

She could feel Phil’s opinions banking up behind his teeth: now that won’t do the gearbox any good, will it?

Then something very bad happens and being in a foreign country, they either don’t understand what has happened, or they do and choose to ignore it. Either way, they leave everything to their driver to deal with and as a result they are now complicit, with the final image revealing the true horror of what they have been involved in.

First published in the Guardian Review in 2010 and available to read here. Collected in Best British Short Stories 2011, Salt, 2012 and The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Fourth Estate 2014

Introduction

I should start by saying that until a year or so ago I did not think that I liked short stories very much. I had studied many as a student in India, mostly classics, mostly Russian authors but I often found them unsatisfactory. Now as I reflect on this, I wonder if it was the subject matter of many of these stories that was so far removed from the life that I was living, and the places that I was growing up in that made me feel detached and disengaged from them. Whatever the reason, over the years, again and again, I tried to come back to them, and again I found myself ambivalent. And then something happened just over a year ago. I suddenly discovered the magic of short stories, perhaps it was parenthood or the pandemic, or perhaps it was that I suddenly understood what a short story really is. And then I just couldn’t have enough of them. Over the course of one year, I wrote many short stories, and I read many more. I have found myself looking for the way writers have attempted to stretch the short story form and experiment with it and make something new and unique out of it. None of these stories experiment for the sake of experimenting. They use the form that best suits the content, shape the structure to fit around the theme. These are a few – mostly contemporary – short stories that I have loved recently for the way that they stretch the imagination as well as the boundaries of what a short story can do. I also like when writing can address big issues but in an unassuming way. I think most of these stories do this, looking at larger political issues through a personal lens.

‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’ by George Saunders

This short story is about morality and integrity, addressing questions of immigration, racism, and about inequalities in society. The story nudges and probes the reader to look for answers within themselves, question their own privilege and biases. This is written in form of a diary, with short sentence fragments composed as a stream of consciousness. But it is of course a really well-crafted story where every sentence is in its perfect place. I like everything that George Saunders writes.

First published in The New Yorker, October 8, 2012, and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in Tenth of December, Bloomsbury, 2013

‘The Baby Carrier Built for Men: FAQs for Commando™’ by Derek Andersen

This is a flash fiction, a story under 1000 words crafted as a FAQ for a baby carrier. It juxtaposes a seemingly innocent harmless object with wartime violence, and the memories of invasion in Iraq. I don’t want to say too much. Within a few sparse sentences it leaves a lasting impact.

First published in Catapult Magazine on Jun 17, 2022, and available to read here

‘The Swan As Metaphor For Love’ by Amelia Gray

What can I say about this story that will sum up how clever it is, and how beautiful it is in all its grossness? This is written like a field guide, with a strong visual element. With carefully choses phrases and beautiful narrative quality, Amelia Gray shows us beyond the ethereal projection of swans that we often seen in literature. I started off wondering how swans could be a metaphor for love, and just within 500 words Gray had convinced me. There is much that lies underneath beyond what we can really see.

First published in Joyland Magazine, December 21 2012, and available to read here, and collected in Gutshot, FSG, 2015

‘Snowstorm’ by Bruna Dantas Lobato

Another flash story that also reads like a diary entry even though it is not composed like one. A son, a mother, across miles and oceans. As an immigrant, who came over from India to study here in the UK, and also as a mother myself navigating communication with my daughter in snatches across digital bytes, this story really struck a chord. This story is also about the parts of us we lose as we move countries and home, the skins we shed, and how we become new people while also navigating the same old relationships.

First published in The New Yorker, August 11 2022, and available to read here

‘The Depletion Prompts’ by David Means

“Write at least six versions of the story, using different points of view, until you realize that the one with the sad ending is impossible to finish.” Written as a series of writing prompts, the story flows and ebbs between different timelines questioning the reality of the versions we believe in and that we choose to write. This is a story within a story, a meditation on how we often squeeze our stories into boxes.

First published in The New Yorker, October 25, 2021, and available to read here