‘The Canterville Ghost’ by Oscar Wilde

I read this story when I was about 12, and loved it, reading it several more times in my teens. The premise is simple – a wealthy American family moves into Canterville Chase, a historic house, despite it being haunted, and despite everyone warning him against it, including Lord Canterville. However the sensible Americans refuse to be scared by this ghost, and ignore his increasingly desperate hauntings, even going so far as to recommend to him a special product to oil his clanking chains, and regularly cleaning up the ancient bloodstains (the ghost is reduced to using the children’s paintbox in his attempts to replace the stains).

The poor ghost dwells on his past glorious hauntings and becomes increasingly despondent at his lack of purpose, but is rescued by the kindly daughter.

Perhaps Wilde wrote it as a satirical antidote to the obsession with the supernatural, the ghostly, and spiritualism at the end of the 19th century. Certainly he was having fun with it, subverting all the usual ghost story telling conventions.

It’s a fun story, not too demanding, and ideal for reading to young children or for reading when you’re not well. And it ends with True Love. A great introduction to the charm and wit of Oscar Wilde.

First published in two parts in The Court and Society Review, 1887. You can find it here

‘William Turns Over a New Leaf’ by Richmal Crompton

Richmal Crompton was, and remains, rightly famous for her “Just William” stories about an eleven-year-old boy navigating with some perplexity the challenges of life. He remained eleven for nearly fifty years. I chose this story almost at random – I would be happy with almost any of the hundreds of William stories Crompton wrote. They are mostly still in print.

William – a goodhearted boy – muddles his way through each story, causing increasing chaos as he goes. There is not a hint of condescension in her portrayal of William, or of any of the characters. They are drawn with sympathy in their foibles and misunderstandings. Each story gives us insights into the world of the time, from the early 1920s right up to the late 1960s. In the 1920s William comes from a well-off middle-class family (with a maid, cook, and gardener), somewhere in the Home Counties. Children had lots of freedom, and could be out all day without any adult supervision, just coming home for meals.

In this story, published 100 years ago, William attempts to become the good boy that his family longs for, with comic results.

Crompton wrote about 40 William books, and described them as potboilers, writing an additional forty or so adult novels which she took more seriously. One day I shall read some of them.

There have been TV and film adaptations of some of the William stories, but I don’t think any of them really capture the humour and energy of the originals, although the BBC radio adaptation with Martin Jarvis narrating was brilliant. I have often laughed out loud when reading them, and my delight was unbounded some years ago when I spotted about 10 volumes in a charity shop and bought them all – bedtime reading with my children for the next few months (and they carried on reading them themselves well into their teens). One of the great things about these stories is that they can be appreciated by readers of any age. Sheer genius.

First published in Still – William!, MacMillan, 1925

‘Liberation Day’ by George Saunders

‘Liberation Day’ is very different from ‘Fox 8’, and is one of the strangest and most disturbing stories I have ever read, and utterly compelling. It’s a typically inventive Saunders story, this time a blend of science fiction, horror, social commentary and historical perspectives. I found it almost impossible at the beginning of the story to understand what was going on. Gradually the horror becomes revealed, and after a few pages I was invested.

The main character, Jeremy, is unaware of the true circumstances of his life – at least for the first three-quarters of the story. This kind of deliberately-induced amnesia seems to be a theme with Saunders, and is itself akin to social commentary. Jeremy is a kind of slave. He belatedly realises this, but opts not to have his memory reset to a blank slate, and to live out his life in growing consciousness of inequity and exploitation. Horrifying, weird, darkly comic, tragic, and worth re-reading more than once.

Like all of Saunders’ stories, including ‘Fox 8’, this story contains many layers of meaning.

First published in Liberation Day, Random House, 2022

‘Then Later, His Ghost’ by Sarah Hall

A chilling story, not for the usual ghostly reasons, despite the title.

This story is set in a bleak dystopian future, with a constant gale-force icy wind. A young man struggles to survive – nothing can grow, all the animals and birds have gone, and, heavily protected by layers of clothing, thick gloves and goggles, he goes around looking for food in abandoned buildings, which sometimes collapse around him. There is a woman living in the house with him, Helene. They are not partners, in fact she is his former teacher, but he suspects she doesn’t recognise him. She is heavily pregnant, and barely moves, perhaps from despair. But he is determined to find her a Christmas gift, some Shakespeare, seemingly impossible in a world where almost everything has been destroyed.

This is speculative climate fiction, depicting a brutally cold and inhuman world, uncanny in its indifference to any fragile bodies simply trying to survive. I can’t imagine how much worse everything will become when the baby arrives.

Much of the story is simply description – but how powerful that description is, and how varied. How many ways are there to describe wind and cold, or abandoned interiors? More than I would have imagined.

“The wind was coming from the east when he woke. The windows on that side of the house boxed and clattered in their frames, even behind the stormboards, and the corrugated-iron sheet over the coop in the garden was hawing and creaking, as though it might rip off its rivets and fly off. The bellowing had come into his sleep, like a man’s voice…”

As a climate writer myself, this haunting story got under my skin and gets into my anthology.

First published in The New Statesman, 2014. You can find it here, along with a link to an audio recording. Collected in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, ed. Philip Hensher, Penguin, 2019

‘Winter Luxury Pie’ by Peter Hobbs

This is one of those delightful stories that surprises at every turn. The narrator has a dry wit and a unique and idiosyncratic voice, as she contemplates the history of her family.

Peter Hobbs is a British writer who somehow captures the voice of a world-weary female American who lives somewhere remote and rural, perhaps the Appalachians or the Deep South. The family are farmers, and the story is broken up into short sections named after pumpkins. I confess I am suspicious of some of the pumpkins’ names; some are genuine (I have grown pumpkins and squashes myself) but some may not be… In any case, this story is huge fun.

“Home-schooling hell aside, the three of us had a golden childhood. From which I don’t retain too much. The lingering slightly fibrous taste of tomatoes straight from the vine. A happiness which arises only when I’m surrounded by farmland or countryside. Great memories of pre-Christmas pig-slaughtering ceremonies. The ability to operate a tractor. Well-developed upper-body strength from every menial task you care to name – and subsequently a right hook a fair degree more dangerous than you’d expect from looking…”

Published in I Could Ride All Day In My Cool Blue Train, Faber & Faber, 2006. You can read it here

‘Hitting Budapest’ by NoViolet Bulawayo

Six young Zimbabwean children, virtually starving, spend their days on the streets stealing food to eat. Their own shanty town is called Paradise; their target is an upmarket area called Budapest, where they have an encounter with a British black woman: “I’m from London. This is my first time visiting my dad’s country.”

The most unsettling thing for these children is the fact that she throws away part of her doughnut (they can’t imagine ever throwing away food) – not their permanent hunger, not the pregnancy of 10-year-old Chipo by her grandfather, nor even, really, coming across a body hanging from a tree.

I have family members in Uganda, and I wonder, when visiting, how people there view white westerners – “Europeans”, as they call us. The children in this story are matter-of-fact about the actuality of their lives, juxtaposed with dreams of travelling, becoming rich, living in big houses. The overseas visitor from London is almost like an alien, incomprehensible. The children have “heard the stories” about exploitation in other countries. One child says, sagely, that he wouldn’t want to fly anywhere, in case he couldn’t get back. He would want to go to South Africa, so he could walk home if necessary.

Poignant, unsentimental, unsettling, this brilliant story now forms part of the beginning of Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names (Chatto and Windus, 2013), a book I must read.

First published in The Boston Review, November 2010, winner of the Caine Prize in 2011. You can find it here.

Introduction

Compression is both a hindrance and an opportunity: a short story is by definition not afforded the same expansiveness as a novel, but it develops different proportions to fit the space it has. It can be more grotesque, adopt a voice which over a longer span might become unbearable, show us only a sliver of a complex world with near-unfathomable rules. Almost anything can be tolerated for a little while. What I find wonderful about short stories is their intensity, their strangeness, and for me the best stories take advantage of these possibilities. One looks up 10, 20, 30 pages later jolted out of all complacency. I’m also particularly interested in what brevity does to narrative. Perhaps unfashionably, narrative is important to me and watching it play out in miniature produces distortions and elisions which I find enjoyable, as I am forced to use my own suspicions to make sense of what I wasn’t told. All fiction makes us complicit in co-creating characters and stories in our minds through reading characters on a page, but to become complicit in creating something utterly strange in one feverish go can be delightfully disorientating. The stories below span the deep past to the space-faring future but what unites them for me is their ability to revel in the uncanny, their commitment to a unique emotional flavour, their self-assurance. If you seek them out, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

‘The Tale of Shun-Kin’ by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, translated by Howard Hibbett

This long short story has been described by some as a novella, but I love it for both for its air of cruelty and perversion, and also the paradoxical tenderness between Shun-kin, the blind shamisen player, and her devoted servant Sasuke. Shun-kin remains aloof, dedicated to her art above all else, while Sasuke is possessed by her beauty and will do anything to remain in proximity to his mistress. Tanizaki’s style in translation is poised, elegant and devastating. Both a portrait of the aesthetic priorities of the Taishō era and the timelessly dark nature of erotic obsession.

First published by Sōgensha in 1933. Translation published in Seven Japanese Tales, Vintage, 1996

‘Barroom Blessings’ by Gianni Washington

A cocktail bar meeting between two supernatural beings, one called to dispatch human souls which have lingered beyond their allotted time on Earth, another to hand out punishment on behalf of the Great Forces. Here is a chance for a psychopomp to show a little mercy, however unwise that may be in the longer term. The two old comrades banter back and forth, alternately concealing and revealing secret longings and beliefs that may see them too obliterated if they judge the other wrongly. The emotional tenor of the story is alternately soft and vicious, as giddying vistas open onto other realms, their priorities entirely alien to the human mind.

First published in Flowers from the Void, Serpent’s Tail, 2024

‘Vera’ by Auguste Villiers de L’Isle Adam, translated by Robert Baldick

The Count D’Athol’s beloved bride, Vera, dies unexpectedly in his embrace. After throwing the silver key to the mausoleum back through the locked gate, the count seals himself away in their bedroom with only one faithful servant, Raymond, to watch over him from afar. He pretends that she has not died and the force of his denial is so strong that he begins to believe that she is really with him, forcing Raymond to play along as well. Impossibly, his wish becomes true, and after a year of total enclosure Vera’s presence is strong enough for her to physically manifest in the apartment. Anyone who has known grief will understand the terrible allure of the Count’s decision and be well primed for the strong, conflicted emotions it arouses.

First published in Contes Cruels, Éditions Calmann Lévy, 1893, translated as Cruel Tales, Oxford University Press, 1985

‘Two Houses’ by Kelly Link

A story within a story, the frame tale told by astronauts on a long journey through space, arguably far more terrifying and eerie than anything back on earth. The main tale concerns an orphaned young man whose resentful relatives agree to let him live in the extravagant piece of art they purchased, a house in which a gruesome mass murder took place and its exact replica. The interjections of the sentient spaceship during the telling of the main tale raise further questions about the boundaries of human and inhuman. A dear friend of mine grew up partly in a haunted house and I think of this story all the time with reference to her early life.

First published in Get in Trouble by Kelly Link, Canongate, 2016

‘Gabriel-Ernest’ by Saki

Sly, humorous and always at least a little nasty, Saki’s work brings me endless amusement. In this story, the upper-class gentleman visiting his aunt’s country estate for the weekend refuses to take Gabriel at his word when informed both by his guest and by Gabriel himself that there’s a wild beast in the woods and the result is tragic, though conveyed with Saki’s signature vicious wit. The barely suppressed homoeroticism provoked by the naked youth strolling the grounds provides a wealth of salacious counter-readings for the story beyond a mere fable about being cautious of hungry strangers. The comment from Cunningham that “his pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model” is hard to read with a straight face, as was no doubt intended.

First published The Westminster Gazette, 1909 and collected in Reginald in Russia, Methuen & Co, 1910; also in The Complete Short Stories, Penguin Classics, 2000

‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska

Perhaps one of the most haunting of Schulz’s stories, the narrator’s elderly father must go away to a mysterious Sanatorium where reality works differently. He is both dead and not, both sick and fervently active, both visitable and unrecoverable to the world. The story stretches one’s understanding of narrative logic, of time and mortality and creates an internal experience of agitation not unlike how I imagine degenerative brain diseases to feel, stirring up the overwhelming desire to escape without a clear course of return in mind. It is now also impossible not to read this story as a foreshadowing of the Holocaust, calling to mind Aharon Applebaum’s novel Badenheim 1939, another story of a health resort from which the denizens are forbidden to return home. Schulz himself was a Polish Jew who was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942.

First published in Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, 1937. Published in translation in Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2008

‘What (Not) to Do with Your Hands When You Are Nervous’ by Eley Williams

This story takes in Keats’s foreknowledge of his own mortality, the term ‘mortmain’ and the history of the Royal Worcester Parian vase depicting the sculptor’s wife’s hands among other related ideas. It flows forth as a series of frantic disquisitions on seemingly loosely connected things as the narrator is stuck on a Tube carriage underground, growing ever later for her job interview. What I especially enjoy about Williams’s writing is the way she often explodes narrative time, replicating the experience of a mind fizzing with ideas and subterranean connections experiencing consciousness moment by moment. There is also an enjoyably smutty undercurrent as the reader starts to realise why the queer narrator has chosen to fixate on hands in particular, even if she disguises it as serious academic enquiry.

First published in Seen from Here, ed. Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat, Unstable Object, and collected in Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good, 4th Estate, 2024