‘The Hobby’ by Eric McCormack

It is an embarrassing indictment of my lack of literary curiosity that I don’t know more about Eric McCormack, because ‘The Hobby’ really is one my favourite stories. I know he’s Canadian, I just looked up his age, and I’m sure I read one of his novels – it didn’t dazzle me, I’m afraid – but beyond that he is a mystery. I found ‘The Hobby’ through ace editor Michele Slung, who put the story in Stranger, a neat anthology in which she generously included a tale of my own. I quote from Michele’s on-the-mark intro to ‘The Hobby’ therein: ‘Each time I read it, I discover something new; always when I finish it, I gasp.’The story can’t run to more than 2,000 words, but oh, how McCormack makes every one of those beautiful words count. On the surface, ‘The Hobby’ is a compact, Twilight Zone-ish effort, with the requisite twist, but the more you think about it, the more wondrous and disturbing it gets. It plays an intricate, clever game with point of view, rewarding the attentive reader with a money shot for which Rod Serling would have traded a year’s worth of Marlboros.

I gotta go find out more about this wonderful writer. One of these days…

First published in Inspecting the Vaults, Viking Canada, 1987, and collected in Stranger: Dark Tales of Eerie Encounters, edited by Michele Slung, Harper Perennial, 2002

‘Mr Fiddlehead’ by Jonathan Carroll

Carroll is high on the list of the planet’s underappreciated gems. He is another serious voice writer, as demonstrated in such finely sculpted novels as Bones of the Moon and Outside the Dog Museum. He is also a quirky bastard – that voice, enchanting as it is, won’t soothe every savage breast. He is sometimes guilty of the critical accusation of walking a shaggy terrier down his mean narrative streets. But, oh that prose!

Nothing shaggy about ‘Mr Fiddlehead’. It is a delightful (and dark) play on a familiar theme: an invisible childhood friend comes to life. Like all of Carroll’s work, it glitters with honed observations of people and places.

And fountain pens – a minor obsession of my own – figure in the story. So what could be bad?

First published in Omni, Feb 1989, and collected in Carrol’s The Panic Hand, HarperCollins, 1995

‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ by Ursula K LeGuin

Another too obvious choice?

Maybe. But it’s still a good one. 

I shouldn’t like this at all. It doesn’t do any of the things that I want a story to do: no characters, as such; no dialogue; no plot, in any normal sense of the word. Kinda preachy.

But what a lesson it declaims!

LeGuin knows exactly what she is doing here, and the place she takes us, the question she makes us confront – would you walk away from Omelas? – is profound and central to our claim to humanity. It is a question that seems more vital than ever.

What is your final answer?

First published in New Dimensions 3, edited by Robert Silverberg, Doubleday, 1973. It has been collected more times than there are Donald Trump lies

‘The Mist’ by Stephen King

I know this isn’t the end of the list as you are reading it, but this is the last slot I have to fill and I struggled to decide which story to name. I was tempted to throw in a Chandler novella because I love Chandler the bestest, but none of those are really a patch on the novels they were cannibalised to create. I thought about a Roger Zelazny piece because really people should still be reading Roger Zelazny. For a nanosecond I toyed with Robert E Howard as a nod to the ghost of my adolescence –and to be really perverse to Jonathan – but let’s face it, he was a fairly shitty writer and his minor significance lies outside of his actual talent as a writer.

Then there is the King.

I love Stephen King. I don’t love everything he has published – god, I stopped trying to even keep up years ago. (‘No mas, no mas,’ to quote Roberto Duran.) But beyond the brand and the astonishing commercial success and the mostly awful adaptations stands a brilliantly entertaining – and frankly brilliant – writer. Not every book, lord knows, but enough of them.

At his best King is more readable than anyone. The Shining, The Dead Zone, Misery… spectacular stuff. And there are rib-tickling (or rib-cracking) short stories, especially the early, pulpy stuff collected in Night Shift.

I’m cheating by choosing ‘The Mist’, I know. Really it is a short novel, though it originally appeared in a short story anthology: Kirby McCauley’s legendary Dark Forces. But it contains everything that makes King so much fun to read. The storyline is stripped down to Lifeboat circumstances: a bunch of people who don’t all get along, trapped in a tight space with limited hope of survival. It is gussied up with an unexplained fantasy backdrop/MacGuffin, but it works because of one thing: characterization. 

King just does it so well, so easily. Even when you don’t believe every word of his dialogue – and King can get a little hokey – you believe in and care about his characters to the last page. That’s the first rule of writing, I know, but few succeed in doing it as well as Mr King does.

I remain, now and forever, his humble subject.

First published in Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley, Viking, 1980. It was collected in King’s own Skeleton Crew, Putnam, 1985, and later republished as a stand-alone volume, Signet, 2007

‘Night They Missed the Horror Show’ by Joe R Lansdale

I’ve saved the best for last.

But, but…

‘Raymond Carver,’ you whimper. 

‘Flannery O’Connor,’ you protest. 

‘Hemingway!’ You shoot yourself in the fucking head, you bloody idiot.

Screw them. This is the real deal. Lansdale – whose name has become more familiar recently thanks to some film and TV adaptations of his work – was criminally ignored for a long time. He has written a series of scathingly funny crime novels – The ‘Hap and Leonard’ books – and is a fierce writer of short stories in several genres. None fiercer than ‘Night They Missed the Horror Show’, which Lansdale his own self subtitled ‘a story that doesn’t flinch’. 

‘Night’ epitomises what horror fiction can do. It is bleak, savage and slices your eye like Bunuel’s razor. It grabs you like Isadora Duncan’s scarf and doesn’t let go through the bleakest of endings. None of the characters are likeable. Everything in it is awful. It liberally employs the n-word (in an entirely necessary way). And you won’t be able to lift your gaze from the page until it’s done. 

This is horror without the supernatural. The monsters here are of this world, and they are more dangerous now than the period in which the story is set or when Lansdale wrote it. 

It is unforgettable. It shows what short stories can do.

I wish I had written anything half as powerful.

First published in Silver Scream, edited by David J Schow, Dark Harvest, 1988, and collected in Lansdale’s By Bizarre Hands, Mark V Ziesing, 1989

Introduction

Where are all the black experimental short story writers?

That is the question that has emerged for me in making this compilation. It is a genuine one, though I suspect (and hope) it betrays my own ignorance of the many wonderful black anti-storytellers out there. I hope you will show me where I can add to the single exception here that proves the rule.

‘El Aleph’ / ‘The Aleph’, by Jorge Luis Borges

My Spanish has never been up to reading this in the original, although I continue to cherish the edition of the collection that I bought in Mexico City in the late ‘90s. The humour and profundity in this story – in which the protagonist encounters, in a friend’s cellar, a point in space containing all other points; a point from which he can see everything in the universe, including you, the reader – continues to dazzle. A trip to Buenos Aire five years ago became a Borges pilgrimage, although I regret not visiting Garay Street where this story is set.

First published in the Argentine journal Sur in 1945. First published in English in The Aleph and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1971. Currently available in The Aleph, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000 and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998

‘Light is Like Water’ by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Edith Grossman

I no longer have my copy of Strange Pilgrims, from which I first read this pure tale of how Toto and Joel navigate a rowing boat, complete with sextant and compass, on light rather than water, having smashed light bulbs in their crowded fifth-floor apartment. I almost always regret giving books away, and have been known to return to second hand book shops the day after to buy back my own copies. This is one certainly I must somehow retrieve. 

First published as ‘La Luz es como el Agua’, in Doce Cuentos Peregrinos, Editorial Oveja Negra, 1992; and in English in Strange Pilgrims, Cape, 1993, available at the Independent)

‘Lavatory’ by Diane Williams

A friend recently put me onto Diane Williams’ work, for which I am so grateful. She is one of those writers who, from the first page, I knew I must read everything. This is the pick, for me, so far of her strange insightful tales, with these lines, in particular (which close the story), standing out as somehow representative of the whole:The host called, ‘Kids! Mike! Dad and Mom!’ He called these copulators to come in to dinner. In fact, this group represented a predictable array of vocations – including hard workers, worriers, travelers, and liars – defecators, or course, urinators and music makers.

From Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, CB Editions, 2016, available at PANK

‘Nancy Brown will be in Town’ by Lydia Davis

I first came across Lydia Davis in a piece on experimental fiction, although I had an uncanny feeling of having encountered her before. She resists the label ‘experimental’ (in ‘From Raw Material to Finished Work: Forms and Influences II’, from her recently published Essays), since it ‘implies that the writer had a plan to test some preconceived writing strategy and see if it would work’. She doesn’t consider her stories to be ‘in any way experimental’, then, since she prefers to start them without much of a plan or process. I take her point, but doubt there is a better term, currently, for work that subverts the form, as hers so often does.

Another essay (Forms and Influences III, on ‘Sources, Revision, Order, and Endings’) includes a fascinating analysis of the genesis (a group email) and evolution of ‘Nancy Brown will be in Town’. Here is the finished product:

Nancy Brown Will Be in Town
Nancy Brown will be in town. She will be in town to sell her things. Nancy Brown is moving far away. She would like to sell her queen mattress.
Do we want her queen mattress? Do we want her ottoman? Do we want her bath items?
It is time to say good-bye to Nancy Brown.
We have enjoyed her friendship. We have enjoyed her tennis lessons.

First published as ‘Susie Brown will be in Town’ in Five Dials; collected in Can’t and Won’t, Hamish Hamilton, 2014

‘When it Breaks’ by Linda Mannheim

I first met Linda through another extraordinary writer – Gerson Nason, with whom I had attended the great John Petherbridge’s City Lit writing group. I have read many of Linda’s stories since, and never a weak one. Linda brings searing precision and empathetic passion, and always takes us somewhere new. This comes from her collection for Influx about Washington Heights, a part of NYC few tourists would visit but which Linda knows intimately.

From Above Sugar Hill, Influx Press, 2014; available online at The Learned Pig

‘Reversible’ by Courttia Newland

There was a time before black British fiction, and that time was not that long ago. I am exaggerating for effect, but not by much. Courttia Newland was one of few shining early lights in that wilderness, with his wonderful novel from ’97, The Scholar. This story is like a scene from Top Boy yet all the more poignant for its temporal reversal.

First published in Sex & Death, Faber & Faber, edited by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs; collected in Best British Short Stories 2017, Salt Publishing