‘American Dreams’ by Peter Carey

The best paper I took at University was by an academic named Ragnhild Eikli on the Theory of the Short Story. It took Joyce’s Dubliners as a theoretical prayerbook for understanding the form, and I think that holds up: Eikli was able to show that in each of Joyce’s stories there is a moment of epiphany and a gesture towards a much larger unnatural tension.

Eikli put me on to this story by Peter Carey which can be read according to those same concerns. He is one of the better-known names in the unknown pantheon of Australian literature.

There is a genuine horror here. There is also much that has ‘aged well’ – hoarding property, building walls, and the intrigue of small transgressions in suburbia. But I think Carey in 1974 was realising something about art or Australia or both that remains unacknowledged: the only available pastime is building tiny models of our situation, then taking them apart.

Published in American Dreams, University of Queensland Press, 1974

‘Geometric Unity’ by Eric Weinstein

I have had a fetishistic preoccupation with the group of thinkers known as the “Intellectual Dark Web” for, I don’t know, around ten years now. A lot of people believe Douglas Murray or Jordan Peterson to be the cornerstone of that movement, but it is in fact disgraced physicist Eric Weinstein, disciple of Peter Theil, whose sole work is this self-published “Theory of Everything”.

Each member of the movement self-styles as an intellectual, but they are really just cranks. There is a delicious aesthetic to this paper, which almost imitates actual thought. Like everything from this circle it comes down to an attempt to justify fascism, though I genuinely don’t think they know that.

Is this a short story? Yes, a kind of narrative: see the concluding passage “Isolation”. I believe the crank is a strange and strangely contemporary figure. I teach at a University and often independent researchers send me their work unsolicited. Some are interesting but most are insane, and almost always claim to be the victim of a conspiracy (Weinstein’s is the ‘Distributed Ideas Suppression Complex’ or ‘DISC’).

I believe we can learn a great deal from them. Here’s Freud:

“Dreams, then, are often most profound when they seem most crazy. In every epoch of history those who have had something to say but could not say it without peril have eagerly assumed a fool’s cap. The audience at whom their forbidden speech was aimed tolerated it more easily if they could at the same time laugh and flatter themselves with the reflection that the unwelcome words were clearly nonsensical”.

Unlike Freud’s nonsense philosopher there is no abstract wisdom to be taken from the crank, but there is a kind of photonegative of learning and aspirational politics. I think Joyce used the term ‘Gnomon’ — a theory of everything that was never suppressed.

Published April 1 2021, available to read online here

Introduction

Animals might be considered, broadly, unsophisticated and unremarkable, while also being cosmically bananas, like the rest of the natural world. It’s interesting to compare how they are observed, presented and communed with in short story form. In this personal anthology, their purpose varies: they are metanarrative, character study, plot device, scene detail and more. The great auk, giant snails, a goldfinch, axolotls, a horse, a polar bear, ortolans, the missing link, the memory of a dog, angels (they count), an invisible creature (it also counts), and finally Lucia Berlin on devastating form (because people are animals too).

‘An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It’ by Jessie Greengrass

When you finish this story, you will feel fully culpable for the extinction of the great auk, even at the remove of 180 years, and not only because it is written in the fourth person. Weep, for the human condition – the violent, gnawing appetite for possession and consumption, and the mental maths of self-justification.

“Here is the truth: we blamed the birds for what we did to them.”

Collected in An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, JM Originals, 2015

‘The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi”’ by Patricia Highsmith

Like so much of Highsmith’s writing, ‘The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi”’ is dehydrating, claustrophobic and vertiginous. An idyllic tropical island becomes a hostile, threatening landscape, and a slow-moving, banal snail becomes a relentless predator for one supercilious professor.

“The professor walked on aimlessly in shallow water near the land. He was still going faster than the snail.”

The pace a man is walking as a gun on the mantelpiece.

Highsmith liked snails, took them to parties in her handbag, and also smuggled them into France in her bra, allegedly. Even if true, it’s not really relevant, although it feels like it is, somehow, incredibly relevant.

First published in Eleven, Heinemann, 1970 and, in the US, as The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, Doubleday, 1970

‘The Goldfinch Is Fine’ by Giselle Leeb

I don’t read a lot of climate-related fiction, probably because I am a coward. In this story, a weatherman reports on an increasingly severe climate event (it’s very wet). He clings to the live stream of a lonely goldfinch in its nest high up on a glacier as the world drowns around him. You can expect to become increasingly anxious about the safety of this lonely goldfinch, and the equally lonely weatherman, as the world becomes utterly unpredictable.

“The weatherman excuses himself and goes to the toilets. He sits in a stall and gets out his laptop and watches the goldfinch. It has all come down to this: a small bird in nest of ice, alone. Unexpectedly, he starts to cry. Why is he still presenting the weather? It is becoming hard to predict anything.”

While it’s true we’re all lonely birds, or lonely weathermen – in a nest of ice, or an eighty-six-foot wave – when the storm hits, Leeb reminds us that’s not everything we are. I love this whole collection which is no better summarised than by its title Mammals, I Think We Are Called. A whole class of individuals, each one reaching out to connect with the whole.

First published in TSS Publishing, 2018, and Sunburnt Saints: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Seventy2One, 2021. Collected in Mammals, I Think We Are Called, Salt, 2022

‘Axolotl’ by Julio Cortázar

By the third sentence of ‘Axolotl’ we discover the narrator has become an axolotl. Although we see him develop an interest in a tank of the animals, we never understand how he became one. By the fourth paragraph, the narrator begins to flip between the third and first person to describe the axolotls / himself:

“I saw a rosy little body, translucent (I thought of those Chinese figurines of milky glass), looking like a small lizard about six inches long, ending in a fish’s tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body.”

The narrator’s voyeurism raises questions about what we take on – what we change about ourselves – when we do nothing but stare.

“The axolotls were like witnesses of something, and at times like horrible judges. I felt ignoble in front of them; there was such a terrifying purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvas, but larva means disguise and also phantom.”

When we focus intensively on only one interest or perspective does it limit our ability to see more broadly? Will we find ourselves in a tank, with glass between us and everything else, “condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation”?

First published in Spanish in Litereria, 1952 and collected in Final del Juego. First published in English in End of the Game, Pantheon, 1967 and collected in Blow Up and Other Stories, Pantheon, 1985

‘Cortés the Killer’ by Samantha Hunt

This story of a brother and sister grappling with the death of their father is ruminative and dark, like all of Samantha Hunt’s compelling collection The Dark Dark. The sibling grief is as sharp and unexpected as a beloved farm horse cracking the ice of a pond on a shopping centre building site, then drowning in it.

“The horse is twisting and snorting. She screams as much as a horse can scream. Clem raises his hands to his face. He takes another step towards the horse. ‘Clem,’ Beatrice repeats his name a third time. He turns to look at her. A seam has been cut open in Clem through the center of his face. A seam that says there is no way to stop this. No way for a man to save a horse drowning in freezing water. Clem brings his hands up to his ears and, pressing the small knobs of cartilage there, he stops listening.”

First published in The New Yorker as ‘Three Days’, January 2006, and available to subscribers to read here, and collected in The Dark Dark, Corsair 2018

‘The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon’ by James Hogg

This story was a primary complaint of most of the reviews I read about the Polar Horrors collection, however, I adored it. As a great fan of an unpleasant protagonist, I found the bald moral self-assurance of the narrator set against his behaviour viciously entertaining.

The 1939 film ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ starring Basil Rathbone is set on a Dartmoor so bizarre it is my belief they did not use even one (1) accurate visual reference of the landscape. So, too, this Arctic survival story set in 1764. Much like the 1939 film (and a Dartmoor that is both the moon, but also the Acropolis) I consider this tenuous polar experience one of the story’s charms.

The narrator has been drunk for a month at the point at which he first meets a bear – whom he takes, at first, for a naked woman, “I was sure I saw her bare feet and toes and from her form, she appeared altogether without clothes.” He kills the bear, and is devastated to find “milk in her dugs”, but what can be done? He carves it up for meat and skin, after all, he is in a survival story. Lo, a starving, whimpering bear cub appears, bleating with joy to find its mother’s skin.

He names his cub Nancy, after the only girl he ever loved. Nancy changes his life. She sleeps in his cabin, and he raises her with much affection. She proves to be a great companion and resource for him. However, when he is taken in by a “colony of Norwegians”, he is delighted to be with females of his own species again, and thinks “some of the young ones the most bewitching creatures in the world.” Nancy’s jealousy of his new woman(s) is untenable, and so on to the disturbing ending, where the bear’s behaviour is the least of the savagery in this chilly rendering of eighteenth-century imperialism and misogyny.

Published in Tales and Sketches, Volume I, Blackie and Sons, 1837. Collected in Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World’s Ends, British Library, 2022

‘Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef’ by Eley Williams

Eley Williams is heavily anthologised here. It’s no surprise. She is a startling, humorous, heart-breaking writer with a unique sentence-level dynamism. Attrib. will surely prove itself a modern classic.

“You once told me that nobody could ever fall in love with a person whose job involved boiling birds in liquor.”

‘Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef’ is an anxious story of judgement, moral blind-spots, and love. The songbird gastronomy is experienced like a hyperviolent film, and the tension brought by this brutal practice constantly tests the fragile bones of a new relationship. As the relationship fractures, it is not only the Ortalan consumption that becomes taboo. As with much of Williams’ writing, the maelstrom of verbosity sharply outlines everything not put into words: the crux of the story.

Collected in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017

‘Hodge’ by Elinor Mordaunt

I considered doing a whole anthology of classic weird women short stories (E. Nesbit, Du Maurier, Mary Elizabeth Braddon etc). These works are a huge source of inspiration for my writing. They often feature a gothic interplay between interior and exterior landscapes. The insidiously oppressive atmospheres arise from the writers’ attention to domestic environments and insipid social mores, and not from the wild gallop of plot rattling through them.

The children – Rhoda and her younger brother, Hector – in ‘Hodge’ (1921), living an isolated but companionable life in a strange, unbeautiful marsh in Somerset, speak of a ‘Miocene’ Forest so real to them they feel they’ve been there, “they would find themselves saying ‘Do you remember?’ in speaking of paths they had never traversed.” One day, they appear to find the fictional forest of their games at an exceptionally low-tide, but as they age away from each other, each maturing to a different social rubric, the reality of the Forest’s existence becomes a tussle between them until years later when Hector finds it again. This time, there’s something in it. “An ape – a sort of ape.” Prehistoric Hodge is, in some ways, like Rhoda’s experience of her brother Hector, “nearish to a man, but –”, and the teenagers enjoy their new Stig-of-the-Dump friend.

This coming-of-age story is haunted by the Victorian fear of devolving from civilised mores to crude desires, and the characters move from innocence to experience when their missing-link pet demonstrates his base interest in Rhoda.

First published in Metropolitan Magazine, 1921, and later collected in The Tales of Elinor Mordaunt, Martin Secker, 1934. Collected in The Villa and The Vortex: Supernatural Stories, 1916-1924, Handheld Press, 2021

‘Plunged in the Years’ by Jeffrey Ford

Robert G. Cook wrote in his own contribution to A Personal Anthology: “Someone — I forget who; certainly not me — once said that Jeffrey Ford was the American M. John Harrison. Which, like most such comparisons, sort of works and also almost entirely doesn’t.” I once described Jeffrey Ford to someone as a weird Stephen King, but I don’t especially stand by that either.

This story reached me in a contributors copy of the 2024 Fall edition of Conjunctions. It was an awesome table of contents – all ghost stories by some of my favourite writers (Paul Tremblay, Margaret Atwood, Carmen Maria Machado, Brian Evenson) – but I flicked straight to the very end to read Jeffrey Ford’s story first. I still well up a little each time I re-read it. It features the memory of a family dog, and a possible seagull.

Is this story about estranged brothers a fiction, an auto-fiction or something more than labels allow? (The narrator is referred to once as ‘Jeffy’, his wife is called Lynn, and he teaches in Ohio). Does it even matter?

Here, the narrator of ‘Plunged in the Years’ tells his wife he’s heard his brother’s voice calling the family’s old dog during a walk in a forest –

“In an instant, I saw him in my imagination, waiting all those years for me to show up, traipsing the planks of the wooden walkway, and bellowing for the dog. ‘Come on, you know what I mean. Just his voice. I’m telling you I heard it and it was his. Disembodied.’
‘You’re a kook,’ she said and shook her head.
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘Can I have your crusts?’”

Jeffrey Ford’s worlds are strange, but their hearts are so familiar.

First published in Conjunctions 83, 2024

‘Hell is the Absence of God’ by Ted Chiang

Although he’s known for his science more than anything, Ted Chiang delivers mind-bending ideas. ‘Hell is the Absence Of God’ interrogates suffering, religion, faith, selfishness, selflessness, irrationality, rationality, gratitude, ingratitude, devotion, virtue, morality, deity, the morality of deity, all punctuated by massive, impassive angels.

“Pilgrims took up residence all over the site, forming temporary villages with their tents and camper vans; they all made guesses as to what location would maximize their chances of seeing the angel while minimizing the risk of injury or death.”

First published in Starlight 3, 2001. Collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor Books, 2002, and Picador, 2014