‘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

‘The A Bao A Qu’ by Jorge Luis Borges

“On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow.”

Some days we’re the A Bao A Qu desperate for help to self-actualise.

Some days we’re the dreadful traveller stopping the A Bao A Qu from self-actualising.

Spoiler: I’ve never known a tentacle plot-twist like it.

First published in The New Yorker, October 4th, 1969. Collected in Manual de zoología fantástica, Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1957, and translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni into English in The Book of Imaginary Beings, Dutton, 1969

‘Unmanageable’ by Lucia Berlin

I find myself slightly incapable of introducing this story. It is about a woman; a mother; an alcoholic. It is short, the writing is spare. Berlin manages to cram the cruel dynamics of addiction, neglect, duty, guilt, motherhood, and childhood into so few sentences, and not without a little wit and even warmth. It is characteristic of the whole collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, and every time I read it, I feel like I’ve been hit by a lorry.

It is the middle of the night when the narrator realises her bottle of vodka is empty:

“At six, in two hours, the Uptown Liquor Store in Oakland would sell her some vodka. In Berkeley you had to wait until seven. Oh, God, did she have any money? She crept back to her room to check in her purse on the desk. Her son Nick must have taken her wallet and car keys. She couldn’t look for them in her sons’ room without waking them.”

Collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015

Introduction

I think of myself as a good reader and a bad writer. I want to share some stories I like, and I want to practice writing, so I volunteered to share my personal anthology with you.

I’m pretty sensitive to emotions, so I (unconsciously?) try to protect my own by reading genres that customarily prioritize other types of stimulation. But sometimes a story will slip through my filters and hit me right in the feels, as they say. Following are twelve stories that hit me hard enough to leave an emotional bruise, in one way or another.

‘Charles’ by Shirley Jackson

A story about narrators and viewpoints, and a story about children. I was a kid, maybe a tween- or teenager, when I found 75 Short Masterpieces in a used bookstore. I read ‘Charles’ and my world broke open. I felt pure shame, even though it wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t real. But it was mine, as I relived my memories of first grade—not kindergarten, I wasn’t retaining memories yet—and saw myself first as Laurie observing Charles, and then, against my will, as Charles. I haven’t reread this story, but I want it in my anthology so that I can, if I ever muster the courage.

First published in Mademoiselle in 1948. Collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, FSG, 1949; and in 75 Short Masterpieces: Stories from the World’s Literature, Bantam, 1983

‘Jeffty Is Five’ by Harlan Ellison

Another story about children, and a story about holding onto the past. Five-year-old Jeffty literally doesn’t grow up, but the rest of the world goes on around him, until it can’t. Now that I’ve had a five-year-old of my own I’m not convinced by Ellison’s portrayal of Jeffty, but his innocence and bewildered acceptance rings true. I feel sad thinking about his parents.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in July 1977. Collected many times, including in The Top of the Volcano: The Award-Winning Stories of Harlan Ellison, Subterranean Press, 2015

‘The Last of the Winnebagos’ by Connie Willis

“On the way out to Tempe I saw a dead jackal in the road. I was in the far left lane of Van Buren, ten lanes away from it, and its long legs were facing away from me, the squarish muzzle flat against the pavement so it looked narrower than it really was, and for a minute I thought it was a dog.”

Another story about holding onto the past, and a story about love. A photojournalist is on his way to profile the last road-legal RV in Arizona when he sees a dead animal on the highway… I don’t know how describe the way the pieces of this story come together without cheating the unaware reader out of first-hand experience of its genius. I hope it suffices to say they do. The result is a compassionate examination of how people hold on to the past.

First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1988. Collected in Time Is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis, Gollancz, 2013; and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories, Del Rey, 2014

‘Hell Is the Absence of God’ by Ted Chiang

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that. And since God hadn’t previously played a role in Neil’s life, he wasn’t afraid of being exiled from God. The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.

Another story about love, and a cosmic horror story. Chiang’s SF stories frequently involve fundamental metaphysical changes taken to their logical conclusion. In ‘Hell Is the Absence of God’, the Christian God is real and miracles happen. It turns out that unconditional love is incompatible with the idea that “everything happens for a reason”, and miracles aren’t necessarily good from a human perspective. I felt the bleakness for days.

First published in Starlight 3, 2001. Collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002. Available in podcast form here