‘A Country Doctor’ by Franz Kafka

I sometimes think ‘A Country Doctor’ is my favourite piece of short fiction. I will never get to the bottom of it. Walter Benjamin had it that every line in Kafka is allegory. Which is to say that every phrase, every image, withstands thousands of readings. And the closer I look at this story, the more its meanings split, double, triple, squirm in the mind like cells in mitosis. It begins with the stunning sentence (one I’ll admit I cribbed for a story of my own) “I was in great perplexity”, and goes on from there, rattling forward with the force of a cold and gnawing nightmare, filled with frustration, sickness, riddles, and hellish visions. There is a groom who bites a servant girl on the face. There is a worm-filled fatal wound that is simultaneously a precious flower. Indeed, many things described are other, often opposite things. The doctor becomes a patient. In a moment charged with mystic import, he is ritually stripped and laid down beside the florid wound of the boy whose life he fails to save. Meanwhile the villagers sing, “Only a doctor, only a doctor”. The story is flanked by two metaphysical creatures, two horses named “Brother” and “Sister” who teleport the doctor through time and space from one act of the story to the other. In both, he is rendered impotent by time. He is present at just the wrong moment. Those two horses grow in my mind the more I read this story that I will never figure out. Inscrutable dark creatures of great power, they are terrifyingly free of the binds of reality, of space, of time.

First published as ‘Der Landarzt’ in Der Landartz, 1919. First published in English in In the Penal Colony, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, Schocken, 1948. Now collected widely, including in The Complete Short Stories, Vintage, 1999

‘Don’t Look Now’ by Daphne Du Maurier

Everybody knows Nicholas Roeg’s film, but Du Maurier’s story has a creepy flavour all of its own. The unheimlichdoes not announce itself gradually, but rather leaps into view, like an adjustment of light. Everything changes, defamiliarizes just enough for the familiar to maintain a presence. Surely it is this doubling, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, that makes twins a potent and recurrent symbol in uncanny fiction. I say that, chuckling, as an identical twin myself. It’s elderly twins that discombobulate us at the very start of Du Maurier’s tale. The blind psychic and her sister are first introduced in speech, in a playful conversation between the central characters, John and Laura, a couple who are temporarily (from John’s perspective at least) escaping the grief of a young daughter’s death. As soon as the twins are introduced, a sickly change of light is cast over the story. Du Maurier maintains it to the end, that unsettling vision of the future, the three women standing like sentries in a vaporetto boat.

First published in Not After Midnight, Gollancz, 1971. Now available in Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, Penguin Classics, 2006

‘Love is a Thing on Sale for more Money than Exists’ by Tao Lin

I believe that Tao Lin is sometimes misread and held up as an example of that which he interrogates in his fiction. What is true of the zeitgeisty US author who preceded him and to whom Lin is sometimes compared – Brett Easton Ellis – is not true of Lin. Both seem to be considered by some as arch ironists, operating in a zone outside of political conviction. But Lin sees the inside and outside of a mode that Ellis operates entirely within. Lin, I think is deeply moral, deeply political. For example, he seems to have spent the last five or six years quietly, and sincerely, plotting a way to escape the frightening merry-go-round of hyper capitalism. His next novel will be called Leave Society.

This story, collected in the most recent Granta book of US short stories, describes a couple, Garret and Kristy, living in an allegorical version of the United States. They are well intentioned. They are would-be activists. They go to anti-war meetings. They are vaguely aware that something is deeply wrong in the world that time has forced them to inhabit, and that they are not getting the full picture. Both react to it in different ways but it is clear from Lin’s narrative, that the author knows something is not right in the west. From the get-go there is miasmic talk of terrorists, but terrorists never appear. They grow as fictive spectres in the text. The ideas around them become increasingly paranoid. Are they burrowing under houses? Do they live inside walls? Reading it, I recollect Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’, and I think, well, it’s good that Lin is out there, somehow getting this vibe down on paper, holding a mirror up to his time.

Collected in New American Stories, Granta, 2015. Available to read online on Lin’s website here

Introduction

While thinking about selecting stories for this anthology, blame memory, but I found myself biased in favour of what I’ve read most recently. A lot of these share an element of surprise, not in the form of a twist (although maybe), but in the road covered, the space, the time, the crossing from one thing to the next in a way that surprised me or delighted me, at least. Call me an old sentimental fool, I’m a sucker for looking back, marvelling at the distance covered.

Also, a lot of dark stuff on here. But not only. I’ve made sure a lot of those were readable online, so do have a gander.

‘The Quiet’ by Carys Davies

‘The Quiet’ opens Davies’ collection The Redemption of Gallen Pike. It’s one of those historical pieces that feels, in terms of time or place, not-quite defined, and I must say that’s right up my street. We get the point of view of Susan, a young woman recently settled in a pretty empty land with her husband, and hear of her troubles with their rough-looking neighbour, who lives six miles away. The story starts with his visit as Susan’s husband is away. It’s a dark story, full of menace, but also kindness. And wouldn’t you know, I’m also a sucker for kindness.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Spring 2012. Collected in The Redemption of Gallen Pike, Salt 2014. Read online at Lit Hub here

‘The Stars Below’ by Ursula K. Le Guin

Here I might just quote Le Guin’s own introduction to the story:

The popular notion of science fiction, I guess, is of a story that takes some possible or impossible technological gimmick-of-the-future – Soylent Green, the time machine, the submarine – and makes hay out of it. There certainly are science fiction stories which do just that, but to define science fiction by them is a bit like defining the United States as Kansas.

Writing “The Stars Below,” I thought I knew what I was doing. As in the early story “The Masters,” I was telling a story not about a gimmick or device or hypothesis, but about science itself – the idea of science. And about what happens to the idea of science when it meets utterly opposed and powerful ideas, embodied in government, as when seventeenth-century astronomy ran up against the Pope, or genetics in the 1930s ran up against Stalin. But all this was cast as a psychomyth, a story outside real time, past or future, in part to generalize it, and in part because I was also using science as a synonym for art. What happens to the creative mind when it is driven underground?

This is a story that sits at the borderland of historical and the mythological, and, clearly, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

First published in Orbit 12, 1973. Collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Harper & Row, 1975, more recently Gollancz, 2015. Read online at Lightspeed here

‘No life’ by J. Robert Lennon

The story opens in a park, with Edward and Alison sitting in their car, getting ready to join the meeting between prospective adopting parents and children. It starts there, but very soon the focus shifts from the children themselves to this couple and another. Harlan (a Texan judge –“a rich hick”) and Linda Breece happen to have spotted the same cute child, and soon it’s clear a competition has started. And when Edward and Alison are invited to dinner by their competitors, you can expect everything not to go smoothly. Lennon’s skill is in wrong-footing the reader. In his short stories, just like in his novels, he is at his best when crossing genres, moods.

First published in The New Yorker, September 4, 2000 issue. Collected in See You in Paradise, Graywolf Press/Serpent’s Tail, 2014

‘The Night Face Up’ by Julio Cortázar

(First a few words on publication: originally published in Spanish in 1956 in Final del Juego, and in English, as far as I can tell, in Blow Up and other stories (1967), a selection from different collections. I first read it in French in a collection called Les Armes Secrètes (1959, like the Spanish edition). My edition, a later one, collected under that name eleven stories instead of the original five. Show some respect, publishers!)

How do you express the unspeakable horror of a road accident? Of the trauma of hospital? Of being sacrificed to some blood-thirsty god, your heart torn out of you chest? Well, a careful writer might safely keep away, but Cortázar takes all of these face on and juggle them into a blur.

First published in English in Blow Up and Other Stories, Random House, 1967. Read online here

‘Three Indignities’ by Brian Evenson

This is pretty real-world horror for Evenson, who often strays into more supernatural territory. People who’ve been around hospitals a bit might get a familiar tingle. Evenson is a master of unease. Read his whole collection A Collapse of Horses to see how he can use the most innocuous thing, the slightest speck, to open the door a crack to terror.

First published in Unsaid. Collected in A Collapse of Horses, Coffee House Press, 2016. Read online at The Center for Fiction here

‘Oestrogen’ by Mike McCormack

McCormack has long, or until recently at least, been considered by many as a greatly underrated writer. His recent novel Solar Bones might have changed that, considering the coverage it got, but I wonder if it will lead to his stories being re-read over. I must say I haven’t read a novel of his yet (that Solar Bones says hi from my TBR pile), but I loved both his collections, Getting It In The Head (1996) and Forensic Songs (2012).

‘Oestrogen’, from his first collection, tells us of a young farmer who one day lands at his sister’s in Galway, intent on spending a couple of months there “to grow a pair of tits”. From this seemingly wacky premise McCormack touches interesting and difficult questions, such as mental health issues in rural Ireland (and beyond, really), and what it means to live both in a changing society and west Mayo. It is also, to me, a surprisingly touching story.

First published in Getting It In The Head, Jonathan Cape, 1996

‘Eastmouth’ by Alison Moore

Alison Moore’s stories inhabit a corner of the UK akin to Shirley Jackson‘s and Kit Reed’s own backyard, with their quiet horrors building up until you choke on them, silently, afraid to make a fuss. Eastmouth in particular looks into the mundane horror of meeting your partner’s parents, and the particular pull one’s hometown can have.

First published in The Spectral Book of Horror Stories, Spectral Press, 2014. Included in Best British Short Stories 2015, Salt, 2015

‘Schwarzschild Radius’ by Connie Willis

Willis here gives us, in Le Guin’s words, a story about “the idea of science,” more than about science itself. It takes places in the German trenches on the Russian front during the First World War, and follows a handful of characters who try to survive by fixing a wireless, because that’s the only thing standing between them and the front. Muller stays sane by making up theories. Schwarzschild is corresponding with Einstein (who introduces the general theory of relativity the same year), but he’s not in good shape:

We are all of us – Muller, and the recuit who is trying to put together Eisner’s motocycle, and perhaps even the doctor with his steady bedside voice – afraid of the front. But our fear is not complete, because unspoken in it is our belief that the front is something separate from us, something we can keep away from by keeping the wireless or the motorcycle fixed, something we can survive by flattening our faces into the frozen earth, something we can escape altogether by being invalidated out.

But the front is not separate. It is inside Schwarzschild, and the symptoms I have been sending out, suppurative bullae and excoriated lesions, are not what is wrong with him at all. The lesions on his skin are only the barbed wire and shell holes and connecting trenches of a front that is somewhere farther in.

First Published in The Universe, Bantam Books, 1987. Collected in Impossible Things, Bantam Spectra Books, 1994. Read online here

‘Green Boots’ Cave’ by Jim Hinks

I read this story, thanks to some dark serendipity, not long after reading a good few pieces about climbing Everest, and more specifically the gruesome fact that there are a lot of dead people out there, that are staying there, up where shit becomes tough and if you’re up there dying is not a remote possibility for you either. I was (morbidly, maybe) fascinated by the fact that people who chose to climb Everest in effect accepted not only that they might die, but that people they loved might die, and that they might have to leave them behind up there in the 29,000-foot blizzard to die. By the fact, and this isn’t potential but certain, that they will have to find their way by the de facto signposts of abandoned bodies, recognisable and talked about by the colours of their coats, their boots.

As a writer I was starting to try to work out how could one possibly approach such a subject, such horror, when I came across Hinks’ story. And I had this most welcome sensation: that of finding someone else has written about what you wanted to write, and so well that you don’t have to try yourself; shouldn’t, really. Hinks up to his Cortázar tricks. Go read it now, it’s pretty short.

First published in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Volume 4 Issue 1. Included in Best British Short Stories 2015, Salt, 2015. Read online here – you’ll have to download the story

‘Cowboy Pile’ by Andy Mozina

Talking about surprise, there is a lot to be said for picking up a book at random. I used to live in Cork, Ireland, which still hosts an International Short Story Festival, and used to have the Frank O’Connor Award, the biggest award for a collection (which Carys Davies’ The Redemption of Galen Pike won, by the way – it’s all connected!). So charity shops there often had a good few collections on their shelves, from the copies sent to the judging panel, I assume.

Anyway, I picked Andy Mozina’s book without knowing the first thing about it, and it was good. ‘Cowboy Pile’, the first story in the book, a five-page funny piece, starts like this:

Out on the ranges, out West, you get cowboy piles. Mounds of human cowboys. A cowboy lies on the ground (for no reason, it seems), and then someone lies across him, and then a third guy piles on. Then one after another. Sometimes you’ll see a pile from the Interstate. If the wind’s right and your window is down and your engine’s running gently, you might hear six guns fired into the air or the barely audible hooting and yowling of a convocation of cowboys. If you’re lucky, ahead of you on the highway you’ll see a pickup with a pair of men wearing ten-gallon hats. Follow those gents. Exit.

First published in Beloit Fiction Journal. Collected in The Women Were Leaving The Men, Wayne State University Press, 2007. Read online here