‘Women! In! Peril!’ by Jessie Ren Marshall

Told through a series of short dispatches from a passenger on spacecraft carrying sleeping women to populate Planet B after Earth is all but destroyed, the title story of Jessie Ren Marshall’s collection is imbued with her signature blend of humor, heart, and terror.  There’s a moment I found particularly resonant, where the narrator ponders the usefulness of narrative in a world that’s been lost: “IDK why our stories have to make sense when the world doesn’t.” But “Women! In! Peril!” does make sense, in the sad logic of tragedy. It’s also reminiscent of Covid-era lockdown, when for a time it did feel like we were the only people awake on a spaceship, typing our little thoughts out to the void in an attempt to make contact, barreling towards terrors unknown.

From Women! In! Peril!, Bloomsbury, 2024

‘G’ by Ling Ma

The titular G refers to a fictional drug that makes you invisible. It was a drug that best friends Bea and Bonnie did together often when they were in college—too often, in fact. Years later and cleaned up, Bea visits Bonnie for a final farewell before leaving New York to enroll in PhD program on in California. Bonnie presents her with a parting gift: a dose of G. Woven throughout this fateful last trip is the story of a friendship that veers into unhealthy codependence and then to flat out self-destruction as both girls contend with body image and identity struggles. The best addiction narratives show us the elation that comes with using, and Ling Ma makes G-induced invisibility so tantalizing: it “lifts the tiny anvil of self-consciousness… Just go out and voyeur around, nothing but a Guston eyeball bouncing down Amsterdam…” A standout story in one of my favorite collections in recent memory.

First published in Zoetrope: Allstory. Collected in Bliss Montage, FSG, 2022

‘Winter Chemistry’ by Joy Williams

Julep and Judy are teenagers in a charmless seaside town who sneak away to spy on their chemistry teacher each night. An innocent enough premise that, in the hands of a lesser writer, might turn into a saccharine coming-of-age tale about the girls’ budding sexuality. And it is a coming-of-age tale, in the sense that coming of age as a woman means confronting the dangers that lurk in the dark corners of daily existence. Williams is an expert at subtext and withholding. Woven throughout the story are hints of blood and menace that foreshadow the final, violent scene. I first read this story on a trash-strewn beach in July, marveling at the deliberate way Williams crafts each crystalline sentence, chilled despite the summer heat.

First published in The Paris Review, Spring1974, as ‘A Story about Friends’, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Taking Care, Random House, 1985, and also in The Visiting Privilege, Vintage, 2015

‘Boys Go to Jupiter’ by Danielle Evans

At what point does inaction become action? This is the question at the heart of Danielle Evans’s cogent narrative of a young white woman’s flirtation with some of the uglier factions of her identity. When a photo of Claire in a Confederate flag bikini goes unintentionally viral, she must reckon with the fallout on the campus of her small liberal arts college. Rather than apologize, Claire doubles down and sides with her small but vocal group of defenders. This story is all the more poignant considering it was published in 2017, before the term “cancel culture” was ceaselessly lobbed around by pundits. 

First published in The Sewanee Review, Fall 2017, and available for subscribers to read here. Collected in The Office of Historical Corrections, Riverhead, 2020

‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell

Mariana Enríquez understands the power of teenage girls, and this story is a bleak testament to that power. Told in the collective first person, ‘Our Lady of the Quarry’ chronicles a group of them who go to great lengths to win the attention of an older boy they have a crush on. When their wiles fail to attract him and he begins to date an older friend of theirs, things turn ugly. Like all great horror stories, ‘Our Lady’ starts off in an ordinary fashion with relatively run-of-the mill bitchiness from our jealous narrators. Slowly, however, bits of their feral nature are revealed. ‘Our Lady’ is a sparkling example of how teen obsession can quickly topple over into violence; how a perfect sunny day swimming at the quarry can become a sweaty, heat-drenched nightmare.

First published in The New Yorker, December 2020, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Hogarth, 2021

‘The Curse of Millhaven’ by Nick Cave

So far, all the stories on this list have been morally ambiguous—this one is decidedly not so. It’s also not technically a short story, but a song. I included it on this list because it has the arc and narrative twists and turns of a great short story, not to mention attention to detail that becomes even more impressive when executed in the meter of song lyrics (“Stinky Bohoon and his friend with the pumpkin-sized head”). Cave paints a whole small town (blood red) in this murder ballad about the teenage Loretta, who kills according to an adage her mother relayed to her: “All God’s children/they all gotta die!” There’s something sickeningly delightful about an antihero who has no qualms about the violence she commits, a point that gets hammered home in the final moments of the song:

They ask me if I feel remorse and I answer, “Why of course!
There’s so much more I could have done if they’d let me!”

From Murder Ballads, Mute Records, 1996

Introduction

I told myself: “Let them choose themselves. If you remember them, if they’ve been clinging to your back for years, jabbering in your ear, peel them off, throw them into the pot and stir. Ignore the superego. Jettison everything that smacks of variety, balance, reason, and taste.”

I’d misremembered some of these stories. Memory is a two-way street. The stories disfigure you, and then you turn around and disfigure them. There are no hard feelings. Can you spot the three-legged ones?

Nonetheless, and for reasons that mostly elude my understanding, these are some hills I would cheerfully die on.   

‘Small Heirlooms’ by M. John Harrison

Kit returns to her dead brother’s house to tidy up his literary estate. He got around a bit in his day: extracts from his diaries pastiche Patrick Leigh Fermor’s pre-war adventures in eastern Europe wonderfully well. But it’s not her brother’s memoirs that haunt Kit so much as his attitude. There’s something solvent about it. Something corrosive. Kit’s brother seems capable of plucking despair out of thin air, though given his air was gritted with the smoke from Theresianstadt, he may not have had much of a choice. “We shouldn’t have to live our lives unless we can live in them, thoughtlessly, like the animals,” Kit wrote to him once, and by the story’s latter stages we are inclined to agree.

Right up until the last line, ‘Small Heirlooms’ reads as a complex meditation on the relationship between writing and memory.

“In bed she decided over and over again, ‘He poisoned his own memories, too.’”

This being an M. John Harrison story, you know some fiendishness is brewing. The story holds its insights floating in plain sight, all to be unlocked by that killer last line.

I read this story, which is really two stories held in some sort of stereoscopic suspension, again and again, and I said to myself, “I’m going to learn how to do that.”

Well. Nope. But still I travel hopefully.

First published in Other Edens, edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock, Unwin Paperbacks, 1987, and collected in Travel Arrangements: short stories, Gollancz, London, 2000

‘Tamagotchi’ by Adam Marek

Luke’s dad is at his wits’ end, trying to reset a dying Tamagotchi. Sticking a sharpened pencil into the hole in Meemoo’s plastic back won’t do it; neither will a pin. Luke, meanwhile — an intense kid who’s struggling with all manner of developmental problems — is ostracised at school because Meemoo’s infected his classmates’ own Tamagotchis with something that looks very much like AIDS:

“It had now lost three of its limbs, having just one arm left, which was stretched out under his head. One of its eyes had closed up to a small unseeing dot. Its pixellated circumference was broken in places, wide open pores through which invisible things must surely be escaping and entering.”

Over the course of a few pages, ‘Tamagotchi’ transforms from goofy family anecdote, through Uncanny Valley holiday brochure, into something possessing the intensity of Peter Nichols’s play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. It’s a depiction of care all the more poignant for it’s being focused virtually nothing: a toy that’s no more than thirty pixels dancing on an LCD screen. You keep expecting Marek to tip us into something that’s easier to handle — a robot story, a father-and-son story, a medical allegory — but he absolutely refuses to let us off the hook.

First published in The New Uncanny, edited by Sarah Eyre & Ra Page, Comma, Manchester, 2008, and collected in The Stone Thrower, ECW Press, Toronto, 2013; available to read online at The Short Story Project

‘Busto is a Ghost, Too Mean to Give Us a Fright!’ by Gerald Kersh

For much of his career, Kersh wrote lively, ingenious popular shockers — stories like ‘Clock Without Hands’ and ‘The Crewel Needle’ — that shone a gay, garish light about the place without knocking anything over.

Now and again, though, something bubbled up in him –- some fragment of his past, spent in some “abominable little furnished room” — a gnarled lump of irreconcilable residue that he never quite worked out how to scratch.

Meet Pio Busto, landlord, extortionist, dog-lover, drunk on Red Lisbon, “a handful of spoiled human material, crumpled and thrown aside”. (Can you hear it coming yet? It’s a style as distinct as a theme tune, and it’s always recognisably the same material, run through the sprockets again and again, in variation after variation: comedy that’s subversive, savage, uneasy, off-colour, violent.)

Pio Buston’s dog Ouif has just got itself run over. It’s smashed, finished, but Busto can’t bring himself to shoot it — which is where our narrator comes in: “Old yer gun loew-er… Nah, sqeeeeeeze yer trigger–”

Kersh wants his characters to earn our compassion. He’ll nail his monster down until he writhes. We hate him, we hate him, we hate him — and then a moment arrives.

First published in Courier, Spring 1938, under the pseudonym P. J. Gahagan, and collected in The Best of Gerald Kersh, selected by Simon Raven, Heinemann, 1960, and most recently, Faber and Faber, London, 2013

‘Thrown Away’ by Rudyard Kipling

RK was surely having a bit of private fun with that title, for there is something about ‘Thrown Away’ that feels positively tossed off. It’s executed with an immense care to appear merely anecdotal. At the end of it you’re left thinking, dizzily, How could anything that light pack such a punch? Half a notebook later, you’re still unpacking its symmetries. This has to be, surely, one of the most highly organised stories in the language.

A sheltered young colonial officer arrives in India, and takes everything about the place far too seriously. Having got himself into various romantic and financial scrapes, none of them career-ending, he kills himself — as sheltered, over-serious men tend to do — and then it’s up to his Major and the narrator to manufacture him a more fitting death (cholera will do), so as to comfort and protect his parents.

Kipling’s early diagnosis of The Boy’s condition (his early upbringing has “killed him dead” before he even arrives) is so striking, and is played out with such ghastly aplomb, it’s easy to forget that it’s only half of the story’s machinery. The rest involves the Major and the narrator, burning the bed, burying the body, scaring off the neighbours, in tears one minute, pissing themselves with laughter the next, because honestly, The Boy’s death is farce, not tragedy, and if there were any mercy in the world it should be possible to wake him up and tell him so.

But there isn’t.

So there you are.

All you have is your decency, which, to maintain, you sometimes have to do the silliest things.

First published in Plain Tales from the Hills, Thacker, Spink and Company, Calcutta, 1888, and available in Collected Stories, Everyman, 1994

‘Robot’ by Helena Bell

Sometimes, all a story needs is a voice. The voice, (on those rare occasions) is the story. In the very act of articulating itself, it tells you everything. 

Helena Bell’s ‘Robot’ is essentially a list of dos and don’ts for the help — the help in this case being a medical ingestion device manufactured by (presumably friendly) aliens.

“You may wash your aluminum chassis on Monday and leave it on the back porch opposite the recyclables; you may wash your titanium chassis on Friday if you promise to polish it in time for church; don’t terrorize the cat…”

The lonely, sick old woman composing these instructions suspects that the robot is out to steal her dresses, the love of her rather neglectful children, her estate, and maybe, just maybe, the planet.

This last possibility is not especially interesting; it’s only here, I suspect, to keep the genre literalists happy. What matters to me — what I can’t get out of my head — is that voice: persnickerty, passive-aggressive, peremptory, and dying by degrees.

“Do not correct me in front of my friends; I have to finesse for the queen; I know how many trumps are out; I know how to play this game; I am the reason you are here, why are you so ungrateful?”

As we map the hole she’s leaving in her account of herself, the narrator’s true shape emerges. Oh, but it’s painful: never let your voice become stronger than you are.

First published in Clarkesworld no.72, September 2012, and available to read online here; anthologised in We Robots: Artificial Intelligence in 100 Stories, edited by Simon Ings, Head of Zeus, London, 2021

‘Gigolo and Gigolette’ by W. Somerset Maugham

What I remember:

Gigolette is a professional diver, whose circus routine has her plummeting into ever smaller containers. Audiences across Europe are astounded and agog, and every show’s a sell-out: sooner or later she’s going to fall to her death, and people want to be there when it happens.  

There’s a downturn in the business, that sets Gigolette and her partner Gigolo at odds. I do remember that Gigolette is left no more or less at risk than she was when the story started, except that she has come to dissociate from herself. She views her death dispassionately now: the eventual, inevitable malfunction of a human mechanism. She has died already, and we somehow missed the crucial moment.

What I forgot:

Gigolo is Cotman and Gigolette is Stella. Their fortunes are actually going in the other direction — they’re improving. Getting Stella to dive into a bucket has brought the couple success after years on the bread-line, scratching a living in dance halls and hotels and, by the way, failing to break into the movies. Cotman, we are told, is sincerely in love with Stella, and though he probably believes this, we certainly don’t. After the life they’ve had, love is an uncertain proposition. Hunger and exploitation hollowed the pair of them out, years ago.

Here’s the last line:

“‘I mustn’t disappoint my public,’ she sniggered.”

That “sniggered” is a master-stroke. 

First published in Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan, May 1932, and collected in Collected Short Stories Vol 1, Penguin, 1963, now in Vintage Classics, 2000

‘Fondly Fahrenheit’ by Alfred Bester

James Paleologue Vandaleur — spoiled, weak, and feckless — has one source of income, renting out the services of his multiple-aptitude android. The trouble being, his pride-and-joy loses its mind whenever the ambient temperature goes above 92.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

Vandaleur’s been spending a lot of time with his intermittently murderous companion, and like any odd couple, they’ve begun to project their personalities onto each other. This isn’t telepathy. This isn’t what the science fiction academics call a “novum”. This is what happens in every marriage, and (incidentally) why James Fox’s Tony comes such a cropper in Joseph Losey’s 1963 film The Servant.

So much for the material. What are you going to do with it?

THE RULES OF PULP FICTION

(an incomplete list)

RULE 1: state the rules of your stylistic game straight away, and with as much insolence and brevity as you can muster. Bester’s first line?

“He doesn’t know which of us I am these days, but they know one truth.”

RULE 2: you’re building a helter-skelter, not a viewing platform. *Keep it moving*.

“‘Then it got to arson. Then serious destruction. Then assault . . . that engineer on Rigel. Each time worse. Each time we had to get out faster. Now it’s murder. Christ! What’s the matter with you? What’s happened?’”

Make motion your god, and your aesthetics will veer off in odd directions. Lines like “She was short, stocky, amoral and a nymphomaniac” will sound to outsiders like you’re reaching for effect. You will know how painfully necessary this register is for you.

RULE 3: distil everything. There’s no time for realism. Reach for the compression bag of simile, so that a search party, say, becomes

“one mile of angry determination stretching from east to west across a compass of heat.”

RULE 4: round here you don’t show: you *tell*:

“‘If I could only get rid of you. If I didn’t have to live off you. God! If only I’d inherited some guts instead of you.’”

RULE 5: remember that you are a professional poisoner. Everything you do, however hedged, reduces to desire and death. So why hedge? Know what you are.

“‘It kidnapped a child. Took her out into the rice fields and murdered her.’

  ‘Raped her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’”

RULE 6: Overdrive rules 1-5 and after a lifetime’s obscurity, you will become Alain Robbe-Grillet. You will become David Lynch. You will become Barry Gifford. Which is to say: you will become one of the most accomplished experimentalists ever to make print.

At which point, you can climb on top of that dung-heap of yours and exclaim:

“Oh, it’s no feat to beat the heat.
All reet! All reet!
So jeet your seat
Be fleet be fleet
Cool and discreet
Honey . . .”

and no-one — no-one — will dare to say where you went wrong.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1954, and collected in Starburst, The New American Library, New York, 1958