A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

In every room I have lived in, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is one of the first books I place on the shelf. Between cities, countries, situationships, relationships, work in hospitality and lecturing jobs around the world, I have continually sought a space which may have the conditions I wish to write, to think, to dream. Because, as Woolf explains: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write […] Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.”

There have been many times when I have almost given up on this pursuit. Coming from where I have, the concept of being a writer has always been said to be somebody else’s dream, and within a series of low-paid, highly-skilled jobs and somewhat elite art events, this notion has been reproduced time and time again. Yet, inspired by Woolf and the others noted in this anthology, I continue to try. I want to read fiction about the characters and experiences I would have identified with when first starting university all those years ago. I want to add to those voices on the shelf that speak about women’s representation and class in a nuanced way. In her essay, Woolf explores the effect of the negation of women’s voices in history how, in this absence, women become othered, placed inferior, misrepresented. I hope to continue to write so my specific story does not remain unspoken or misunderstood, and in my teaching, I hope to encourage diverse students to put a name to their experience, too. Because, as Audre Lorde puts it, in the process of articulation, individuals can “put a name to the nameless so that it can be thought”.

First published by Hogarth Press, 1929, and widely available today, including in the Penguin Great Ideas series

‘Talking to Myself, Talking to You’ by Kathleen Fraser

When working on my first novel, I was obsessed with modernist and neo-modernist authors from Woolf to Fraser to Watson to McBride. I was attempting to depict a second-generation, working-class girl’s coming-of-age tale in its specificity and felt guided by these writers. I know it can often be understood that “experimental” literature seems to be a way of setting a boundary between the author and the reader. However, whilst engaging with this work, I found the absolute opposite. Through their innovations, I felt I was able to get closer to understanding the complexities of the female experiences they were depicting; I was drawn to consider how plain language has felt “a brutal tool” (Watson) that cannot, as James Joyce explains, render those parts of human existence that do not fit within “wideawake language, cutanddry grammar, goahead plot”.

Kathleen Fraser’s critical and creative work, influenced by the tradition of modernism, directly and playfully confronts women’s “dis-ease” with language, literature and authority. Her narrative piece, ‘Talking to Myself, Talking to You’, addresses a key tension in her writing. Namely, how she can represent a specific female reality within a “structure that gagged me”. In this story, we follow a female narrator as she attempts to communicate with her absent male lover. But, “I had to stop because I couldn’t begin. Too much prelude”. She seamlessly shifts in her stream-of-consciousness style between memory and reflection as she hopes to put a name to her reality in a way she might later explain to him. However, repeatedly, she fears male judgement – a directness, a logic – where her internal experience cannot reside.

“I suddenly feel exposure. Unable to present something firm and clear … a logical extension of the productive person you’ve known me to be. Will you find me out? … No answer surfaces.”

At the end of this piece, the narrator does not find the words but ends with a promise that she will continue to try. At first, this ending may seem like the narrator’s failure. However, I believe in inhabiting this specific story of a woman’s inability to speak, Fraser achieves in showing the reader (in an embodied way) what it feels like to be alienated in a language system you are forced to perform daily.

First published in Each Next, The Figures, 1980 and also in Feminist Studies, Summer 1981

Queenless by Mira Marcinów, translated by Maggie Zebracka

“Queenless – a honey bee colony without a queen.”

Like Johnson’s Sisters, I read this short novel in one breathless sitting. Composed of poetic-prose style vignettes, Queenless tells the story of a daughter’s mixed love for a mother she is losing. The narrative traces their coming together and their eventual separation in a structure akin to a tide breaking. We are left with a young woman learning to live without her gravitational centre (her ‘queen’).

Marcinów is a Polish writer who is also renowned for her critical work in psychology. What stood out to me most when reading was her skill in depicting an honest, potent love between two women. Carl Jung writes, “Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life”, and I believe Marcinów succeeds in showing in her prose that the paradox is the closest tool we have in comprehending the “fullness of (love)” in its hungry, messy form. A daughter speaks of her mother’s flaws and toxicity, naming their relationship “unhealthy”, but she could not love her more; she could not want to leave her more. The form of this story magnifies its emotional content – comprised of fragments, lyrics, scenes, and sparse, sometimes single sentences. In the white space of the page, we collate these fragments into a whole whilst also having the time to reflect and thoughtfully participate. We grapple with the narrator to consider how we might put a shape to our own love for our mothers, our own inarticulate griefs, our own desire to live in the face of it all.

Queenless will be published in the UK on July 30th by Héloïse Press and can be pre-ordered at bookshops now

‘Overnight’ by Saba Sams

Sams’ powerful stories of teen girlhood in all of its confusion, intense emotion and inchoate self-shifting reminded me of those times my heart felt wide open to a dangerous world, one that I could not help but feel a wide-awake addiction to. In ‘Overnight’, her lucid descriptions immerse the reader in a 00s world of nightclubs, blue WKDs, Smirnoff Ice and Red Stripe. The strobe light and phone camera screen select what we see as we inhabit young Maxine’s perspective. She “saw [George] first in the viewfinder of her Snapchat”. As the story progresses we zoom in to who he is and how he relates to her. In the beginning their relationship being one of innocence, listening to George’s iPod shuffle (Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls”) and finding comfort away from their single mothers’ struggles and working-class lives. However, it’s clear from Maxine’s avoidance and almost paralysis in seeing him again that something passed between them. Sams artfully executes the reveal of this event. A car light in the dark slowly coming into stark focus.

First published in The Stinging Fly, 2018, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Send Nudes, Bloomsbury, 2022

1961 Triptych by Remedios Varo

Neil Gaiman says short stories are “tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner”. My final selection for this anthology is an unexpected one. It is not a short story but, in fact, a triptych: a series of three paintings which tell a story, one which allows us to, briefly, enter another world, another mind, another dream. Remedios Varo was a Spanish surrealist painter concerned, like others in this anthology, in using her art “as a way of communicating the incommunicable”. Her work is otherworldly and concerned with liberating the self from the confines, like Machado, of “our known world”.

In the first panel, ‘Towards the Tower (Hacia La Torre)’, we see a group of uniformed young women led away from a bee-hive-like structure by Mother Superior. The women pedal in time, gazing ahead in their trance-like states. However, one of them is still awake. She dares to look outward. A sparkle in her eye. In the second panel, ‘Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (Bordando El Manto Terrestre)’, the women sit in a high tower directed by the Great Master to work – weaving the fabric of reality. The tapestry of the earth threads from their hands and out of a small gap in the wall, creating a world they are integral to but cannot participate within. Looking closely, we see the woman who is awake stitching a small detail, unseen by the others. She creates a boat, a lover, a new reality for herself beyond the confines of these walls. In the final panel, ‘The Escape (La Huida)’, the heroine is steering her boat away from the tower, her lover by her side, a dark cave symbolising her new world ahead. It is important to note the lover has not saved her, but she has fabricated her liberation alone.

Will she make it? What will this new passage entail? Comparable to the short story, the ends in Varo’s sequence are not perfectly tied up. We are left with questions, wordless interpretations, and I believe a message on the potentiality of women’s creative expression. The heroine can use the tools that once enslaved her to articulate (and thus live) her newfound freedom.

Varo’s work is included in IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism (2024-2026). Beginning at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, the show travels to Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

Introduction


Though I consider myself a horror writer, I’m not a big reader of genre fiction. My definition of what constitutes a horror story is quite broad. Broader than most people’s. I look to find horror or strange stories or weird fiction or whatever you want to call it in unexpected places, often written by authors not associated with genre writing. All I ask is that the story be disturbing and odd and chilling. That it might make me laugh with some horrible black humour while at the same time thinking, ‘Should I really be laughing at that?’ That it might stay with me. That it might haunt me not because of ghosts or vampires or zombies, although those things might be present, sure, but rather because some unwelcome truth has been exposed. Something that resonates with my own life. For me, this is what makes a horror story work best. And ambiguity. Tons of ambiguity.

There are a few writers missing from my list who I would’ve liked to have included. Robert Aickman sets the tone but has too many wonderful stories to choose from. Andre Dubus’s stories didn’t quite fit the theme. And then there’s Rebecca Lloyd, Robert Pope, and L.S. Johnson, three great short fiction writers currently working.

The stories listed below would, in my opinion, make a wonderful anthology of strange tales. Some are very dark and serious, some are more fun (but still dark). These are stories that, if I’m being honest, I’ve tried to emulate over and over again, arriving at my own versions, hopefully unrecognisable from what inspired them. Isn’t that the biggest compliment one writer can give to another?

‘Vision’ by Alistair MacLeod

While there are quite a lot of weird goings on in Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod’s wonderful collection ‘Island’, I was surprised by the supernatural elements found in one story, ‘Vision’. Like all the stories in the book, ‘Vision’ is set in Cape Breton, Nova Socia. While sea fishing, a father recounts to his son a tale of a trip he and his twin brother took as children to Canna Island. They were paying a surprise visit to their grandparents, but got lost and ended up in the filthy, cat-infested home of an old blind woman. They eventually find their grandparents house, but their connection to the old blind woman runs deeper than they realise, and she will end up saving one of their lives on the beach at Normandy during World War II, many years after her own death.

I also have to mention the opening story in this collection, ‘The Boat’, which is my favourite in the book. It’s a fantastic story but not one for this anthology. 

First published in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories, McClelland & Stewart, 1986, and collected in Island, McClelland & Stewart, 2000, and again in Island: The Collected Short Stories, 2017

‘The Frozen Fields’ by Paul Bowles

Reading Paul Bowles’s Collected Stories, it was this tale that stood out. While containing nothing fantastical, it does have little sprinklings of magic. It could almost be a fairy tale. In this story, a six-year-old boy called Donald, who lives with his parents in New York City, visits the New England farm of his maternal grandparents at Christmas. There, he fantasizes that a wolf smashes through a window and carries away his bullying and physically abusive father. Donald views the farm as an enchanted and magical place, a place where perhaps his rebellious spirit can take the form of a wolf and rid him of his father for good. 

First published in Harper’s Bazaar, 1957, and collected in The Time of Friendship, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, and then in the Collected Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009

Except from Autobiography, by Morrissey

As a life-long fan of The Smiths and Morrissey solo, I obviously couldn’t wait to get my hands on Autobiography. Largely, it didn’t disappoint. Maybe throw in a paragraph break here and there, why don’t you? And what’s with all the alliteration? I expected the book to make me laugh, cry, maybe roll my eyes occasionally – which it did. What I didn’t expect was to be sleeping with the light on after reading it. That’s because, embedded within the book, is one of the best and most chilling ghost stories I’ve ever read. I’ve often thought that this section of the book, if removed, would make a brilliant addition to a collection of ghost stories. For me, it’s with this section that Morrissey proves that in another life he could be a celebrated fiction writer.

It purports to be a true story, about a jaunt Morrissey took with some friends one evening in the late 80s onto Saddleworth Moor (Morrissey’s fascination with the Moors Murderers is well known). Returning after dark along a windswept moorland road, they see a figure “rising-up from the black earth…standing upright and then throwing his arms towards our lights.” It’s an apparition worthy of an M.R. James story: “a boy of roughly 18 years wearing only a humiliatingly-short anorak coat that was open to the rest of his body.” Between them the four friends search for an explanation, then at the first phone box they come across they call the police only to be told to keep an open mind. To my way of thinking that’s the last thing anyone in that situation wants to hear from the police!

First published by Penguin, 2013

‘One Warm Saturday’ by Dylan Thomas

A young man goes to the beach, having spurned his friends because he’d decided he wants to spend the day alone. Once there, “among the ice-cream cries” he’s lonely and bored. He falls in love with a young woman “willing and warm under the cotton” who smiles at him in a communal garden. But he is too shy to talk to her. Luckily, they encounter each other again later that day in the pub where he’s been kicking himself for his shyness. After getting acquainted, they head back to her room, taking a party of people from the pub with them. She tells him the others won’t stay long and that he must be patient. Once in her room, he starts to fantasise about the time they’ll spend together, not only that night but for the rest of their lives. He’s sure the two of them are made for each other. It all seems too good to be true. But don’t worry, the only climax on offer is the devastating kind. Stepping out of the room to use the toilet, the young man gets lost in the dark hallways of the house. After disturbing many of the occupants of the other rooms, tearing up and down the halls shouting the woman’s name, and almost falling to his death down a shaft, he fails to find his way back to his lover. The horror!

Perhaps what appeals to me about this story is that Thomas sets up a kind of fantasy for the retiring type (of which I count myself), wherein despite being too shy to talk to the woman in the garden the young man gets a second chance (which never happens in real life, let me tell you!) and looks set to spend the night with her, only for this fantasy to be cruelly dismantled at the end. It’s almost as if I can hear Dylan Thomas laughing in my face.

The young man, we can only assume, will be haunted by this missed opportunity for the rest of his life, and will be forever wondering ‘what if?’ As, of course, is the reader. By this, and by his or her own lifetime’s worth of missed opportunities. How delicious. Right?

First published in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Dent, 1940

‘The Headless Hawk’ by Truman Capote

In ‘The Headless Hawk’, Vincent – an art gallery employee – has a painting presented to him by a girl with “trancelike eyes” who he initially dismisses as being “dressed like a freak”. The painting, though lacking “technical merit” nevertheless has “that power often seen in something deeply felt, but primitively conveyed”. Entranced by the painting, which the girl possibly painted while housed in some kind of institution, Vincent buys it for himself. Somehow, the painting conveys all Vincent’s life’s failures, which leads him to a fascination with the painter, as he wonders “who was she that she should know so much?”

He embarks on an affair with the woman, though he is ultimately disgusted by both her and the painting, possibly because he sees himself reflected in both.

This might be a study of psychosis or insanity. If the girl is crazy, does that mean Vincent is too, given that he sees himself in her painting? Is his appearance of sanity simply an act? Though there’s something dark and unpleasant at the heart of this story, it remains elusive. It’s a puzzle that the reader can return to over and over again, trying to figure out its meaning.

First published in The Tree of Night and Other Stories, Random House, 1949, and collected in The Complete Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2005

‘The Bottomless Hole’ by The Handsome Family

The horror of the human mind when it won’t rest, eh?

Given their association with the TV series True Detective (their song ‘Far from Any Road’ was the theme tune of its first series), it shouldn’t be too surprising to find The Handsome Family on this list. In fact, many of their songs function like short stories. Take ‘The Snow White Diner’, in which the occupants of a diner watch a car containing a deceased mother and children being hoisted out of a river, or ‘So Long’ in which the narrator bids adios to all the pets he ever owned, as well as “whatever was in that hole that I raked over”, and lists the manner of their deaths.

In ‘The Bottomless Hole’ a farmer discovers “the mouth of a deep dark hole” behind his barn. He tests the depth of the hole by chucking stuff in – broken tractors and dead cows, that kind of thing -– but never hears anything hit the bottom. So, unable to stop wondering if what he has here is a bottomless hole, he does what any reasonable person would do in that situation and makes himself “a chariot” using ropes and “a rusty clawfoot tub”. He then bids his wife and kids goodbye and rides down into the hole. Having cut himself free when he ran out of rope, he’s singing to us as he falls. He can’t remember his name. All he knows is that he must satisfy his mind as to whether or not this damn hole he’s in is, as he suspects, bottomless.

From the album Singing Bones, Carrot Top Records, 2003

‘Stone City’ by Annie Proulx

To my mind this is a ghost story, although it doesn’t contain any actual spooks or spectres. What it does have is a family so bad, born bad, that though they’re long dead, or driven off, they continue to haunt and terrorise the people of Chopping County where the story takes place. An abandoned farm, once known as Stone City, a place where “the buildings were gone, collapsed into cellar holes of rotting beams” and “blackberry brambles boiled out of the crumbling foundations”, is their castle of Otranto. “There are some places that fill us with an immediate loathing and fear,” as Proulx puts it. And Stone City has “something evil tincturing the light”.

The farm was once home to the Stones, a family group led by Old Man Stone, the worst of the lot, “a dirty old tyrant” as one character has it, a man said to “have kids who were his grankids” and who “ought to have had nails pounded into his eyes and a blunt fence post hammered up his asshole.” Yep, he’s that bad. And even though he died a long time ago, his evil still permeates.

The story’s narrator is new to the area, and all this is related to him by Badger, a local man foolish enough to have gone hunting on the Stones’ property when he was a kid. “My dog,” he tells the narrator one day when they meet at Stone City “All I got in the world, ain’cha, Lady?”

Badger will come to wish he’d kept this thought to himself, at least while he was on this land, because somewhere in those cellar holes are the lingering spirits of the Stone family. And they are listening.

First published in Grey’s Sporting Journal, 1979, collected in Heart Songs and Other Stories, Scribner, 1988

‘Prey’ by Richard Matheson

Okay, so we’re edging into genre territory now, but at this point I think we need some light relief and this story, well, it’s hilarious.

It’s the story of Amelia, a young woman who one day brings home a package. Inside is a wooden box resembling a casket. Inside the box is “the ugliest doll she’d ever seen. Seven inches long and carved from wood, it had a skeletal body and oversized head. Its expression was maniacally fierce, its pointed teeth completely bared, its glaring eyes protuberant.” Also in the box is a tiny scroll which states “This is He Who Kills. He is a deadly hunter.” We, the readers, already know that this isn’t going to end well.

The doll, we’re told, is a rare Funi fetish doll which Amelia found in a curio shop, which is supposed to have the spirit of a Zuni hunter trapped inside, and which is a present for her boyfriend, Arthur. Instead of casting the damn thing out of a window, which is what anyone in their right mind would do, Amelia sets in on the coffee table and heads off for a bath. Once she’s gone, though, the doll falls off the table and the silver chain wrapped around it which prevents the spirit trapped inside it from escaping, slides off. Ah, shit. Here we go.

When she returns from her bath, Amelia is unable to find the doll. She goes into the kitchen and finds that a small knife is missing from the knife rack. We know what happens next. She’s pursued about the flat by the doll, which is intent on stabbing her to death. Even when she locks herself in the bathroom, she sees the knife blade being jabbed beneath the door. My favourite moment in the story comes when Amelia traps the doll inside a suitcase – this thing is only seven inches long, remember – and we breathe a sigh of relief and think she might survive this ordeal after all. But uh oh she hears a cutting sound and when she looks at the suitcase she sees a knife blade “protruding from the suitcase wall, moving up and down in a sawing motion.”

I wonder if James Cameron read this story before he wrote his script for The Terminator. Remember Kyle Reece’s line in the film? “Listen, and understand. That Terminator is out there, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop… EVER, until you are dead!”

First published in Playboy, April 1969, and collected in Shock Waves, Dell, 1970 and a couple of Matheson Collecteds; also widely anthologised, including in American Fantastic Tales: Terror & The Uncanny From Poe to Now, Library of America, 2009