‘Hilda’s Wedding’ by Elizabeth Jolley

(i) Short story as something that is fabulous and broken:

“Smallhouse and Gordonpole polished the whole hospital every night. It took them all night. They emptied the bins too and they were allowed to smoke which was fair enough when you saw what was sometimes thrown away from the operating theatres.”

Elizabeth Jolley was an English expatriate Australian writer who was originally a nurse, and said about both professions that they “require a gaze which is searching and undisturbedly compassionate and yet detached.” As both nurse and writer (and English expat) I could not agree more. It’s not always a comfortable position to be in — the inside outsider — but it’s inescapable. It’s probably why I chose nursing when I realised I didn’t have the balls to commit to writing.

‘Hilda’s Wedding’ is classic Jolley: innocent yet biting, playful yet profound, mired in the everyday grime of common reality even as it spins off into a deeply weird and quintessentially Australian gothic surreal. Night Sister Bean (a recurring character in Jolley’s stories) is, everyone says, a witch. “‘Always stand between Sister Bean and the drip,’ they said.” Our unnamed narrator decides to test this hypothesis, but then the story steps sideways into poor simple “always pregnant” Hilda’s lack of a suitable husband, and while Sister Bean is away recovering after her own surgery, the hospital’s night crew stage an impromptu wedding. The Casualty Porter is pressed into service as the bridegroom, Smallhouse volunteers to give Hilda away, and Feegan the Warden conducts the ceremony, at one point mixing up the marriage liturgy with the funeral service to hilariously screwball effect. The kitchen boy gets rather left out, and is seen crying near the end, though the whole wedding was a play-act (we assume). And then suddenly in the last paragraph we’re back to Night Sister Bean and the possibility of karmic retribution for her infusion witchery. It’s such an oddball rattle-bag of a story, and entirely loveable, not least for its spot-on description of a large hospital:

“One block for hearts and one for chests, a block for bladders and one for bowels, a block for bones, one for women’s troubles, one for mental disorders, one for births and all for deaths.”

Written in 1976 and set easily 20 years earlier, it’s still a horribly accurate picture of where I work now.

First published in Looselicks, 1976. Collected in Woman in a Lampshade, Penguin Books Australia, 1983

‘Inescapable’ by Peach Momoko

(j) Short story as über-commercialised graphic design:

I cannot quote this story in any useful way, because it is wordless, and because it sits in its own unique place in the vast agglomeration of story and lore and canon that is the Star Wars universe. But after forty-five years and counting, that universe is now so utterly supersaturated into popular culture — is now literally inescapable — that it would be near impossible to find anyone who had so little idea of the storied elements of the Force, the Dark Side, and Darth Vader that they wouldn’t be able to understand and be moved by the vast terror and all-too-briefly grasped relief told in these twenty-four eye-poppingly gorgeous panels.

Honestly, I am fully Star-Wars-ed out. Glutted, satiated, full to puking. I don’t care how good the reviews are for Andor and Ahsoka, I’m done. But I have read this short graphic tale countless times now, and it will not leave me alone, because it’s a horror story, full-bore hellscape horror, with Vader as the demon at its heart, and what the hell is that doing in the Star Wars universe? The fact of it, and the awful meta-irony of the title, never mind the stare-at-it-for-hours monochrome-and-blood-red beauty of the art… it’s unsettling, and disruptive, and did I mention it’s gorgeous to look at? Graphic design as a terrifyingly wordless scream of a short story.

First published in Star Wars: Darth Vader – Black, White & Red #1, Marvel, April 2023

‘John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist’ by Rob Doyle

(k) Short story as obscenely unfiltered literary criticism:

On the Holyhead-to-Dublin ferry, a man called Rob — who may be Doyle, but probably isn’t, but possibly is, either way he’s the narrator, although he barely says anything himself — this man called Rob listens to his friend John-Paul Finnegan as Finnegan sets forth his theory of Irish literature, or more accurate to say his theory of what the Irish people, those who’ve stayed in Ireland at least, think of literature. Which is not a lot, reckons Finnegan, and spends pretty much the entire story bewailing this sorry state of affairs to friend Rob, and at one point to most of the rest of the ferry’s understandably terrified passengers, in a long, repetitive, looping, and utterly foul-mouthed rant. Finnegan uses Ulysses as his case in point, also coincidentally the name of the ferry on which the pair are embarked for home, and look, you could probably make a game attempt to divide Doyle’s story up into Joycean-Homeric chapters if you thought that would be fun, but, again, as previously mentioned, it consists mostly of Finnegan ranting to Rob and saying fuck a lot, so maybe not. The thing is, it’s laugh-out-loud hilarious even as it’s pitch-perfect bleak and sad about the realities of even attempting literature, never mind failing at it, and it’s spot-on about Joyce and his legacy even as Finnegan is furiously wrong-headed about the whole damned thing, and I think of all the current crop of genius Irish writers it’s Rob Doyle who is the true heir of Flann O’Brien, and so there.

Collected in This is the Ritual, Bloomsbury/The Lilliput Press, 2016. Available to read online here

‘A History of Violence’ by Olivia Laing

(l) Short story as art criticism, or possibly the other way around:

Olivia Laing is just about my favourite writer at the moment; reading The Lonely Cityand To the River have played a significant part in keeping me sane over the last two years. So maybe favourite’s not the right word. She is my essential writer at the moment. From 2015 to 2019 she wrote a regular art-cultural criticism column for friezemagazine, and the best of them are weird tales easily the equal of anything else I’ve chosen here. ‘A History of Violence’ begins with a man at a London party coming up to her and just starting to talk:

“My dad was Irish, he said, he worked on the building sites. London was built by the Irish. They all died young. No compensation. It was the asbestos, it got into their lungs.”

Which makes zero literal sense if you actually think about it, but is culturally true. Or, as Laing goes on to elucidate, is capitally true. “Everything is seeping to the surface now,” she writes, “the slow or hidden violence of late capitalism… You can be an accidental connoisseur of snuff movies simply by scrolling through Twitter with a breakfast cup of tea.” In the space of barely three pages she glides through, or rather connects up, the fate of Irish navvies, the tar pit of social media, contemporary French literature, and the blood-soaked art of Ana Mendieta — then takes a final vertiginous step into Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and how “Eichmann’s trial testimony was marked by a constant refrain of looking away.” Except from one thing: a burial ditch from which the blood would not stop seeping.

Eichmann refused to look so he could pretend he hadn’t seen. Laing’s humane genius is to look at everything, to bear witness, and to bring back the stories of what she hasseen.

First published in frieze, June, 2018 and available to read here. Collected in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Picador, 2020

Introduction

A Personal Anthology offers no guidelines on what exactly constitutes a short story for the purposes of constructing your ideal anthology. This is as it should be, because sometimes it seems like there are as many definitions of the short story as there are practitioners of the art form.

For my own part, I have defined a short story as this: a self-contained piece of prose of less than approximately 40,000 words in length. This is quite a bit longer than most would allow, but I cannot stand the strange and slightly dismissive term ‘novella’ (the less said about ‘novelette’ the better) which, for me, tends to mean that the author either does not have the confidence to declare his or her work a novel, or that they are slightly ashamed of having written a short story.

I have chosen these stories based on personal preference and ordered them from the earliest publication (1950) to the last (2022). That I think you should read them all goes without saying, but you should also read the collections of which they are a part. Not one of these represents all a given author has to offer a reader.

I hope you enjoy the stories when you do read them, and I hope they lead to the discovery of more beauty than you expected to find in such short pieces of work. There are stories below which do more with half a page than some novels do with 500. This is the wonder of the short story. The TARDISes of art, they’re always just so much bigger on the inside.

‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury

“The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down.”

I’m a big believer in the idea that science fiction is made for the short story form, and the short story form is made for science fiction. The short story gives sci-fi the space it needs to develop a concept without allowing so much time that the concept begins to wear thin. The best examples stay with you, occurring to you now and again with a frequency disproportionate to their length. ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury, is a particularly nice example.

The premise is simple enough. Far in the future, what we would now call a ‘smart-house’ (albeit one which runs on “memory tapes” rather than digital information in a nice example of zeerust) continues its automatic functions like making breakfast, running baths, and putting on video projections to entertain the children, despite the fact that it seems to be entirely empty. We learn, with brutal simplicity, that there has been some sort of explosion which has killed the family who lived there, leaving only their silhouettes outlined in the paint of the house’s walls as evidence they ever existed at all.

The story is effective in large part because of its poignancy. There’s something plaintive about the house as it continues to work through its endless and repetitive list of tasks and, when a sudden house fire starts, it feels to the reader almost like reading a description of the burning of a living thing. The house screams, it tries “to save itself”, but to no avail. In the end all that is left is a single wall repeating the date over and over and over again. The house’s pointless and repetitive life and death mirrors our own as it speaks to nobody, performs tasks for ungrateful ghosts, and eventually dies in obscurity.

Throughout, Bradbury resists the urge to give the reader too much background for his scenario. In this case, it makes the reader feel like an explorer finding the empty world too late to avert the disaster. A wonderful story.

First published in Collier’s Weekly, May 1950. Collected in The Martian Chronicles, Doubleday, 1950

‘Going to Meet the Man’ by James Baldwin

“His mother got in and closed the door and the car began to move. Not until then did he ask, ‘Where are we going. Are we going on a picnic?’

He had a feeling that he knew where they were going, but he was not sure.

‘That’s right,’ his father said, ‘we’re going on a picnic. You won’t ever forget this picnic -!’”

Baldwin is more known for his novels than his short stories, publishing only one short collection in his lifetime. But this, the title story of that collection, does as much as longer works like Another Country (1962) with a fraction of the page-count.

The story begins with Jesse, a white deputy sheriff in a southern town, unable to get an erection in bed with his wife. Giving up, he lies down and begins to remember being eight years old and going on an outing with his mother and his father. At first, it seems to be a pleasant trip, maybe a picnic (food is mentioned), but it quickly becomes clear that it is something more sinister.

The family arrive to watch with their friends as a black man is tied by chains above a fire. The chains are lowered and raised, and the fire allowed to eat away at his flesh. While the white families watch, he is castrated and his penis falls into the flames.

Eventually the body is released, and the white families settle down to eat their picnic and spend time together as the body of the man smoulders on the ground, the proximity of racism to the lives of white Americans bluntly and unforgettably depicted. The endurance of the racism is further emphasised by the horrific final scene as Jesse comes back to the present and finds he is finally able to achieve an erection and have sex with his wife.

Baldwin is always skilled at helping the reader to empathise with his characters, and this talent is stretched to its limit in this story, finally breaking as the cold realisation of just what allowed Jesse to overcome his impotence becomes clear. Bleak and not to be missed.

First published in Going to Meet the Man, Dial Press, 1965

‘The Collector of Treasures’ by Bessie Head

“And what may your crime be?”

“I have killed my husband.”

“We are all here for the same crime,” Kebonye said, then with her cynical smile asked: “Do you feel any sorrow about the crime?”

“Not really,” the other woman replied.

“How did you kill him?”

“I cut off all his special parts with a knife,” Dikeledi said.

“I did it with a razor,” Kebonye said. She sighed and added: “I have had a troubled life.”

South African writer Bessie Head chronicled the slow development and change of the South African state as it began to reckon with the wounds of colonialism and apartheid. She had a particular interest in the experience of women, often forgotten in the national story, with the changes that occurred in society around them.

In ‘The Collector of Treasures’, Dikeledi Mokobi has been sentenced to life in prison for killing her husband, with several other women in jail for the same crime. Her story echoes that of so many women around the world. She married one bad man, Garesego, to escape another, her uncle, and lived to regret the decision after he disappeared, having developed a taste for the finer things in life after wage rises resulting from South African independence, leaving her to raise her children on her own.

Dikeledi manages to raise her children by herself, striking up a friendship with a neighbour, Paul, and his wife. When her oldest son goes to secondary school and she finds herself short of money for the fees, she reaches out to her erstwhile husband to ask for help and is refused and accused of being Paul’s lover. Paul confronts her husband but he continues to spread the rumour of her being Paul’s lover about the town.

When, abandoned by his own concubine, Garesego decides to come back and demands Dikeledi welcome him back to her home, it is one humiliation too many. Dikeledi methodically sharpens her knife, and castrates him, killing him.

This is the second castration in this list, but while the one in Baldwin’s story is the ultimate expression of racism and dehumanisation, in Head’s story it is a liberation. Despite the fact Dikeledi ends up in jail, she is freer than she has ever been.

First published in The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, Heinemann, 1977

‘Acid’ by James Kelman

“Sorry Hughie, he said. And then ducked the young man below the surface.”

So-called “flash-fiction” is a very popular form at the moment. The problem is, most people writing it don’t really have the skill to do it well. If you’re a writer and you want to learn, there’s only one author you have to look to and that’s James Kelman. He is the master of telling the story of a life, or a dozen lives, in a single breath. ‘Acid’ is a prime example.

The story depicts an industrial accident, a young man falling in a vat of acid in a factory. The other men stand around him, horrified, but one of the braver of them, the young man’s father in fact, pushes him down under the surface with a pole. This act of apparent cruelty is explained neatly as Kelman tells us what we already know deep down; that the acid has eaten the boy’s body away and that he is, in fact, already dead.

The symbolism of manual work eating away at the bodies here is clear, especially from an author like Kelman who has spent so much of his life campaigning for the rights of those harmed and killed by asbestos, but so is the strangely touching moment of a father helping his son pass in dignity. I’ve read the story dozens of times and it amazes me every time I do.

First published in Not Not While the Giro, Polygon, 1983

‘In the Hills, the Cities’ by Clive Barker

“Some were yoked on their neighbours’ shoulders, straddling them like boys playing at horseback riding. Others were locked arm in arm, knitted together with threads or rope in a wall of muscle and bone. Yet others were trussed in a ball, with their heads tucked between their knees. All were in some way connected up with their fellows, tied together as though in some insane collective bondage game,”

This is a horror story which, like so many others, uses the genre’s ability to play with our own anxieties and discomforts and to transcend the low reputation of the cheap scare. Barker’s Books of Blood are the place to go to find such stories. He changed the game of British horror, replacing the largely sexless stories of action heroes saving the day in books like James Herbert’s The Rats to depict humanity, and particularly the body, in its visceral glory.

Like so many Twilight Zone episodes, this story begins with two people driving empty, unfamiliar roads, in this case the Yugoslavian countryside. The two men are lovers who have grown tired of each other, and their mutual developing dislike simmers under the surface of the first part of the story. Meanwhile, in the hills, two cities are binding their citizens together to create monstrous giants to fight each other.

So far, so ridiculous, but when the men find the mutilated survivors of the losing city, the story takes on a frightening and dark tone which persists to the end so that the final scenes of one of the protagonists hitching a ride on the monstrous leg of a giant made of intertwined people seems a great deal less laughable than it might do otherwise. Making the ludicrous plausible and frightening has always been one of Clive Barker’s particular skills and he does this to great effect here.

It’s a story which doesn’t reward much analysis, but that’s okay. Sometimes things are just disturbing and that’s all they need to be.

First published in Books of Blood, Volume 1, Sphere Books, 1984

‘Dedication’ by Stephen King

“Martha […] turned unhesitatingly to the dedication page, where Darcy read: ‘This book is dedicated to my mother, Martha Rosewall. Mom, I couldn’t have done it without you.’ Below the printed dedication was added in a thin, sloping, and somehow old-fashioned script: ‘And that’s no lie. Love you mom! Pete.’”

Stephen King doesn’t get enough credit and that’s a hill I’ll die on. ‘Well, that’s stupid, but at least you’ll be dead,’ you may think, and that’s fair enough but the fact remains all the same. King has plenty of money, and maybe that’s a good enough substitute for not having the respect for his literary skills that he deserves, but his work, and in particular his short stories, are a treasure trove of his talent, rare and worn lightly, to draw the reader in with a simple premise and leave them wanting more.

I could have chosen one of any number of stories by him to include in this list, including stories like ‘The Man in the Black Suit’, which won the O. Henry Award in 1996, or his New Yorker story ‘All That You Love Will Be Carried Away’, but I wanted to pick one which more accurately represented King’s work, rather than what he thought (correctly) literary gatekeepers wanted to read.

‘Dedication’, like a lot of the other stories on this list, is a nasty little piece of work, and all the better for it. Against the backdrop of the disturbing plot, the underlying themes of the work – King’s deep respect for his mother’s sacrifices on his behalf, his constant disgust at the racism and classism of America – show up all the more clearly.

Martha Rosewater, a hotel housekeeper, has just received a signed copy of her son’s first book, which is dedicated to her. Over celebratory drinks with her friend Darcy, she explains that she is more responsible for her son’s literary talent than may be supposed. She describes how, when pregnant with her son, she took visited a “bruja” witch woman who told her that her baby’s father, a thug who manages to get himself killed during an attempted robbery, is, in fact, not her son’s “natural” father. His “natural” father is a racist but brilliant writer named Peter Jeffries who regularly visits the hotel at which she works.

Martha must cement the mystical bond between her son and Jeffries in order that her son can take after the genius writer instead of the would-be armed robber, and how she does so is hard to forget. Every morning, when she cleans Jeffries’ hotel room, she scoops up his drying semen from the bed and eats it.

In the hands of some writers, the above image would overpower anything else the short story had to say but, believe it or not, “Dedication” is a genuinely touching story about a devoted mother who is fiercely proud of her writer son and who, like King’s mother, has worked in low-paid jobs all her life in order to raise him by herself. As Grady Hendrix notes, King tends to be unusually self-effacing for one so rich and successful, and is quick to give his wife and mother credit for his career. ‘Dedication’ is one of many examples of this and is a beautifully written story to boot.

First published in Dark Visions 5, Dark Harvest,1988. Collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, Viking, 1993

‘The Hanging Judge’ by Muriel Spark

“‘Can it be possible,’ speculated this reporter, ‘that Judge Stanley is beginning to doubt the wisdom of capital punishment?’

Sullivan Stanley was not beginning to doubt anything of the kind. The reason for the peculiar expression on his face as he passed judgement on that autumn afternoon in 1947 was that, for the first time in some years, he had an erection as he spoke; he had an involuntary orgasm.”

Perhaps because her best-known work is the (deceptively) straightforward The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), readers are sometimes unaware of what an unrelentingly strange writer Muriel Spark is. Her novels take place in a kind of strange, heightened reality which seems at times to be our own and at other to be entirely distinct from what we know about the ways people interact and talk to each other. Her short fiction is no different.

‘The Hanging Judge’ is one of my favourites of hers in part because it’s so funny. The story depicts Judge Sullivan Stanley, well known for sending offenders to be hanged if necessary and a big believer in the value of capital punishment. However, reporters and onlookers notice a pained expression as he sentences a murderer named George Forrester, who killed overweight women he picked up in the Rosemary Lawns Hotel, to death. His expression comes not, as the press speculates, from the guilt of taking a man’s life, but from the spontaneous orgasm that he, so long impotent and flaccid that a local prostitute dubs him “the hanging judge”, experiences upon doing so.

The rest of the story details his long-held confusion at the meaning of that orgasm as he moves through his professional life and eventually retires to the very hotel from which the murderer in question would pick up his victims. Is he, he wonders, a sexual deviant, or can his arousal be explained in some other way. Spark provides us with no answers and, as with the Alasdair Gray story I will discuss later, the reader is left to wonder whether she is just tweaking our nose or whether there really is something deeper going on. 

First published in The New Yorker, 1994. Collected in The Complete Short Stories, Canongate, 2011

‘Imaginary Friends’ by Laura Hird

“Mr Paterson was like no other adult she’d ever met. She’d only known him for three Wednesdays but already they were the best of friends.”

Laura Hird has only published four books and each one of them is outstanding. Nail and Other Stories, in which this story first appears, is a fantastic collection which shrugs off the hit-and-miss reputation of short story collections by not having a single bad one in it. Hird has a particular talent for downbeat stories in which the protagonist is barely aware of the horrors happening around them. ‘Imaginary Friends’is just such a story.

The Mr Paterson of the above quotation is the young, unnamed protagonist’s piano teacher. To the protagonist he is the best kind of adult. He is ostensibly an amateur magician, has a big fluffy dog with the improbable name of Caliban (matching Mr Paterson’s magician persona), and is much happier messing around and playing touchy-feely games with the protagonist than he is with teaching her the piano.

For the reader, the hairs on the back of the neck are already raised and it’s no surprise at all when one of Mr Paterson’s magic tricks, in the form of a strange whiteish paste he produces in the bathroom, is in fact the beginnings of abuse.

Like all imaginary friends, Mr Paterson eventually disappears from the scene (evidently forced out by concerned locals or the police) but, in an innocent and terrible reflection of the enduring nature of child abuse, his presence and secrets remain with the protagonist forever. A chilling story brilliantly executed.

First published in Chapman, 1996. Collected in Nail and Other Stories, Rebel Inc, 1997

‘Moral Philosophy Exam’ by Alasdair Gray

“The horses were humanely killed because nobody else wanted them.”

This story, by Glasgow legend Alasdair Gray, is one I’ve never been sure what to do with or how to take. It is this that makes it so compelling.

Insofar as the story is a story, it tells of a TV programme in the vein of Rogue Traderswhich investigates small businessmen. Those, as Gray caustically remarks, who are too small to “afford to bring strong libel actions”. The programme investigates a horse breeder who left his animals poorly fed and badly stabled. The man is charged with cruelty to animals, jailed, and his horses are seized. They are then killed because there was nowhere else for them to go.

In the hands of another writer, this would be a small ironic story worth a wry smile but not much more. What Gray does, however, is he challenges the reader at the end with a short philosophical quiz, asking who cared most for the horses, who gained the most from the events, and who lost the most (surely the horse). The story is typical of his tongue-in-cheek style. You’re never quite sure whether he has taught you a lesson, or whether he is just winding you up. I always lean towards both being true.  

First published in The Ends of Our Tethers, Canongate, 2003