‘Whoever Was Using This Bed’ by Raymond Carver

In the introduction to Best British Short Stories 2022, Nicholas Royle says of The Stories of Raymond Carver, “Wherever I open the Carver and read an opening line, I want to read on”. ‘Whoever Was Using This Bed’ starts, “The call comes in the middle of the night, three in the morning, and it nearly scares us to death.” Disturbed by a strange phone call, Jack and his wife Iris stay up smoking and talking, “the kind of talk that could only take place at five in the morning.” They reveal their health concerns and discuss “a life-and-death thing” with a sense of intimacy and understanding and trust, which is brilliantly undercut by the chilling punchline.

First published in The New Yorker, April 1986, and available online for subscribers here. Collected in Where I’m Calling From, Harvill Press, 1995

‘A Temporary Matter’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

Shoba and Shukumar are notified that the electricity in their quiet tree-lined street will be cut off for five evenings, so that a line can be fixed. Having suffered a tragedy that has pulled them apart, the power cut draws them together again: “Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again.” They play a “game”: they sit in the dark, exchanging confessions. I love the details in this story – Shukumar being borne away to a conference in a “cavernous” cab; Shoba correcting typographical errors with an “arsenal of coloured pencils”, “behind her barricade of files”; Shukumar’s dissertation on agrarian revolts in India – their precision anticipating the awful injury inflicted on the final night.

First published in The New Yorker, April 1998, and available online for subscribers here. Collected in Interpreter of Maladies, Flamingo, 1999

‘Cranley Meadows’ by James Lasdun

In 2010, James Lasdun very kindly provided a fantastic cover quote for my first Nightjar Press story, and I read his new collection, It’s Beginning to Hurt. I still remember the impact of the two-page title story, but the one I’m including here is ‘Cranley Meadows’. Lev Rosenberg, a fifty-four-year-old physicist, has lost his college job and has been looking for work: “What will I do? Keep looking, I suppose.” He still frequents the college observatory. On “a chilly, glittering October night… Lev inched the telescope across the heavens”. He wants to show Saturn to his wife Bryony, who was once his student but whose interest in astronomy has waned. “You seem as if you have something you want to tell me,” he says. It’s a devastating story but it’s the gentle tone, Lev’s kindness and understanding, that makes it really heartbreaking.

First published in The Times Literary Supplement, 1999. Collected in It’s Beginning to Hurt, Jonathan Cape, 2009

‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

I kept seeing love for Ogawa’s collection, Revenge, and now I know why. The opening story takes place on “a beautiful Sunday”, in a neat, clean, vanilla-scented bakery. A woman sits waiting to order two strawberry shortcakes for her six-year-old son’s birthday, as she does every year. In the tidy kitchen, a girl is crying, but the woman “could hear nothing, not a word, not a sound.” With a powerful sense of stillness and silence and inaction, this story is haunted by the tragedy, the truly terrible thing, at its heart. The stories in the collection are linked, each one touching on and enriching another to make a potent and spellbinding whole.

Originally published in Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai, 1998. Published in English in Zoetrope: All Story, Winter 2011/2012. Collected in Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, Picador, 2013

‘Jutland’ by Lucie McKnight Hardy

Ana and Eric are moving to Jutland with their two young children. Eric intends to concentrate on his art, while Ana is struggling to revive her writing: “Baby brain, they’d called it.” The story is threaded with perfect, pointed details: the tiny village “with nothing but a narrow road and a low stone wall to keep the sea at bay”; the “cold, lucid light” which they have come for (or which, tripping in over the North Sea, is coming for them); the church Ana “knows that she will visit”. The story begins with the grace of birds, the hollow bones that allow them to fly. “It also makes their bones more fragile and susceptible to damage. You can’t have it all, she thinks.” The contrasting heaviness in the final image is truly nightmarish.

First published as a chapbook, Nightjar Press, spring 2019. Collected in Dead Relatives, Dead Ink, 2021

‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’ by Lucy Caldwell

Caldwell said of this story, “I wanted to write about the distance between where we come from and where we end up; between who we think we are and who we turn out to be. Between what we dream, and what we do”. The narrator, travelling home from her cousin’s funeral, taking a night flight with her toddler, has an existential crisis at “thirty-however many thousand feet… hurtling onwards at hundreds of miles an hour”. The man sitting next to her is kind and helpful and they bond.

“You think of the books that you and your cousin loved, the ones with multiple pathways through, and dozens of endings. You’d read them lying on your stomachs, heads pressed together, holding various pages, options, open. You’d always be careful, trying to make it through, and she’d choose the most reckless routes possible, just to see what might happen.”

I saved the link to this BBC National Short Story Award winner, and next to it I’ve written, “stunning; exactly the sort of story I wish I could write”.

First published in Intimacies, Faber & Faber, 2021. Available online on the Guardian website here, and audio via the BBC

‘Special Meal’ by Josh Malerman

Having started with Shirley Jackson, I’ll finish with a choice from an anthology of Jackson-inspired stories, edited by Ellen Datlow. In ‘Special Meal’, Amy and her family are having dinner and awaiting visitors, men who will test her to see if she knows maths. “How many of us were there? I don’t want to say.” Knowing maths is not allowed: people can be turned in and taken away for knowing numbers, for understanding counting and amounts. Time is a grey area; there is anxious consideration of what is allowed: “Is it okay to know what late means?” “He was older than Dad. Is that math?” I love this story’s sense of pleasure, and its poignancy. Amy is eating her favourite dinner: “It was like a birthday dinner but of course I couldn’t be sure when my birthday was.” She has a favourite place, between the kitchen and the living room, “where a wall might’ve been, but wasn’t.” And Amy loves maths.

First published in When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson, Titan Books, 2021

‘Thomas, Terence and the Snow’ by The Rev. W. Awdry

Chosen by David Collard

The third of four stories making up Tank Engine Thomas Again by the Reverend W. Awdry, it was originally published by Edmund Ward in 1949 as the fourth volume in the celebrated Railway Series. My 1963 copy (First UK Edition, Eighth Impression, January 1963. Oblong duodecimo. Publisher’s original pale blue with vignette and title to front cover in red) is the first book I owned that wasn’t made of flannel, and it’s been read to shreds. In the story Thomas meets a friendly red tractor named Terence who explains that his ‘ugly’ caterpillar tracks mean that he doesn’t need rails and can go anywhere. Thomas, both uppity and reactionary (like all the other engines in the Fat Controller’s fleet) replies ‘I don’t want to go “anywhere”. I like my rails, thank you!’

There’s a heavy snowfall and Thomas is fitted with a Snow Plough which is so uncomfortable that he loses his temper and damages it. Next morning an unsnowploughed Thomas sets off along the branch line with his coaches Annie and Clarabel and, emerging at speed from a tunnel, hits a snow drift – ‘Cinders and ashes! I’m stuck!’ Terence comes chugging to the rescue and a humbled Thomas promises his driver that he’ll be more sensible in the future.

The story has everything – conflict and resolution, mild peril, a friendship, hubris, understanding, resolution and closure. What more do you want?

But Awdry’s 26 canonical books are problematic. I’m reminded of the 1930s poet and film-maker Humphrey Jennings who once observed that, reading from front to back, a steam locomotive’s chimney, dome and cab (see any image of Thomas) clearly represent a Marxist class progression from the top hat of the ruling classes and the bowler of the bourgeoisie to the flat cap of the proletariat.

Awdry’s steam engines are exclusively blokeish – Gordon, James, Edward, Henry, Percy, Toby etc – and speak and behave like minor public school boys, while the carriages (Annie, Clarabel, Henrietta etc.) are female and prone to sobbing and wailing when things go wrong; the trucks are scruffy, gruff, mutinous and plebeian.

First published in Tank Engine Thomas Again, Edmund Ward, 1949. See and hear the complete story, with lovely illustrations by C. Reginald Dalby here. * David Collard’s Multiple Joyce: 100 Short Essays About James Joyce’s Cultural Legacy is published by Sagging Meniscus Press. You can read his other contributions to A Personal Anthology here.

‘One Christmas’ by Truman Capote

Chosen by JL Bogenschneider

Better known is Capote’s ‘A Christmas Memory’, but dues should be given to this underrated sequel (actually a second one, following ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’) in which we’re reunited with Buddy – for which, read young Truman – who’s uprooted from his home in Alabama in order to spend Christmas with his father in New Orleans. Neither of Buddy’s parents have previously taken an interest in him: he lives with relatives and his best friend is an elderly, guileless cousin called Sook.

Buddy is an innocent who still believes in Santa, thanks to Sook. He doesn’t want to visit his father, but Sook asserts that it’s the Lord’s will and also that Buddy might see snow. It’s the latter that convinces him, but the revelation – broken on arrival – that it never snows in New Orleans is the first of many disappointments that unfold over the season.

The story flies before descending and crashing hard, but it’s worth it for the sweet coda, a single, ingenuous, unbroken line that – given all that’s gone before – is equal to the sad-beauty of ‘A Christmas Memory’’s As for me I could leave the world with today in my eyes…

Read them both together.

Originally published in 1983 as a gift book. Collected variously, including in The Complete Stories of Truman Capote, Penguin, 2005 and A Christmas Memory, Penguin, 2020. * JL Bogenschneider is a writer of short fiction, with work in a number of print and online journals. Their chapbook, Fears for The Near Future, is available from Neon Books. You can read their other contributions to A Personal Anthology here.

‘The Werewolf’ by Angela Carter

Chosen by Andrew McDonnell

Is there a more wintery book than The Bloody Chamber? You can almost feel the hot breath from the beasts that drip blood across the snow as you flick the pages. There are many stories to choose from: the toxic masculinity of Mr Lyon, or the wolves circling in the snow in ‘The Company of Wolves’. For me, the one I come back to again and again is ‘The Werewolf’.

It’s an unusual story: barely 2,000 words long, yet split into two parts of equal length. The first part tells of a Northern country where cold people have cold hearts, and then there’s a switch to a narrative in the second part. We hear of a child taking treats to Grandma’s house on the other side of the forest. On her way she meets a wolf, and in self-defence chops off one of the wolf’s paws using her father’s hunting knife. It flees back into the forest. When she reaches Grandma’s house, she finds the old woman feverish. She’s also missing a hand. When the child pulls the wolf’s paw out of her pocket it has become a human hand. The girl calls for the neighbours who chase the old woman out into the snow and beat her to death. The girl inherits Grandma’s house and lives happily ever after.

Carter’s genius lies in her acute understanding of our complacency as readers. During the first part, the narrator addresses us in the second person, saying how these superstitious people are so unlike ‘you and I’, and distancing us from the storyworld. She draws a gross dichotomy between them and us. This is the clever part. When I have taught this story, students always transpose Little Red Riding Hood onto the second part. They never pause to think through the holes in the child’s story, nor to ask how come these ‘superstitious’ people essentially offer the child the keys to her grandmother’s house without question. The manner in which folk and fairy tales shape our consciousness is a currency Carter exploits hilariously. So, we are in the end, no different from the people in that Northern country. We are as superstitious and naive. Happy Christmas.

First published in The Bloody Chamber and other Stories, Gollancz, 1979. Also available in Burning Your Boats, Carter’s collected stories, Chatto & Windus, 1995. * Andrew McDonnell is a published writer of poetry and short fiction. His first collection of poems, The Somnambulist Cookbook, was published in by Salt in 2019.

‘Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor’ by John Cheever

Chosen by Trahearne Falvey

Like Dickens, John Cheever understood that Christmastime brings into focus the difference between the haves and have-nots, and at first this story seems to be a Carol-esque tale of employer generosity. Unlike Dickens, though, Cheever was a bitter alcoholic. His protagonist Charlie, an elevator operator and a hero to us all, sort-of-swindles his way into a multitude of roast dinners, and gets so messy-drunk at work he causes a rich woman to have a panic attack. In place of cheesy moralising, there are loads of martinis, lines like “I just scrambled myself some eggs and sat there and cried”, and a healthy dose of cynicism concerning the motives of philanthropists.

Cheever’s a kind of elevator operator himself, continually pulling the floor away so that by the end we don’t really know where we are or what’s happened, only that the third Old-Fashioned was, perhaps, too much fun. Read while hungover on Boxing Day, with a Bloody Mary.

First published in The New Yorker, 24 December 1949, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Vintage Cheever: Collected Stories, 2010. * Trahearne Falvey is a writer and teacher in South London. His stories have won the Aurora Prize and the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize, and his criticism has appeared in 3AM Magazine, Review31 and Lunate, among other places.

‘The Pedersen Kid’ by William H. Gass

Chosen by Daniel Davis Wood

William H. Gass once said he wrote ‘The Pedersen Kid’ “to entertain a toothache”. But his casual levity is a sleight-of-hand, a chicanery that betrays none of the sinister things at the heart of the story. Set in the American Midwest in deepest winter, in a rural clearing distinguished only by a pair of farmhouses, what makes ‘The Pedersen Kid’ so sinister is its smothering snow. The snow abducts and oppresses. It doesn’t just drift or fall; it “curl[s] around” and “crawl[s] over” bodies, and it obliterates all features of the terrain until “[t]here wasn’t anything around. There wasn’t anything: a tree or a stick or a rock whipped bare”. The snow, here, is an impersonal force of nature whose power is subtraction, the erasure of the world, and it becomes all the more sinister when the few inhabitants of this wasteland abuse it for personal ends—to conceal their secrets, their ill intentions, and their whereabouts.

Usually with Gass, the artistry lies in the exuberance of the language. In ‘The Pedersen Kid’, though, it’s more to be found in the quite atypical tone: muted, indeed anodyne, in a way that suggests cold calculations behind each and every line. There’s a good deal of action, appropriately seasonal—a child returns from the dead (maybe) to offer a sort of salvation—but what abides, finally, is the chilling composure of the sentences with which Gass takes the measure of human souls as denuded as the snowscape around them.

First published in MSS, 1961. Collected in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, HarperCollins, 1968, and The William H Gass Reader, Penguin Random House, 2018. * Daniel Davis Wood is a writer based in Scotland. His début novel, Blood and Bone, won the Viva La Novella Prize in his native Australia, and his follow-up, At the Edge of the Solid World, was published to acclaim in 2020. He also runs Splice (www.ThisIsSplice.co.uk), a small press focusing on adventurous, unconventional literature. You can read his other contributions to A Personal Anthology here.

‘Fog’ by Anna Kavan

Chosen by Nicholas Royle

Anna Kavan’s best-known work, Ice, is a bleak midwinter wonderland of a novel. Her story, ‘Fog’, may be short on snow and ice, but there’s thick fog and it’s so cold in the police interview room that the officer’s breath condenses in the air. An unnamed narrator tells us she always liked to drive fast, but she wasn’t driving fast that day, partly because it was foggy and partly because she felt ‘calmly contented and peaceful’. She adds: ‘The feeling was injected, of course.’ The narrator, like her creator, is addicted to heroin. The rhythm of the windscreen wipers has a further tranquillising effect, making her feel she’s driving in her sleep. The fog adds to the dreamlike atmosphere, the world looking ‘vague and unreal’, so that when she drives past a group of long-haired teenagers, they look as if they are wearing Japanese dragon-masks. They remind her of the ‘subhuman nightmare mask-faces’ in an Ensor painting. Since they are not real, then, what would it matter if she were to run one of them over? When the police stop her, she thinks, ‘I might as well be at a police station as anywhere else.’ The inspector who interviews her is ‘just a sham’; she disassociates from everything and everybody. Nothing is real. All she wants is to be ‘a hole in space, not here or anywhere at all’. There’s a desperate, wintry sadness to the story. Rhys Davies’s introduction to the posthumously published collection, Julia and the Bazooka, reminds us that the author suffered from depression and twice attempted suicide, but she couldn’t half write.

First published in Julia and the Bazooka, Peter Owen, 1970. * Nicholas Royle’s latest short story collection, Manchester Uncanny, is just out from Confingo Publishing. It follows London Gothic and will, in due course, be followed by Paris Fantastique. He edits the Best British Short Stories series for Salt, who published his non-fiction book, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector. He runs Nightjar Press, publishing short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks. You can read his other contributions to A Personal Anthology here.

‘Snorri & Frosti’ by Benjamin Myers

Chosen by Nick Allen

You’re always thinking Frosti … sometimes it is fine to just be.

The final entry in Benjamin Myers’ short story collection Male Tears, ‘Snorri & Frosti’ is pure Beckett, told almost entirely through dialogue and wonderful for that. Two old brothers, living in a cabin in Northern Europe, chopping wood, shooting the breeze, “listening to the silence”, trying not to die. They make coffee. They philosophize: “The world is full of uncertainty, change and confusion but there is truth in an axe blade.” They bicker. They can’t decide whether to build a sweat lodge. Full of mordant humour, the type of pedantry that only plays between two people who have been together for years… and there is a story about the time Snorri left the village, repeatedly told over dinner.

“It is winter. It is cold. Frosti has a headache.”

First published as a limited edition chapbook by 3AM:Press, 2013. Also available as an ebook from Galley Beggar Press, 2013 and available to buy here. Collected in Male Tears, Bloomsbury, 2021. * Nick Allen has published one collection and three pamphlets of poetry, with a new pamphlet due in the Spring. He gets most of his sustenance from espressos and malt whisky