‘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

‘The Mud Below’ by Annie Proulx

If I could recommend every story in Close Range, a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, I would. Proulx is a writer who belongs to the Wyoming prairies and this story of Diamond Felts, a rodeo rider with a desolate past and a proclivity for violent sexual assault, is a bleak, honest look at life on the edges of rural America.

“The shock of the violent motion, the lightning shifts of balance, the feeling of power as though he were the bull and not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn’t known was there.”

First published in The New Yorker, 1998, available here. Collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999

‘The Half-Skinned Steer’ by Annie Proulx

“On the main road his tire tracks showed as a faint pattern in the pearly apricot light from the risen moon, winking behind roiling clouds of snow.”

In this reconfiguration of an Icelandic folk tale, Proulx occupies territory I tend to discourage students from: having a character spend long periods alone; freighting the work with considerable backstory; employing character introspection rather than just narrating what’s happening. But the author’s genius of course renders such ‘rules’ irrelevant. Her protagonist journeys to the harsh, unforgiving American west to attend a funeral, a hostile landscape he’d escaped as a young man, one of decay, violence and inexorable legacy. At its heart, a story embedded in a story about the (mis)treatment of animals and a disillusionment with the pioneering American Dream.

Strangely, Proulx, in interviews, doesn’t much rate this one of hers. I think she’s wrong.

First published in The Atlantic, November 1997, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999

‘55 Miles to the Gas Pump’ by Annie Proulx

My final choice is another short-short story, to balance out my two long picks. Residing in its collection just before ‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘55 Miles to the Gas Pump’ is a snippy reflection on what makes us tell stories in the first place. A grisly murder scene is interrupted before it really gets started, with a chilling quip that functions as something halfway between an explanation and a warning:

“When you live a long way out you make your own fun.”

Published in Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx, Fourth Estate, 1999

‘A Lonely Coast’ by Annie Proulx

As with Heidi James, there was no way I could do this list without Annie Proulx, who’s not only a wonderful novelist but one of the modern masters of the short form. I couldn’t find the story I was looking for and didn’t have time to reread four books in their entirety to track it down, so in the end I flipped open a book at a random story, scanned the opening paragraph and decided immediately to go with this one. It’s worth quoting at length:

You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge in it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You’ll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull off the road to close your eyes or look up at the sky punched with bullet holes. And you might think of the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don’t give a damn. They’re too far away, like everything else.

It’s breathtaking stuff, but of course, that’s just standard from Proulx. As with most of her work this is earthy, down-at-heel, coarse and violent, full of characters living tough lives in the rural outlands. She’s a master of style, and voice, her prose is dazzling and like all the best writers she has the most wonderful ear for the patterns and rhythms of vernacular speech. “I’m so hungry I could eat a rancher’s unwiped ass.” “You want some buffalo wings? I said. “Practically the same thing.” The feel for the country and the people she writes about across the three volumes of Wyoming Stories is on a par with Faulkner for me, and it’s hard to pay her a higher compliment than that.

First published in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999

‘Brokeback Mountain’ by Annie Proulx

Okay, this is not a recent discovery. I read it at least once a year, for its technical deftness and the gut punch of its emotions. Sometimes I write the first line of each section on a piece of paper, trying to figure out how Proulx managed to string the decades together with such ease. The balance of scene and summary is perfect. There’s a bit where she describes how the bodies of Ennis and Jack have changed over the years – broken noses healed crooked, teeth filed down, moustaches grown, accents shifting. And it’s just so moving. I think it was the first story that ever made me cry. There’s something devastating about the clash between the lovers’ wordless feelings and so-called traditional wisdom – “If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.”

First published in The New Yorker, October, 1997. Collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Harper Perennial, 1999

‘Brokeback Mountain’ by Annie Proulx

I include this for its confidence and scale. I re-visit this story often – to see the way that Proulx crafts the final detail of the men’s shirts interlaced one against the other, the passage of time, the masculinity. I saw the film before I read the story and find I cry throughout both. The intensity of the desire and the repression. I always loved Heath Ledger and admired his courage in taking this role that he said terrified him. Proulx squeezes the maximum out of this story of impossible love over 20 years. Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are indelible figures set against a raw rural working world – from the first encounter in the tent, to Del Mar’s vomiting, to the sex scene in the hotel: “The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and sour hay, saddle leather, shit and cheap soap.” A story of men and class and desire and love. Devastating at its core with Del Mar’s inability to create a different life for them. Unrelentingly heartbreaking and unrelentingly real. “I wish I knew how to quit you.”

First published in The New Yorker, October, 1997. Collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Harper Perennial, 1999