‘Grass Laminate’ by Ben Pester

The closest I get to knowing what short fiction is and how it works is when Ben Pester and I talk about them together. I could do this as a Pesternal Anthology. I think I might. For now, though, I’d direct you to ‘Grass Laminate’. Ben writes short stories for the voice: under and within this one, I can hear the click of a glottis, the nervous motion of spittle, the panic-whimper retuned into a proper syntax music. I feel like a lot of them could stand comfortably beside the speaker of Not I, only they wouldn’t be comfortable, because discomfited, upset, and yet doggedly continuing is more the mood Ben operates in, and it makes me feel less alone in my sense of this. When we talk, we end up talking about Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Few people come as close to touching that book, which is my favourite one, as he does.

To be published in a forthcoming collection

‘If YES’ by Ben Pester

I was in London because it was Claire Carroll’s book launch at The Social W1W 7JD me and my friend Jess Payn attended together. We met Joshua Jones of (more short stories) Local Fires (2023) and did not m e e t Ben Pester but heard him read from his Boiler-House-Press-published (also short stories) Am I in the Right Place? (2021). Another of his stories, in the rooms of e-existent Hotel (2017-22), that is * so funny * I’d fell upon earlier is ‘If YES’, a short egg story. It seems a great many great writers have been obsessed with eggs at some point in their careers has anyone else noticed this? ‘If YES’ is an office gambol framed in a user-satisfaction feedback form by Ben Pester. A Large Egg is surprise-delivered at the work-place to which “Ben” (main character) and colleagues are “deeply attracted”. Its proximity mystically effects an “instant Alpha brainwave state” causing powerful primal-corporate cameraderie and, ultimately, business (“start-up”) productivity. Of course, there is an oviparous in the egg and I was l-o-l-ing at the strength of the tension-building (snort-worthy single line paragraphs) Ben Pester achieves re speculation over what will be inside the oeuf. Things of course get dreadful and I say a real Oh no reading ‘If YES’ it’s so eggishly palpable. Commerce dialect looms massive as our cultish capacities under late-late-late-stage Capitalismo are so well allegoried. See also Seven Rooms: Assorted materials from a Paper Hotel (2023), Hotel-on-web’s paper component.

Within the rooms of Hotel online here, Tenement Press & Prototype 2017-22

‘Orientation’ by Ben Pester

Pester is one of contemporary literature’s great surrealists. His work pokes holes in our understanding of reality, challenging us to explore the darkness of the human psyche via the interminably banal. It’s also really funny. ‘Orientation’ is the first story in Am I in the Right Place?, another jealous rage / throw-at-wall collection from Boiler House circa the pandemic and uses office jargon, powerpoint formatting to tell a story in which a character (you) is being given an induction on their first day at a new job. Pester uses the second person throughout, conjuring an air of acute claustrophobia between the reader (for it is we who are being oriented) and Graham, an entirely ordinary yet deeply unsettling colleague who is in charge of your onboarding. In typical Pester fashion, things escalate to a hysterical fever pitch taking a spatially and temporally away from the office, back in time into a memory, before Graham waves us vaguely away.

Collected in Am I in the Right Place? Boiler House Press, 2020. Also in Granta, here

‘Lifelong Learning’ by Ben Pester

“‘There’s a hole in your ear!’ Carl once said. You were in his spare room, during a phase in which you weren’t going out because Carl wanted things to be home-based.”

A couple of years ago I decided it was time to stop being sad. I found a therapist who was not too far away and whose hourly rate I could just about afford. I told him that I hadn’t been able to write in such a long time – I was barely reading, barely thinking – and he suggested that I write about the sadness. I left pissed off and didn’t return; I’d never heard something so stupid. I felt nothing, and this nothing had no shape, no substance: what was there to write about? Ben Pester’s collection Am I in the Right Place? is one of the books that brought me back to literature, mostly because it is hilarious and weird and surprising, but also because it is about the nothing I had been experiencing. In ‘Lifelong Learning’, the protagonist has a hole in his ear into which half a can of Grolsch lager disappears. He escapes an awful WKD-and-Call-of-Duty party through a hole in the back of a cupboard which leads to the Village. There, he struggles to articulate the shapeless nothing of his life and hopes ‘to find someone’. ‘Because I have been alone on the limits for so long,’ Pester writes, ‘I have been in need of my friends for so long.’

First published in Am I in the Right Place?, Boiler House Press 2020

‘Low Energy Meeting’ by Ben Pester

This story is a delight. An over-caffeinated line manager has brought treats to the meeting to counter everyone’s low energy. There’s been a slime leak and Raj has grown a third eye but the manager keeps himself peppy with Maltesers – full of brio and childhood confession. I’ve heard Ben read it aloud twice and I’m thinking of recording him just so I can listen to it whenever I want.

First published in Am I in the Right Place, Boiler House Press, 2020

‘All Silky and Wonderful’ by Ben Pester

The train on which the narrator is commuting enters a tunnel, prompting him to wonder: “Had we entered a new kind of space? Were we still physical things?” These questions seem to capture the essence of this surreal, unsettling, and oddly moving story. A story that, like several others in Ben Pester’s excellent debut collection, hooks into the subconscious and burrows deep. The narrator rereads a message on his phone about the death of an old school friend. After dozing off, he wakes to find himself in an empty carriage. Everyone else has moved into the adjoining carriage but when he tries to do the same, the guard won’t let him through. The other passengers turn against him, appearing frightened, even disgusted by him: “Their faces were subtly altered, as though they were now confronted with an unpleasant cleaning task – say, a dead and half-rotted pigeon, discovered behind a voided fireplace.” I won’t describe what happens next because that would take away the fun of reading a story in which the narrative direction is impossible to anticipate. Yes, it is an extremely funny and bizarre story, but moreover it speaks to the reader on a deeply human level. Neglected or half-noticed places, dark, hidden away, negative spaces—tunnels, lofts, crawl spaces—, the mundane details of the everyday, become alive with feeling and meaning. After reading, we too feel transformed, our perspective shifted to perceive the world in a new, “silky and wonderful” way.

First published in Granta, June 2019, and available to read here. Collected in Am I In The Right Place, Boiler House Press 2020