A mid-July miscellany

Short story summer, two recs for autumn, ‘best books of the 21st century’ discourse

My summer of short stories (so far)

Over the last couple of months I’ve read a lot of short fiction: collections, anthologies, individual stories. This wasn’t a deliberate choice – I hate making specific plans for reading, it makes me feel under pressure straight away – it’s just how things have panned out. Many of the stories were very good, some were mediocre and some were terrible. Here are some favourites (and not-so-favourites) from my recent reading.

The good stuff

Manchester Uncanny by Nicholas Royle. I just couldn’t put this down. I read the whole thing across a single evening. Royle’s visions of the uncanny are so compelling: like his previous city-themed collection, London Gothic, this is a disorientating, animate book, full of stories that both unnerve and amuse. The opener, ‘Welcome Back’, is a perfect case in point: it delves into academic office politics, with the narrator getting tangled up in accusations of bias when a colleague resigns. But believe me when I say you will never guess the twist, and the way it’s played straight makes it all the more hilarious.

It’s the longer stories I really loved, though, especially ‘The Child’, in which a man is led on a strange journey after he visits a mysterious video shop. I always adore a lost media story, and this one is so gripping, so rich, I was ready to read it for hundreds of pages more.

Two Truths and a Lie by Sarah Pinsker, published online by Reactor and as an ebook by Tor. Straight from the ‘made in a lab just for me’ short story universe, this is also a lost media story (with a difference). Compulsive liar Stella is shocked when an old friend claims to remember a kids’ TV series she’s completely made up – and not only that: he also has videos of episodes on which they both appeared. Great starting point, well told, just long enough to pack enough detail in without overcomplicating things. A bit like Kiersten White’s Mister Magic if it was much better and a lot shorter.

The Lost District by Joel Lane. I’m only halfway through this, but given my love for Joel Lane’s writing, I am 100% happy to recommend it without having finished it. I’ve now read seven of his books, yet his writing still feels startling and fresh to me. This is a short story collection that deals with many of the author’s recurring themes: lives lived on the edges of society, lostness and disappearance, the unreliability of memory; cold imagery, a poetry of abandoned things. ‘The Lost District’ and ‘The Bootleg Heart’ feel like real urban legends; ‘Scratch’ is harrowing and deeply effective. There are shades of Dennis Cooper to stories like ‘The Pain Barrier’, with its sadistic porn, and ‘The Window’, which has a killer first line: It wasn’t until their third date that the boy asked Richard to behead him.

It’s not necessarily where I’d suggest someone start with Lane; 24 stories is a lot to get your teeth into if you’re not already a fan. But this gives me another chance to recommend The Witnesses Are Gone and From Blue to Black, which made me fall in love with his work.

More short stories I’ve enjoyed recently:

• ‘Bed of Nails’ by Kathy Stevens, published online by Granta

• ‘How You Find Yourself’ by Sara Sherwood, in Test Signal: A Northern Anthology of New Writing

• ‘TRUTH SERUM’ by Jacob Steven Mohr, in Archive of the Odd Issue #3: Aibohphobia

And, in the interest of balancing things out…

The disappointments!!

• A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell. I’m really sad I didn’t enjoy this more – Enríquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire is one of my all-time fave collections – but Sunny Place has more misses than hits. Some of the stories feel tired and unoriginal, plus there’s a pronounced tendency to use disability or disease as a lazy shortcut to disturbing imagery. If you haven’t read Enríquez before, don’t start here.

• A Cage Went in Search of a Bird by various. An anthology of short stories inspired by Kafka. The list of contributors is seriously impressive but the stories, for whatever reason, are mostly just okay. Only Helen Oyeyemi’s ‘Hygiene’ is both original and genuinely Kafkaesque.

• Imposter Syndrome by various, edited by James Everington and Dan Howarth. This is a horror anthology which promises a set of stories all about doppelgangers, doubles and changelings. Great idea! Awful execution though! There was only one story I truly enjoyed. I don’t like being negative about stuff from small presses, but it’s hard to find many redeeming features here. Avoid.

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Two recommendations to keep in your pocket for autumn

And He Shall Appear by Kate van der Borgh (12 September, or possibly 16 January*, 4th Estate). A music student arrives in Cambridge to start his degree, aware his ordinary background marks him out as an outsider. Things start to change when he forms an unlikely friendship with the wealthy and charismatic Bryn Cavendish, a talented magician with a thing for the occult. Yet as their bond deepens, the narrator’s obsession with both Bryn and his girlfriend Alexa threatens to become dangerous. Yeah, I know: at first, I assumed this would be a retread of themes that appear in lots of debut fiction; a book I’d definitely enjoy, but essentially unoriginal (think, for example, The Cloisters). Then something started to shift.

It’s partly the addition of a horror angle – the suggestion (see the title) that Bryn is something more diabolical than just an amateur magician. But it goes further: this turns out to be a story that turns itself upside down and shakes everything out. And I think, in doing that, it gets to the heart of why so many people love these stories about academia and privilege, and how risky it can be to mythologise a person, a lifestyle – even yourself. The Bellwether Revivals meets The Party, reminiscent of Engleby in its narrative approach and The Little Stranger in its use of supernatural elements, it’s masterfully handled and gathers pace as it goes along. By the end I was absolutely glued to it.

*I’m not sure when exactly this is coming out – publisher’s catalogue and website say September, Amazon and Waterstones say January. If it’s the latter, consider this a early recommendation for 2025.

Barrowbeck by Andrew Michael Hurley (24 October, John Murray Press). This might be Hurley’s most accessible book yet, while at the same time also being perhaps his most ambitious. It’s a set of linked stories set in Barrowbeck, a valley on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, progressing through time from the founding of its first settlement to its fate in the near future. Barrowbeck contains some of the folk horror that’s become synonymous with the author’s name, but there’s also reflective historical fiction, hints of magic, a couple of excellent character studies, even some sci-fi.

The stories are connected rather than designed to form a whole, so this definitely feels more like a collection than a novel – I feel it’s important to point that out, as the synopsis does not make it clear. The first few stories have elements of scene-setting, and the last one exists mainly to tie everything together; those in between are most rewarding to read. My personal favourite was ‘Autumn Pastoral’, a creepy, atmospheric ghost story that feels like a novel in itself. In ‘Sisters’ and ‘An Afternoon of Cake and Lemonade’, it’s the rich character development that stands out. ‘Covenant’, meanwhile, is a strange tale loaded with portent. In Barrowbeck, the river keeps flowing and the mood is always shifting.

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The best books of the 21st century?

As you might have heard, the New York Times has named the ‘100 best books of the 21st century’. It’s a pretty boring list, as lists voted on by loads of people are wont to be, but it fulfilled its main purpose: getting everyone on the internet to argue about books and make their own lists.

My main opinion about the list is that I really like the aesthetic approach of using photos of battered old copies. But I’m not immune to wondering what would be on my own ballot. So here’s a very quick, off-the-top-of-my-head top 10…

The books I chose were: Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen; What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt; The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters; Real Life by Brandon Taylor; Notes On a Scandal by Zoë Heller; Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke; Communion Town by Sam Thompson; Conquest by Nina Allan; God’s Own Country by Ross Raisin; and Night Film by Marisha Pessl.

Naturally, deciding on the books threw up various dilemmas, such as: Having nothing by Alexandra Kleeman here feels wrong. Elif Batuman’s The Idiot would almost definitely have been on the list if I hadn’t hated Either/Or, which is perhaps unfair. Conquest is basically standing in for Allan’s entire body of work, and I could have picked The Race or The Dollmaker instead. But overall, I’m happy with this as a combination of bona fide modern classics and my personal canon. (Still sort of want to do a top 100, though.)