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Just to let you know that I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA this evening, 8 pm UK time, so do feel free to drop by and ask me questions about The Dollmaker, my upcoming novel The Good Neighbours and anything else you can think of relating to books and writing. Looking forward to you joining me at eight!
Whilst the non-fulfilment of Boris Johnson’s ‘do or die’ pledge is being held up as one of those celebratory, gather-around-the-campfire moments we can all find some solace in, it has begun to feel increasingly to me like an evasion. I don’t want to say a pointless postponement because I’m hoping – along with millions of others – that this will not be the case, although what exactly I am hoping for becomes increasingly unclear. I’m a staunch Remainer who has come to distrust the word, not only because of the way it has been turned into a slur by the hardline Right, but also because of the way it sorts me into a camp, pitting me against others rather than allowing me to talk with and try to understand them.
I feel contempt and anger for the lies spread about by the ultra-Leavers, not just the lies about Remainers and how we’re all about corporate capitalism but the still more damaging lies about immigration, about what a trade deal with Trump’s US, for example, might actually look like, what it would inevitably do to the social and environmental fabric of the country those behind the Leave campaign believes they are being so vigorous in defending. Not that we’d be offered such a trade deal, except on terms so mortifying I’d hope even the ur-Slytherin Dominic Cummings wouldn’t dare to advocate for it, but still. The Remain campaign though – as throughout the referendum itself – seems to have become increasingly self-righteous, increasingly divisive, increasingly intolerant, with this week’s meltdown in the People’s Vote ranks being only the most recent example.
We have a breathing-space extension to the Hallowe’en Extension, great. But with a scant six weeks between December 12 and January 31 and with Christmas and Hogmanay slap in the middle, where exactly is the upcoming general election going to land us?
In an era where the very idea of the nation state is going to become increasingly irrelevant, we need Corbyn’s policies, need them badly – but with the deep seam of intolerance, secrecy, gaslighting and reverse-bigotry splitting the heart of Corbyn’s Labour, I can’t imagine the circumstances under which he’d be able to deliver on his manifesto or even be capable of holding a government together. What we need is not ideology but caution, tolerance, above all far-sightedness. My own electoral dilemma is easily solved, because I live in Scotland. I’ll be voting SNP no matter what, for their policies on education, health and social care and for their solidly progressive green agenda as much as for their stance on Scottish independence. But when I begin to get the sense that the only power we have up here is to shore up the metaphorical Hadrian’s Wall we have built for ourselves through our SNP mandate, that is not a good feeling. What might be coming for us from down south? Johnson’s contempt for – or indifference towards, depending on how you interpret it – Scotland is self evident, but then Corbyn sees us only as a bolt-on, another bloc vote to be corralled and subdued. (Some chance.)
I have no answers, only more questions. Not a comfortable feeling but perhaps that’s as it should be. On the up side, it is Hallowe’en, the last bright blaze of autumnal fire before the frosts of winter (although we’ve already begun with the frosts up here, thanks). So let’s gather around that camp fire and tell some ghost stories.
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I read this article about the resurgence of witchcraft in literature just before the Worldcon and found a lot to think about. Witches do seem to be having a moment right now, which is a good thing, not least because witches are far more interesting in terms of story than vampires or zombies. Dare I say they bring us hope, a sense of something vital and necessary and important to our society. I agree wholeheartedly with Cosslett, that the witch is well worth celebrating and exploring both as a symbol of women’s power and resistance to tyranny as well as a deeply rooted aspect of fairy tale and mythology. The witch is currently in the ascendant, and goddess knows we need her. But on this day of all days, we would do well to remember the reality of what the word ‘witch’ can mean, not only for the women of centuries past but still – sometimes, some places – today. The word witch has not only been a slur, it has been an accusation, a means of control, a name for hatred, a prelude to imprisonment, torture and government-sanctioned murder. Some of our witches are still fighting to be remembered, to be seen in the eyes of the society that condemned and killed them.
And we should also remember not all of them were women.
Let’s light a Hallowe’en candle for the witch still living in fear as well as for those celebrating the timely revival of all the downtrodden voices they represent. In her superb poetry collection WITCH – my standout discovery from Cosslett’s piece in the Guardian – Rebecca Tamas has done just that. This cycle of poems draws inspiration from all aspects of witchcraft – the traumatic, the incandescent, the morally ambiguous, the self-renewing – to present a blisteringly brutal revelation of what the word means. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry in 2019 (bonus recommendation: Fiona Benson’s luminescent Vertigo and Ghost, which is also quite witchy) and WITCH looks like being one of my favourite books of the year.
With the witch renaissance in full flower, there’s no shortage of crafty book recommendations for All Hallows Eve. Firstly, I’d like to focus attention once again on Sarah Maria Griffin’s Other Words for Smoke, which in terms of modern representation of witches is as powerful as anyone could hope for. The language is gorgeous and the story is compelling, the world evoked both terrifying and beautiful. I loved this book, which deserves to become as famous as Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (which is equally to be recommended and definitely witchy).
If you haven’t caught up with Catriona Ward’s Shirley Jackson Award-winning, British Fantasy Award-winning second novel Little Eve yet, let tonight be the night. Ward has a phenomenal talent, her feel for language so steadfastly in service of her riveting plotlines as to be inseparable from them. I read this book in a single sitting and found it genuinely chilling. Knowing that Ward is currently at work on a new book makes it doubly exciting to revisit this one.
If you’re already fed up with the cold, and enjoy a generous leavening of metafiction with your horror (I know I do) then William Gay’s masterful Southern Gothic Little Sister Death is your perfect match. I cannot overstate how much I loved this book, how closely it’s stuck with me since. The first chapter is one of the most exquisite feats of suspense writing I’ve ever come across, and the novel as it progresses does not renege on this initial promise. Like Little Eve, this is a story of cults and kinship and buried truths. It is also a novel about the implications and possible dangers of rooting out those truths. It’s a book about writing, and writing horror in particular. Little Sister Death is not just for Hallowe’en, she’s with you for life.
If you’re off to a Hallowe’en party and don’t have time to read a complete novel this evening, I would recommend you get yourself into the groove with a story or two from Georgina Bruce’s collection This House of Wounds. I’ve not quite finished reading it yet, but oh my goodness, this is something special. I don’t normally go in for these kind of overly simplistic comparisons but Bruce’s writing truly does read as if Eimear McBride and Livia Llewellyn had a baby! Bruce has been gradually building her reputation in weird short fiction for some years now and this collection marks a significant staging post in her career. The stories in This House of Wounds are richly allegorical, formally innovative, thought-provoking and ambiguous. All the things I love, in other words. If this isn’t on every awards ballot next year then the witches will be rising in rebellion…
If you’re heading to the cinema in search of Hallowe’en hell-raising, forgo the seasonal shlock-fests and reboots (fun though they always are on an evening like this) and go see Joker instead. ‘S all I’m saying.
For some musical accompaniment on your nightly revels, might I be so bold as to offer you this – a playlist for The Dollmaker that I recently compiled for largehearted boy. This is more wistful, mist-ful Hallowe’en than your full John Carpenter, but there are some ghosts here, some dark and twisted tales, an elf-queen or two. I loved picking out the tracks for this and I think that taken together they do convey something of the strangeness and longing that lie at the heart of Andrew and Bramber’s search for one another. I hope you enjoy them.
For me, it’s Cabin in the Woods (again) and a dram of single malt. Happy Hallowe’en!
Priya Sharma’s new novella Ormeshadow has the quality of a story that has always existed.
Gideon Belman learns the legend of the orme from his father John, who tells him of a great beast, a dragon, that once flew high across the bay before coming to rest with its head in the waves. The dragon fell into a sleep that seemed vast as death, but as John is careful to remind Gideon, sleep and death are not the same…
Ormeshadow is the story of Gideon, his father, mother and uncle and the many lives that intersect with theirs as they live out harsh lives on the farm held by both the Belman brothers, a plot of land loved by one, left behind by the other but not forever, the site of promises and betrayals and – ultimately – the birth of new futures.
The story is told through a series of discrete chapters, sections of a continuing narrative that take place sometimes years apart, sometimes a few scant days. This fractured form is both mosaic and multifaceted jewel, a sequence of prose poems that beguile and engross and accumulate and shatter the senses.
The urgent themes from Sharma’s earlier work are here – family tensions, social inequality, myth and magic. In Ormeshadow, we see her acquiring still greater confidence and authority in the art of storytelling. It is impossible to read this novella and not be affected by it at a gut level. It is still less possible to read this novella and not be overcome by admiration for what Sharma as a writer has accomplished here. Ormeshadow feels ageless, perfect. Yet it is a story that speaks persuasively for our time.
A powerful fusion of language (did I mention the language?) form and mythmaking from a writer whose work is constantly evolving and breaking new ground. Superb. Read it.
The Dollmaker is published in the US today – excuse me while I gloat over the fantastic (and creepy) cover art:
Huge thanks to Judith Gurewich and the whole incredible team at Other Press for steering Andrew on his journey across the Atlantic.
I read The Handmaid’s Tale not long after it was published. I was still at university and I remember it was a much talked-about title, even then, in the way that William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice had been when the film adaptation came out, which happened to be the year I started doing my ‘A’ Levels. I tend to think of these two novels, still, as a kind of pair – both discussed important ideas, both had a profound effect on me at the time, both – again, at the time – felt safely removed from my lived reality. For my young-adult self, these novels provided a significant focus for my developing intellect, an illustration of how bad things might – could – get if complacency were allowed the ascendancy over political engagement.
I remember reading The Handmaid’s Tale and feeling a visceral, red-robed hatred of Gilead’s organising structures and founding ideology. I also remember reassuring myself that as a society we had moved past these dangers, that the arguments Atwood was rehearsing were largely theoretical.
I was a child of the Cold War. The year The Handmaid’s Tale won the Clarke Award, I was in Russia meeting other young students and experiencing first hand the stirrings of a new political reality that would bring down the Berlin Wall only two years later.
Yes, it was incredible and yes, it feels like ancient history. The Handmaid’s Tale became an instant classic because it is so perfectly conceived, so exquisitely judged as writing, so powerful as story. But the definition of a classic goes further: for a book to remain in the literature it must continue to feel relevant, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred years and more after it was written. A relatively short thirty years after Atwood wrote her breakout book, it feels more relevant, more important and certainly more terrifying than it did when it won the Clarke Award. In political terms this speaks for itself. In literary terms it is an incredible achievement, and a marker of Atwood’s status as one of the most important writers of the post-Vietnam period.
I was not able to be at the London event to commemorate the launch of her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, but I was lucky enough to bag a ticket for the live cinema broadcast of that event, an interview with Samira Ahmed interspersed by readings from the new novel by actors including Ann Dowd, who plays Aunt Lydia in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood has grown gracefully into her role as literary grande dame and she is wonderful in interview: incisive, insightful, sardonic, quick-witted, fearless, funny. I feel lucky to have been there, as it were, and nothing could diminish my admiration for Atwood both as a writer and as a human being. But what of The Testaments itself? It is a book that seemed desperately wanted, but did we need it? And, to put the question bluntly, is it any good?
The answer to both questions, as so often, is yes and no. There is so much commentary on The Testaments available online now that to summarise the plot again here seems superfluous to requirements. Suffice it to say that the novel comprises three alternating first-person narratives, that the architecture of the novel is structured around revealing the links between them. One of the narrators we know already – or at least we think we do. The other two we have previously glimpsed – but at some distance. The thrust of the novel’s action concerns the fate of Gilead as a political system. Where The Handmaid’s Tale was slow, interior, close-focus, its acute tension derived from the withholding of knowledge and answers, The Testaments is structured more like the later, non-book-related TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale: information is withheld, but only until the next episode. Characters are there not simply as their complicated, contradictory selves, but to represent particular facets of a problem or system. There is action and there is cruelty. There is plot exposition in the form of dialogue.
It reads well because it is Atwood and she has now reached that summit of experience where she can – in all likelihood literally – write in her sleep. But the whole enterprise feels lightweight to me, a MCU version of The Handmaid’s Tale in which cruelties are avenged and villains are vanquished. Most superhero movies bore me because they’re morally simplistic (even the ones that strain so desperately not to be). The Testaments feels the same. I came across a reader review the other day that said The Testaments felt like YA, ‘as if the sequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four turned out to be The Hunger Games’. I can’t think of a more accurate critical summation.
In answer to my original questions, I would say personally that no, we did not need this book. In terms of language, interiority, structure, conceit, complexity and resonance it lacks the power of the original. If The Testaments were by a lesser known author and did not have the might and weight of The Handmaid’s Tale to act as an anchor, it would quickly become lost among all the other similarly timely feminist dystopias currently being written and consumed. At the level of reading pleasure, it has plenty to offer. I turned its pages quickly and with enjoyment, finding the first half (the set up) a great deal more interesting than the facile-seeming denouement, but then that’s true for me of virtually all mass-market SFFH. I did not hate it – not at all. I will remember it with affection because of everything it represents about Atwood and about now. But taken purely for itself, as text, it is disposable.
Even in spite of this, there is a case to be argued that rigorous critical appraisal of The Testaments is not the point of the story, that this is not a book so much as a phenomenon. I find it interesting and moving that the generation of young women who are growing up with the TV version of The Handmaid’s Tale, many of whom will have read the novel after seeing the series, are precisely those who have flocked in such numbers to launch events for The Testaments, who have queued outside bookstores at midnight to obtain their copies first, who have felt such a passionate sense of ownership of the original novel and its characters that it is they, in some sense, who would seem to have provoked and inspired Atwood into writing a sequel, where thirty years of steady sales and campus admiration did not. In a very real sense The Testaments is their book, not mine. That the book exists is in itself a phenomenon, a testament to the power of The Handmaid’s Tale and its own justification.
Does The Testaments diminish the power of the original text? Of course it doesn’t, and nor should it. But whilst I will hope to continue visiting with The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, my beloved Cat’s Eye, Oryx and Crake even, and those marvellous interlinked stories in The Stone Mattress, I cannot imagine wanting or needing to reread The Testaments, which if not a bad book is a weak book by comparison. Its solutions are too easy, too rapid. It feels like wish fulfilment. No doubt I’ll watch the TV adaptation, when it inevitably arrives on our screens, but I already know in advance that it will vaguely annoy me.
I’m thrilled to announce that La Fracture – the French-language edition of The Rift – has this past week been longlisted for two of France’s most prestigious and enduring literary prizes: the Prix Medicis, established in 1958 to recognise authors ‘whose fame does not yet match their talent’ and the Prix Femina, established in 1904 and decided each year by an exclusively female jury.
Glancing down the list of past recipients, I feel quite overwhelmed! This year’s longlists can be found here, and here. Finding myself in such company is surreal, to say the least.
I am incredibly pleased for my French publishers, Editions Tristram, who have been staunch and stalwart in their commitment to my work right from the beginning, and doubly indebted to my translator, Bernard Sigaud, without whom none of this would be happening.
They’re all amazing people and these longlist placings belong equally to them. Salute!
A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to catch the writer Rebecca Stott reading her essay ‘On Ghost Cities’ on Radio 4. Drawing on her early childhood, when her family were still part of the Exclusive Brethren, Stott describes her enduring fascination with urban spaces forsaken by their human inhabitants, either through gradual depletion or traumatic change. For Stott, the imagery of cataclysm was not alien, but something she had lived with as a daily reality. I found Stott’s essay beautiful and profound, full of ideas that resonated with me on a personal level. It also served to remind me that I had not yet read In the Days of Rain, Stott’s Costa-winning memoir of her family’s connection with and eventual severance from the Exclusive Brethren. Which is how I came to be reading it on the train this Tuesday as I travelled into Glasgow to attend a live screening of Margaret Atwood’s launch event for The Testaments at the NFT.
In truth, Ada-Louise’s face had come to stand for all those women who’d been shut up or locked up. Not just Brethren women, but all women who’d been bullied or belted by men who’d been allowed too much power in their homes. Her face haunted me. One day when my daughters were a bit older, I told myself, I’d talk to them about that, about patriarchy and how dangerous unchecked male power can be. I’d talk to them about Ada-Louise.
“Mum, you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale,” Kez said. “You know we can’t ever take feminist progress for granted. They’ll take our freedom away again unless we protect it.”
One of those strange coincidences that feel like more than coincidence, when a particular text falls into your hands precisely at the time you need to be reading it. In the Days of Rain is more than just a memoir. Written when Stott was already mid-career and fully in command of her material, it is a furious and tender examination of faith, credulity, community, scepticism, love, folly and the human propensity for both the numinous and the monstrous. It is also a book about women and the numberless ways in which – then and now – they are set up to act as scapegoats for men’s greedy descent into violence and error.
There’s more, though. While Stott wholeheartedly condemns the psychological and latterly physical and sexual abuse that came to define and ravage the Exclusive Brethren, she remains determined to explore the more surprising truths of what it is like to have one’s formative experiences and imagination shaped by living in what is, in effect, a parallel universe.
What is clearly difficult and sometimes painful for Stott to explain is that not all of these experiences are negative. I found these parts of the book – Stott’s examination of the language, imagery and philosophy of visionary belief – affecting and thought-provoking. As I happen to be in the early stages of work on a novel that deals with some of the same themes I cannot help thinking and wondering about the recent crop of writers – all of them women – who have drawn vital inspiration from their experiences of life in faith communities: Tara Westover, Sarah Perry, Grace McCleen, Miriam Toews. Their work is luminous. The questions they ask are hard questions. Most remain unanswered.- .
Atwood’s interview with Samira Ahmed – witty, mischievous, deeply intelligent and fiercely timely – set a new standard in book events. It was a privilege to be present at its screening, heartening to learn afterwards that the multi-venue livestream topped the UK’s cinema box office takings for that day. Having Rebecca Stott as my literary companion in the hours before and afterwards provided a powerful poetic symmetry. I am still thinking about her book and what I can learn from it. I am still thinking about ghost cities, the many uncanny ways in which the future continues to leak into the present.
Just a quick reminder that The Silver Wind is published today in an expanded and updated edition from Titan Books.
This is not simply a reissue. In fact, I would go so far as it say it’s a whole new book! This edition not only brings the original text together with the previously uncollected, associated stories ‘Darkroom’ and ‘Ten Days’, it also includes a brand new novella, The Hurricane, which delves deeper into the early life and apprenticeship of The Silver Wind’s mysterious mastermind, Owen Andrews.
The Hurricane was always central to my conception of The Silver Wind as a whole. I wrote several versions of it back in 2010, but none of them truly satisfied me and so in the end I decided to go ahead and publish the book as it stood. When Titan approached me last year with the idea of relaunching The Silver Wind I was thrilled, not only because this new edition would introduce the work to a wider audience, but also because I would finally have the opportunity to present the text to readers in a form that more accurately represents my original vision.
The Silver Wind is important to me. Not only do I love these characters and their overlapping stories, they were written at a time when I was actively beginning to get a grip on what I wanted to achieve as a writer. As such, I would count The Silver Wind as my first significant work. It was a joy to finally bring all its constituent parts together, to edit and revise the book as a single entity. I am proud of the result and endlessly indebted to the team at Titan for making this new edition a reality.
I hope new readers enjoy accompanying Martin Newland on his journey(s). To those who read and liked the original version, please do consider investing in a copy of this new and definitive edition. I would never normally encourage book duplication just for the sake of it, but in this case I’m trusting you will find the outlay worthwhile.
If Julia Lloyd’s magnificent cover art isn’t enough to tempt you, I don’t know what is!
This week sees my debut as a book critic for The Guardian, with the appearance of my review of Stephen King’s new novel The Institute.
Taking on the King so publicly might have been daunting had it not been so interesting. Reading and reviewing his latest book encouraged me to contemplate – more even than usual – what exactly it is about this particular author that provokes such fierce reactions, be they of fanatical loyalty or chilly contempt. More even than that, what does King mean to me?
I have a long history with King, but that history is unusual in that it begins much later than is apparently the norm for most King devotees. I did not read him at all as a teenager – I remember pouring scorn on my brother’s dog-eared copy of Pet Sematary, and on my brother for reading what I ignorantly insisted must be trash – and it wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties, and becoming a writer myself, that I began to understand for myself some of the many qualities that make King’s work unique in the speculative canon.
Two things happened more or less simultaneously: first, a record company rep I knew began passing on to me the promotional copies of King audiobooks he had taken to reading on his regular driving routes. Then, as a beginning horror writer eager to learn everything and then some about the field, I stumbled across King’s personal history of horror in the 20th century, Danse Macabre.
That book changed my life. Not only did it help to bring a semblance of order to my thoughts about horror, not only did it introduce to me a bunch of important writers previously unknown to me, it revealed to me also how well King writes, how uncannily closely his imagination and intellect are in tune with one another. Most of all, how his voice is, quite literally, inimitable. I remember listening to Rose Madder on audio while decorating my living room, thrilled by how completely I had become immersed in the intricacies and detail of that story. That King was one of the narrators of that particular audiobook no doubt affected the way I read and hear him to this day. His emphasis on particular phrases, often repeated, his ear for dialogue, his understanding of and love for certain tropes. All of this spoke to me powerfully, because it convinced me more or less in an instant that King knew what he was doing, not just in a narrative sense but in an ironical, metafictional sense. That his approach to fiction went way beyond story and deep into Story.
I fell in love. Rose Madder is not a popular work among King’s Constant Readers, but I am fiercely protective of it, still. My journey as a King fan had begun.
I raced through much of the back catalogue at that point. I loved what the King commentariat think of as the core works – I think Salem’s Lot is a classic of the twentieth century, I’m still spasmodically arguing with Chris over just how great Misery is (again, it’s classic) still regretting the presence of ‘that one stupid chapter’ in the otherwise masterfully epic IT. Already though my personal preferences were becoming tinged with unorthodoxy. I am one of the possibly three people who believe that Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining is actually deeper and stranger than King’s original. I prefer Four Past Midnight to Different Seasons. I like From a Buick 8. My favourite King work ever is Hearts in Atlantis.
No one who knows my writing will be surprised to discover the affection in which I hold the paired Bachman/King novels The Regulators and Desperation. But I know I’m going to lose company with all of you when I confess that for me, King’s scariest novel to date has been (yes, I’m going to say it) The Tommyknockers.
Second-favourite King novel? The Gunslinger, which contains some of his finest writing ever.
Favourite King short story? ‘Dolan’s Cadillac’. (I laughed right along with him.)
Favourite King-on-screen that isn’t The Shining? Storm of the Century (I’ve watched it four times and counting).
Most recent almost-masterpiece? Revival, which is destroyed, and I mean destroyed, by a denouement that might as well have been cribbed from a rejected screenplay of ‘The Rats in the Walls’. (Honestly Steve, there are times you break my heart.)
Unlike so many, I did not read King young, but I read him at a time of huge importance in my life, and I am in no doubt he has left his mark on me as a writer in ways I am only partially aware of. It is King’s sense of the possible, most of all, that marks him out, his eye for the marvellous, which exists everywhere, and often makes itself known when you least expect it. His sense of the numinous. His love of stuff. The way he’ll over-pad a novel till it strains at the seams and yet still make you feel obsessed by whatever he’s talking about.
As readers and as writers, King offers back to us the world we live in, subtly changed and ripe for exploration. My favourite parts of The Institute? The irrelevant bits, of course: Tim Jamieson’s convoluted route to becoming a night knocker deep in the boonies, Luke’s escape and epic train journey, which reminds me of Rosie’s flight from her killer cop husband all those years ago. King’s plots may be propulsive, but it is the details that make them compelling, the detours and sidetracks, the moments that stick in the mind like authentic memories.
I’m often critical of King – because he writes too much too quickly, because he falls back too willingly on generic tropes where more subtle and elusive solutions would prove more satisfying, because he too often breaks his own rule and lets us see the monster. My dissatisfaction with certain aspects of his work, sometimes with entire novels (Lisey’s Story, I’m looking at you) never detracts from my enjoyment of his achievement as a whole, my pleasure in the very fact that it exists. There are not so many writers whose privilege it is to leave such a lasting impression on us, or to excite such debate. It’s good to have him around.
Long live the King.
Still Worlds Turning is an anthology of new contemporary short fiction edited by Emma Warnock and published by No Alibis Press, an independent imprint run from a bookshop of the same name in Belfast. This was one of the books I decided to take with me to read at Worldcon, due to its firm (though by no means exclusive) focus on Irish writers.
Anthologies are strange beasts. At their best, they are genuinely eye-opening. At their worst, they are shapeless, uneven in quality and, occasionally, pointless. As with single-author collections, my taste in anthologies is very much for those that have a coherence about them, not necessarily in terms of theme (themed anthologies can quickly lose their appeal) but in terms of approach. They should have something to say, in other words – a sense of direction, a message to communicate about the state of fiction now.
Happily, Still Worlds Turning has all the radicalism and cohesion you could possibly wish for. Reading it is like being a fly on the wall at a gathering of talent so fresh and so furious it is almost gladiatorial.
Some of the writers included – Eley Williams, Joanna Walsh, Wendy Erskine, Sam Thompson, Jan Carson, Lucy Caldwell – were already familiar to me, the others new names. The quality was consistent throughout and while the the editor has deliberately shied away from imposing any overarching theme on Still Worlds Turning, what these stories have in common is a rawness and intensity of approach, a willingness to wrestle with the stuff of language. In the hands of these writers, the short story is cast not as a precious jewel, refined and entire unto itself, but as a living drama constantly evolving before our eyes. There is humour here, and pathos, where humour is a defining feature of resilience.
And for those who are into theme, it is there to be found. No doubt it was my own gothic sensibilities that led me to discern in this anthology a through-thread of the uncanny, not just in Sam Thompson’s appropriately named ‘Seafront Gothic’, but also in Lucy Caldwell’s disturbing and eerie ‘Night Waking’, Daniel Hickey’s brilliant and brutal – and very funny – ‘The Longford Chronicle’ (think/dream Boris Johnson meets The Hunger Games), Laura-Blaise McDowall’s strange and lovely ‘Balloon Animals’, and Mandy Taggart’s poignantly Faustian ‘Burn’.
There are stories here that I found challenging, not so much in the way they are written but in the vision they present. Judyth Emanuel’s ‘Tw ink le’, Jan Carson’s ‘The World Ending in Fire’, Dawn Watson’s ‘The Seaview Hundred and Fifty-Two’ and Lauren Foley’s ‘Molly & Jack at the Seaside’ in particular are viscerally raw snapshots of life at the margins but I count this very much as a plus because these are stories that need to be heard. I would point readers towards Lauren Foley’s account of Molly’s journey to publication for a sobering insight into how difficult it can be – still – to find publishers willing to take the risk with uncomfortable material, even when the editors themselves profess admiration for the work.
No Alibis and Emma Warnock should be commended for taking that risk. Still Worlds Turning deserves notice as a key reference point for what is happening in fiction right now. Here is a generation of writers delving deep into issues of community, poverty, sexuality and trauma whose work does not just feel timely, it feels urgent. Above all, these are stories that demonstrate the power and the beauty of language, in which the gaps in language say almost as much as the words themselves, in which form is as vital as content. Read and learn.
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