SHORT STORY REX April 2023
M John Harrison, Camilla Grudova, Judith Shadford, Sherwood Anderson and more...
1. “Cicisbeo”, M. John Harrison
for years ive been meaning to read more M John Harrison but for some dumb reason have not undertaken to get hold of his books, only reading his works in drips and drabs, most recently this one.
it's a story about infidelity and suburban malaise that turns into something else as a man becomes more and more deeply obsessed with a very mysterious home-improvement project.
There’s a moment, a turning point in the story where the Weird pokes its head through the Real like an adolescent crack in what’s thus far been a fairly sober, prosaic tone of voice and it love it so much
‘They’ve taken it well,’ she said of the boys. She was proud of them. After a few days, though, they grew thoughtful, painted their faces, spent money on slime. They ran in and out of the small garden whooping and shouting: but magical thinking would not save them. Change was inevitable. The tribe was doomed.
That phrase “spent money on slime” especially hits a hard-to-define pleasure center in my brain, four simple words that when put together make you go “wait what”
the suburban milieu with the irreal twist puts me in the mind of Stephen Millhuaser but sparser, less languid and also British, why have i not read more of this stuff, what is wrong with me
2. “The Apartment”, Camilla Grudova
Experienced a case of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (the tendency to notice something more often after noticing it for the first time) after reading this story in the latest issue of the excellent journal Bourbon Penn and then seeing her name seemingly everywhere afterwards
The first sentence summarizes it more succinctly that I could ever hope to: “This is the story of six residents of the same apartment and how they all died.”
The story, set in an unspecified city/country, confronts us with abject squalor and each character’s different stance in the face of same: the romantic, the ascetic, the hedonistic, etc … all (as we’ve already seen) with similar results
It’s grimy, it’s absurd, it reminds me a bit of Gogol (though that might be because one of the residents in the apartment is named Taras)
Grudova made Granta’s Best Young British Novelists list (and, I’m now noticing, won a Shirley Jackson Award some years ago) so maybe i would not have got Baader-Meinhof’ed if I’d been paying more attention…
3. “Endless Yearning”, Judith Shadford
Highly impressed with this story in the latest Seize the Press, told through the impoverished future dialect of a youngster enslaved in the mines by robots known only as 'sternoids'
I walk to skoo every morning, but today chains hung across the door. Line of black buses waiting. Sternoids jumped out and shoved us inside. No seats, no windows. Us bigger ones hung onto the bars up top. Littles hung on us. The bus started with awful shaking—rattle rattle rattle. You couldn’t hear.
Skoo made us miners: hammers and chisels. Pick up crystals. Littles pick up stones. Kids like me hauled big chunks. When skoo was chained, sternoids came. Mines needed more kids.
It feels very much in the "if this goes on..." tradition of capital-C Classic Science Fiction--we live in a moment where (in the US at least) the powers-that-be seem eager not only to get kids out of school and into arduous physical labour, but also to use inhuman robot sentience to track and control as much of our human experience as possible, and this story seems, er, less than sanguine about the possibilities.
Bold choices going on here that should leave no reader indifferent, but then again that is Seize The Press's stock in trade, go support their patreon already, why dont you
4. “The Dumb Man”, Sherwood Anderson
Hot off the presses it’s a story from over a century ago. I’ve been meaning to tell people about this one for a few years now but never have—like our narrator, “I don’t have the words”. So here, check out the first few paragraphs of “The Dumb Man” by Sherwood Anderson.
There is a story -- I cannot tell it -- I have no words. The story is almost forgotten but sometimes I remember.
The story concerns three men in a house in a street. If I could say the words I would sing the story. I would whisper it into the ears of women, of mothers. I would run through the streets saying it over and over. My tongue would be torn loose -- it would rattle against my teeth.
The three men are in a room in the house. One is young and dandified. He continually laughs.
There is a second man who has a long white beard. He is consumed with doubt but occasionally his doubt leaves him and he sleeps.
A third man there is who has wicked eyes and who moves nervously about the room rubbing his hands together. The three men are waiting -- waiting.
Upstairs in the house there is a woman standing with her back to a wall, in half darkness by a window.
That is the foundation of my story and everything I will ever know is distilled in it.
…right? Right?? Doesn’t that feel a bit more twenty-twenties than nineteen-twenties? Am I out of my mind? Afterwards, a fourth man enters the picture, sending the other three into disarray, and the agitated, out-of-breath prose rushes to the end, a non-ending: “I have a wonderful story to tell but know no way to tell it.”
It’s not farfetched to chalk this energy up to Gertrude Stein, or at least that’s my theory. Anderson and Stein were great friends and mutual admirers, and “The Dumb Man” serves as a mission statement of sorts for the collection it introduces (The Triumph of the Egg), much as “The Book of the Grotesque” does at the start of Winesburg, Ohio and so if “The Book of the Grotesque” is Anderson in a Three Lives bag, “The Dumb Man” is his Tender Buttons bag, if that makes sense (or maybe his Geography and Plays bag lbr)
(i was hipped to this story indirectly by Diane Williams writing about The Triumph of the Egg in Granta some years ago when i was on a Diane Williams kick)
(The following story in the collection, “I Want to Know Why”, is also an interesting achievement which I cannot in good conscience recommend here mainly due to the *ahem* elevated number of times (24) that it uses the n-word)
Other short-story recs
speaking of Diane Williams’s writing in Granta, this one’s pretty great
[deep voice] previously on short story rex, I big-upped Ivy Grimes and Paula D. Ashe and must do so again. I read Grimes’s story “Stag” in the latest issue of Coffin Bell and she continues to be one of my favorite writers working now, and I’ve been reading Ashe’s collection We Are Here to Hurt Each Other during brief commutes on the train and so far its fucking disgusting in the not-bad-meaning-bad-but-bad-meaning-good sense of the word (as well as in the bad sense, tbc, its very gross lol)
Not-a-story rec: Destello Bravío
Finally got to see this fantastic film, the first feature from director Ainhoa Rodríguez, starring an ensemble of non-professional actors from a tiny pueblo in rural Extremadura. It weds an Iranian New Wave approach to almost a Greek Weird Wave aesthetic and if the preceding combination of words makes any sense at all to you then you might enjoy this profoundly feminist combination of docufictional technique and haunted, absurdist vibes. RIYL Through the Olive Trees, Alps, etc.
Also-not-a-story rec: Speak No Evil, Wayne Shorter
rip mr gone