One of the harsher effects of lockdown for writers has been the narrowing of opportunities to come out of our studies and meet with people – with each other, and also with readers. We’ve all done our best with Skype and Zoom, and the ingenuity and enthusiasm of booksellers and events organisers in making the most of the tools at their disposal has been incalculable. We all know by now though that online meetings are not the same, and even as we enjoy catching glimpses of one another across the internet, there’s nothing like coming together in person to celebrate the announcement of a prize shortlist, the launch of a new novel or simply to compare notes on what we’ve all been reading lately.
This privation has been especially difficult for authors who have had books scheduled to be published in 2020. Even under normal circumstances, there’s a significant gap between completing work on a novel and sending it out into the world. Having to wait an extra six months or even a year before their work sees the light of day has been deeply discouraging. For those writers whose novels have been released this year, there is the sadness of not being able to participate in book festivals, conventions, and all the other events that would normally mark a novel’s rite of passage. As we re-enter a heightened state of lockdown, even the opportunity of celebrating quietly at home with friends has been pushed into an indefinite future. Which makes it all the more necessary for us to gather the resources we do have: to read, to celebrate and talk about the books we love.
Christopher Priest’s new novel THE EVIDENCE is published today. This is Chris’s sixteenth novel to date, which is achievement enough in itself. It is also a fantastically inventive, original and unexpected novel, a true delight to read. The Evidence brings us into the company of Todd Fremde, a crime writer who has been invited to give a lecture at a university some two days’ travel from his home island – for yes, this is a Dream Archipelago novel like no other. On arrival in the icy outpost of Dearth City, Todd finds himself with more than dreary weather to contend with as he is drawn rapidly into a situation that seems increasingly to resemble the plot of one of his own police procedurals.
As Todd struggles to make sense of what is going on around him, he begins to examine the activity of crime writing itself: why are we addicted to it, and what does it actually have to say about the nature of crime? The Evidence is a funny, thought-provoking, thoroughly entertaining book, a crime novel that undermines itself at every turn whilst retaining and honouring all the elements of mystery that make detective stories so satisfying.
I love this book, and I know you will, too. In fact I would go so far as to say it’s a novel that’s perfectly timed to bring some much needed joy and humour to our reading lives. If you’ve never read Priest before, The Evidence might be exactly the right place to start.
Truly delighted to reveal Julia Lloyd’s exquisite cover design for Ruby, published by Titan Books on the 8th of September.
Ruby is the brand new title of the brand new edition of Stardust, previously published in 2013 by PS Publishing. The all-new Ruby has been revised and expanded to include a new story that will reveal new insights and information about the book’s mysterious title character.
Ruby Castle is a film actor, famous for her roles in horror cinema, made infamous for murdering her lover in a jealous rage. The stories in this book illuminate her life and times from different angles, forming a multifaceted portrait of an extraordinary woman.
It has been a joy to return to this manuscript, to spend time with Ruby again, to bring to the text a new incisiveness and clarity. Writing the extra story was the icing on the cake! In the years since Ruby first stepped into the spotlight, I feel I’ve come to understand her better, and I hope I’ve been able to reflect this in the revised text.
Julia’s cover art captures the drama and tragedy of Ruby’s story to an uncanny degree. I’m thrilled with it, and looking forward to introducing Ruby to a wider audience later in the year!
I begin each reading year curious about which will be the first truly great book I stumble across and how long I’ll have to wait before that happens and this year I’m lucky: less than a month of 2020 has elapsed and I’ve already encountered Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier, his third novel, longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and as I’m turning the last page I’m wondering to myself how the judges could have had the hearts or minds to dismiss it from the running. It was a good longlist, I get that, a strong set of interesting books. Half of it had to be dispensed with, one way or another, but even so.
Night Boat to Tangier is not just a book about two Irish ex-gangsters. It’s a book about freedom and imprisonment, love (of course), exhaustion, despair, mental illness, the iron grip of history and personal trauma. Magic and folklore. Landscape, landscape and landscape. Poetry – because Night Boat to Tangier is an epic poem. If the definition – or a definition – of a work of art is a conceived artifact that is at one and the same time dreadfully specific yet utterly universal then Night Boat to Tangier is a work of art. (I keep thinking about John Banville, that quote of his just after he won the Booker about it being about time a work of art took the prize. I love it when writers come out with stuff they shouldn’t.)
Night Boat to Tangier fits wholly, sublimely into the song-tradition of Irish writing. But the feeling it gives me as I finish reading is – illogically, incongruously, absolutely – the same feeling I get reading or seeing a performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Barry’s interpolation of magical elements into his text is the capstone of genius and I am coming to think that Barry must be a magician. At the very least, he reminds us with every sentence why writing matters. A book to sear the heart and thrill the mind.
The end of the year has yielded some marvellous reading. I’ve been saving Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread until now, because the very title makes me think of Christmas (the parts of it I still enjoy, frost and music mainly, and, well, gingerbread) and because her close-knit, somehow private prose has a wintry feel, at least for me, by which I mean the scent of woodsmoke and the way Rothesay Bay looks – like the lagoon in The Land that Time Forgot – when it’s shrouded in mist.
Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread is all those things. It’s also a novel that is supported by an undercurrent of deep anger, wrapped about so tightly in coloured lights and party games you might not notice it. There’s a scene in the book where a bunch of helpless girls are being bullied by a bunch of other, momentarily more powerful girls, who make the tormented ones laugh and smile while they’re being pinched and manhandled, so the adults (and the watching cameras) will not realise what’s actually going on. The whole of Gngerbread is like this, and this is its subject matter.
I could call Oyeyemi a clever writer or a subversive writer or a writer of startling originality and while she is all of these things, what she is most is a writer who is intent on following her own interests, her own concerns, her own manner of expression, with barely a thought for the ‘literary establishment’ or what might be popular or acceptable or ‘now’. Her work is discursive, densely wound as a ball of wool and sometimes as difficult to untangle. There are moments when it’s tiring to read, to stick with it, because it’s so much its own thing, showing so little concern for what I might be thinking or feeling, but that’s what makes Oyeyemi’s writing rewarding, that’s what makes it important. I’m also guessing that’s what makes it so much less talked about and discussed and rewarded with prizes (am I mistaken in thinking that Oyeyemi has never yet been shortlisted for a major prize?) than it should be.
We have a magician in our midst. I know she won’t care about prizes, which is why I’m giving myself permission to care on her behalf. What she cares about is the writing, the doing of it, the thinking, the following of a thread of an idea (or a trail of breadcrumbs, if we really must) wherever it leads her. The placing of one word in front of another, an outpouring of imagery so rich and so personal it might communicate to some as dissonance, but that is in reality as careful and considered and skilful as the aligning and mortaring of bricks to build a fortress wall.
She is unique and she is wayward and she is to be treasured. I watched an interview with her recently on YouTube in which many of those qualities shine out strongly, most of all her insistence on being allowed the head-space to say what she actually means, rather than being pushed towards repeating the slew of steady, ready answers to familiar questions that inevitably accrue in our minds when we’ve done even a couple of author events, let alone a book tour. Again, treasure. I was interested, though afterwards not surprised, to hear her mention Jesse Ball as a favourite writer. Just a week or so ago I read his most recent novel The Divers’ Game, and though opposite to Oyeyemi in some ways – so pared down it’s like glass, or granite, with the immaculate sheen of poetry – in the quality of its writing it possesses that same waywardness, that same fierce, you might even say stubborn insistence on being what it is, that is, an almost icily accurate representation of what the writer is actually thinking, actually feeling.
Not a summary, not a pruned-back, dumbed-down approximation, but the real deal. A brutal and terrifying portrayal of dystopia and moral laziness and yet at the same time – can I even say this? – still somehow hopeful, The Divers’ Game should win every science fiction award out there in 2020. My prediction is that it won’t be shortlisted even for one.
I am thinking of these two writers especially today because they give me courage. They give me courage to believe that it is possible, as a writer, to enter the places you need to enter, to explore the realms of thought and language you feel bound to explore.
To say what we have to say, regardless of how it might be received, what worth might be placed upon it by others. To follow what we believe to be true, and to keep on going.
‘The poem, like most of my poems, and like the story I’d promised to expand, conflated fact and fiction, and it occurred to me – not for the first time, but with a new force – that part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.’
(Ben Lerner, 10:04)
In a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Open Book, an interview with the American writer Ben Lerner about his new semi-autobiographical novel The Topeka School could be heard back-to-back with a discussion between Olivia Sudjic and Meena Kandasamy on the nature and rise of autofiction. I read Sudjic’s Exposure earlier this year. At the time of listening to the programme I had just finished reading Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 in preparation for reading The Topeka School. As I write these words now, I turned the final page of Kandasamy’s third novel Exquisite Cadavers about half an hour ago.
Kandasamy has spoken of how Exquisite Cadavers is in part a response to the response surrounding her second novel, When I Hit You, much of which had the effect of relegating this singularly audacious, virtuoso autofictional essay on the radical power of literature to the domain of misery memoir. As part of the discussion on Open Book, Kandasamy was upfront about the repeated frustration she has experienced in being subjected to this kind of commentary:
‘When I wrote my second novel and it was very personal, people would reduce the whole thing to “oh, she just wrote about what happened to her”. Most of the emphasis was on the ‘what happened to her’ part of it, as opposed to the fact that ‘she wrote about it, and she’s creating a work of art here’. The fact that you’re a woman, the fact that this is an artistic endeavour that’s taken years to write is just erased.’
Sudjic was quick to confirm that her experience as a writer has thus far been very similar and I could have listened to their conversation for hours:
‘Autofiction when it’s written by women is often seen as this indulgent thing where they’re writing about themselves, and I find that so strange, because what they’re really doing is drawing attention to the frame. It’s a technique that sits next to metafiction really, which is drawing attention to how it’s all constructed, and I find it very frustrating that that’s what gets ignored when it’s women doing it, whereas for example with Ben Lerner, everyone’s very on board with reading those books as real, structural, artistic works, rather than constantly asking him what his mother thinks about the way she’s represented in them.’
Exquisite Cadavers is a brave and important work on so many levels. With a structure partly inspired by Derrida’s 1974 novel Glas, it presents a fictional story of a mixed-race couple living in contemporary London alongside margin notes detailing the ideas, events and research that inspired it. As the book progresses, the invented story and the autobiographical elements begin in their own strange way to coalesce, each illuminating the other in a way that reads as a genuine representation of the way fiction is actually created. It’s a brilliant achievement, and what I love most about it – as with When I Hit You – is its visceral revelation of the power literature can still wield, not in spite of its ‘literariness’, but because of it. The ‘lived experience’ is the creation of these words, these sentences, this body of work, not the facsimiles of experiences described, which may or may not be ‘true’ but who the hell cares? What we care about is what is on the page, the experience that brings reader and writer closer together.
The irony, as Sudjic points out, is the extent to which she and Lerner and Kandasamy are engaged in similar literary endeavours, as set against the peculiar distance that is drawn between them by many readers and commentators. I loved Lerner’s first two novels so much I found myself weeping in gratitude. I cannot imagine a more important writer right now than Kandasamy. I found Sudjic’s polemic in Exposure vitally enlightening and, safe in the knowledge that her second novel Asylum Road is coming down the line soon from Bloomsbury, I am about to begin reading her debut, Sympathy.
I’m saving The Topeka School for the week between Christmas and Hogmanay. Far from being played out, the novel today is more exciting than it’s been for years.
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.
*
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!
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.
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.
With just one day to go before the Gordon Burn Prize shortlist is announced, I have managed to read ten out of the twelve longlisted titles. Time constraints mean that I haven’t managed to blog about Will Ashon’s Chamber Music – a superb collection of essays, boldly conceived and powerfully executed – or Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, which was one of my reading highlights from 2018. I also ran out of time to read Kerry Hudson’s Lowborn – a book I feel I am almost guaranteed to like and admire (contrary though this may seem, this is undoubtedly the reason it kept getting pushed to the back of my reading queue) – and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, the one book on the longlist whose presence there bemused me.
With these personal shortcomings very much in mind, my prediction for the shortlist is as follows:
The Vogue by Eoin McNamee
For the Good Times by David Keenan
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine
Chamber Music by Will Ashon
This Brutal House by Niven Govinden
That being said, there’s an argument to be made for every single one of the titles I’ve read, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a very different shortlist emerging, with very different emphases.
I’m looking forward to finding out which books make it through. In the meantime, I’m also going to reveal my personal choice of winner, which would be Eoin McNamee’s The Vogue. The emotional power of that work, its inalienable sense of place, its stark poetry – even more than Ghost Wall and For the Good Times, my close runners-up, this is a novel that will remain with me for a long time to come.
