SHORT STORIES
GUESTBOOK by Leanne Shapton (Particular Books £22, 320 pp)
There are ghosts of all kinds in Shapton’s concise, uncanny stories and vignettes, which are illustrated with photographs of foxed mirrors, empty beds and kitsch Christmas wrapping paper.
She uses short, simple sentences to suggest situations that are sinister, inexplicable or beautifully melancholy.
In Sirena de Gali, there are snapshots of vintage clothes, with a prosaic description of the garment, followed by a poetic excerpt from the life of the woman who wore it, as if her long-gone feelings and the musty scent of memories are imbued in the fabric.
In Billy Byron, a pro tennis player with an ‘uncanny sense for where the ball was going’ is pushed to greatness and the grave by his imaginary friend Walter, while in Who Is This Who Is Coming, with its nod to M. r. James, a bedsheet performs an eerie ballet that hints at a haunting. Deliciously unsettling.
SHOW THEM A GOOD TIME by Nicole Flattery
(Bloomsbury £14.99, 256 pp) The funny, sorrowful characters in Flattery’s bold and bracing stories are ‘sick with chaos’, finding themselves in situations that have tip-tilted into the surreal.
Lives have been hollowed out — jobs lost, romances gone awry, parents gone — even as the weight of emotion has bowed them in unexpected ways.
In Sweet Talk, a small-town teen develops a summer crush on an older seasonal worker as a killer stalks the country.
In Track, recorded sitcom laughter provides the soundtrack to a fractious relationship, while in the title story, a young woman, whose previous employment has been in the porn industry, heads back home to a pretend job in a pretend garage and poignantly asks: ‘What have I done to deserve this life?’
IT’S GONE DARK OVER BILL’S MOTHER’S by Lisa Blower
(Myriad £8.99, 240 pp) The title of Blower’s debut collection of stories comes from a colloquial saying about the weather — there are dark clouds on the horizon and rain’s on the way.
It’s an apt forecast for the fortunes of the characters in these spritely, unsentimental tales, set in Stoke-on-Trent, where unfulfilled yearning, fractured families and uncertain economic futures set the emotional barometer to overcast.
In the opening tale, Barmouth, an annual trip to a caravan site charts the break-up of a marriage and the breakdown of sibling relationships.
In the prize-winning Broken Crockery, a naive, hopeful granddaughter misses her hospitalised Nan and repairs a smashed china sausage dog as a talisman for her recovery, while elsewhere, a cherry tree causes a rift as neighbours battle over its ripe fruitfulness.