My reading seems to have leaned more towards literary fiction rather than genre fiction this year, mainly due to me randomly routing out books of short stories in my local secondhand bookshop and discovering many new writers. Here then, are a few short stories that I most enjoyed reading in 2018.
1. The Fat Artist by Benjamin Hale
From the collection of the same name, The Fat Artist is the tale of a successful artist who decides to become his own exhibit piece by sitting on a bed in an art gallery and eating all the food -
all the food - brought to him by the public in a quest to become the fattest person who ever lived. Hale's book contains a raft of disturbing, thought-provoking stories, with a cast of damaged, recognisable characters, and they often end on an unresolved note which may frustrate some readers but which for me made the stories even more haunting.
2. The Frozen Fields by Paul Bowles
Bowles tell the story of a small boy who, visiting his mother's family at Christmastime, dreams of a wolf to rid them all of his bullying, abusive and controlling father.
3. The Sunflower Seed Man by Priya Sharma
Priya Sharma cleverly uses the fact that sunflowers
are scary and
do have a kind of humanoid appearance to create this story about a loving father gone bad. From the collection All the Fabulous Beasts which has been one of my reading highlights of the year.
4. Rain by Andre Mangeot
Young Lucas, looking to show his father that his rebellious ways are behind him, is sent on an assignment to Romania for the family's lumber business. His new found respectability and thoughts of his impending marriage to a woman his parents adore are derailed when he defends a local woman, Katya, in a bar. From that point on, Katya, a sudden rainstorm, and Lucas's own buried ambivalence about his life, conspire to destroy the person he's tried hard to become. All told in vivid, exquisite prose.
5. Never Visit Venice and
The Inner Room by Robert Aickman
A few years ago when I was reading through Aickman's collections, I'd somehow managed to miss these two gems from The Wine Dark Sea - two of his best stories in my opinion.
7. In the Hold, It Waits by Tom Johnstone
A story of piracy and revenge on the high seas with some truly unsettling imagery including - at one point - flying Lovecraftian monsters that will literally hump you to death. That's right. From the beautiful
Book of the Sea from Egaeus Press.
8. The Winter Father by Andre Dubus
Andre Dubus has been my discovery of the year. When I finished his book
Collected Stories, I wanted to turn back to page 1 and start reading again. He's the kind of writer who makes you wonder how exactly he does what he does. How can his stories be so wordy and slow, and yet so powerful and gripping? I shouldn't work, but it does. It works magnificently! I finished
The Winter Father and just thought 'Wow'. Some of the others stories in the book, such as
The Pretty Girl, left me stunned. In fact, I could list almost all the stories from the book here, but I'll stick with one. The Winter Father tells of a man who splits from his wife and struggles through the winter to maintain a fatherly relationship with his children. When summer arrives, he finally finds a way.
9. Stone City by E. Annie Proulx
From Proulx's collection,
Heart Songs, which I thoroughly enjoyed, this is a ghost story without any ghosts in it. The narrator is a wannabe bird hunter who stumbles upon Stone City, the one-time home of a nasty and wild family, ruled over by Old Man Stone, a man who the narrator's acquaintance, Bangor, says 'should have had nails pounded into his eyes and a blunt fence post hammered up his asshole'. Stone City is now a deserted collection of shacks, but the narrator is soon to learn how Old Man Stone's evil influence continues to haunt the place.
10. Where No Shadows Fall by Gary Budden
What is this? A description of London written as weird fiction? However you want to describe it, this, for me, was easily the highlight of Tales From the Shadow Booth Vol.1.
11. The Boat by Alistair MacLeod
An affecting story with a tragic ending about a fisherman who aspires to more in rural Canada and the son who must choose between following in his father's wake or doing that which his father wanted to do but could not. This one strongly resonated with me for some reason.
