A Personal Anthology, by Lloyd Shepherd

When Jonathan asked me to do this, I thought I was going to struggle, to be honest. I’ve never really considered myself a committed reader of short stories. I read a lot of longform fiction and not a lot of the shorter stuff.

Or so I thought. But a quick visit to the bookshelves at home changed that view, because it turns out I have a lot of pretty strong impressions created by short stories I’ve read – visual impressions, mostly, that have stuck inside my lizard brain like Rush song lyrics from when I was 13 years old.

So I’ve picked those stories which have left me with the strongest visual memories, which has meant recalling recent joys like Elizabeth McCracken, Henry James and Elizabeth Taylor, but it’s also rather joyously led me to stuff which I haven’t read for perhaps four decades, trying to find that story with that thing, you know, that thingI used to dream about.

And yes, this has also meant reliving those years when, alongside Rush albums, I was devouring SF, fantasy and horror with all the enthusiasm of a fan unencumbered by what other people thought.

So this, like my memory bank, is very much a mixed bag. It’s sort of in publication order. I tried listing the stories in the order in which I read them, but found the filing system unreliable.

‘The Story of a Masterpiece’ by Henry James (First published in Galaxy, January-February 1868. Collected in The Complete Tales of Henry James, Volume 1: 1864-1868. Available to read online here)

Henry James is my favourite author, I think. He’s certainly the one I’ve spent the most time with, apart from perhaps Stephen King (they would not have got on). My favourite novel is, unquestionably, The Portrait of a Lady, which I re-read every few years and still find dark depths in, because it is such a dark novel. So perhaps King and James would have got on. I certainly find James to be a much, much darker writer than he is often painted.

Talking of painting – I’ve picked one of James’s earliest published short stories, from before he wrote his first novel (Watch and Ward, best avoided, in truth), when he was still oscillating between Europe and Massachusetts and trying to find his true voice.

Which is strange, because the true voice is undoubtedly here, in this strange tale of a man who commissions an artist to paint his fiancée, only to be horribly disturbed by what the painting says – or might say – about his future wife. James’s obsessions with trust, surfaces, art and even the nature of evil itself are all present in here, and it’s a cracking story to boot. It would make an exceptional play – but then James thought that about a lot of his work, and the belief served him poorly.

‘As the Fruitful Vine’ by Mollie Panter-Downes (First published in The New Yorker, 31 August 1940. Collected in Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, Persephone Books, 1999)

Mollie Panter-Downes was a reporter and correspondent for The New Yorker throughout the Second World War, and published 21 stories in the magazine during the war, alongside a fortnightly ‘Letter from London’ and 18 long articles about life in England during the war. All in all she wrote 852 articles for The New Yorker, mostly from a secluded writing hut in the gardens of her country home where she lived with her husband and children.

‘As the Fruitful Vine’ tells the story of Lucy Grant, who discovers she is pregnant soon after marrying her husband and seeing him leave for the Far East with the Royal Navy. Her family fuss around her and encourage her to move away from London to live with relations in the country, as the great fear of a German invasion grows and grows. As in all the stories the point is that lives are continuing to be lived, even while the sounds of bombs from the other side of the Channel grow louder and louder.

But Lucy is less concerned about this than about her competitive older sister Valerie, though she comes to realise that Valerie has wanted to fall pregnant for years but has been unable to. This is the most important achievement in Lucy’s life, this ability to do something her sister cannot. Panter-Downes paints ordinary lives such as these continuing, with all their petty grievances and empty victories, even while the backdrop grows steadily more grim. It’s worth reading the whole volume as an alternative history of WWII, told through lace-curtained windows and enduring, ordinary lives.

‘The Day it Rained Forever’ by Ray Bradbury (First published in Harper’s, July 1957, and collected in The Day It Rained Forever, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959; also in The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Knopf, 1980; Everyman Library, 2010) 

Ah, Ray Bradbury. Has there ever been a writer so capacious? You don’t finish Bradbury, you live within him. I’ve been reading him for decades, and I still come across stories I’ve never read before, or perhaps had forgotten reading. Wikipedia reckons he wrote 600 short stories, and 11 novels, some of which were ‘fix-up’ novels, stringing together short stories into a narrative whole. The stories run the gamut from those collected in The Martian Chronicles, as fine a set of colonial parables as I know, to those in From the Dust Returned, based on a family of ghouls and ghosts, who live in Illinois, and are called the Elliotts.

The story I’ve picked is ‘The Day It Rained Forever’, which gave its name to a collection of stories published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1959. It tells the tale of three old men living in a hotel in an America desert, waiting for the rain that always comes on January 29^th. But this year, the rain doesn’t come – something else does, driving a car and carrying a harp. It’s classic Bradbury – warm-hearted, human, off-to-the-left-of-things, and thrumming with mystery. It’s also full of quite beautiful lines and images, many of which would read like poems if they were to be laid out in the right way: “The rain fell on the rooftop and fell on hissing sand, it fell on rustling car and empty stable and dead cactus in the yard.” A sentence made all the more remarkable by the fact that he isn’t actually talking about rain.

The collection is dedicated to Rupert Hart-Davis himself. In a nice piece of symmetry Hart-Davis also published the collected tales of Henry James.

‘All the Sounds of Fear’ by Harlan Ellison (First published in the UK in The Saint Detective Magazine, 1962. Collected in Ellison Wonderland, Paperback Library, 1962) 

When I was 12 or 13 my Dad signed me up to The Science Fiction Book Club, which sent an SF novel through the post once a month. I was introduced to Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (later filmed, stupefyingly, by Tarkovski as Stalker), An Infinite Summer by Christopher Priest, and Blackpool Vanishes by Richard Francis, but there was also a short story collection by the hack writer (I use the term with admiration) Harlan Ellison, called (and I beg forgiveness for Harlan here) Ellison Wonderland. The story that stuck with me was ‘All the Sounds of Fear’, which tells the tale of the terrible fate awaiting actor Richard Becker, known to the world as ‘The Man Who IS The Method’. The final scene left a visual impression which remains through to the present.

Ellison is maybe best known for his screenwriting, which included the classic Star Trek episode ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’. He cultivated a tough-guy, straight-talking writer-for-hire persona, personified by him sending a copy of every story he ever published to an Ohio State University professor who had denigrated his writing. Ellison punched him and was expelled. But this was a story Ellison told, and the boundary between Ellison the self-imagined writer and Ellison the living man is forever blurry. His short stories are madly imagined, overwrought and passionate. Perfect teenage reading, in other words.

‘Grey Matter’ by Stephen King (First published in Cavalier, October 1972. Collected in Night Shift, New English Library, 1978)

My Auntie Susan introduced me to Stephen King when she gave me a copy of The Stand in around 1978, when I was 12, and that was what was great about books in the seventies, before home video and when cinemas didn’t let you in to the scary stuff unless you looked like you could pass for 18 – there were no such walls around books. And because this is Stephen King I can’t help feeling that this was in some way a possession, like the demon that jumps from partner to partner in the movie It Follows. King has been with me ever since, and I now feel that the rest of the world has finally caught up with my own opinion, that he is as fine a writer as we have, and would be far more feted if his material wasn’t so damn entertaining.

King has always had a nice line in short stories, and I’ve picked ‘Grey Matter’ from his first collection, Night Shift, because it so perfectly captures a boy’s relationship with beer, this strange stuff which, on first taste, is absolutely disgusting but which can take its own hold on you (possession, again). Suffice to say, in this story, the beer takes hold in rather a different way. The story is also a great example of King’s masterful eye for the inflections of everyday speech, particularly the speech of his home state, Maine. The narrator is believable from the very first line, because he speaks like what he is, an old man shooting the shit with his friends in a windswept smalltown grocery store in the depths of winter. He’s full of magnificent proverbs and aphorisms which ring entirely authentically, in my ear at least, my favourite being ‘when you get up to seventy without an oil change, you feel that north-east wind around your heart.’

‘The Devastating Boys’ by Elizabeth Taylor (Collected in The Devastating Boys, Chatto & Windus, 1972)

Another story from 1972, and could it be any more different? Elizabeth Taylor is one of those writers who are shared among fans with a passionate adoration. I discovered her through social media, where a group of writers, all female, were waxing absolutely lyrical about her novel Angel, which I picked up and read in two days. I’ve since read most of her novels and short stories. They are all, without exception, exquisite, darkly funny, and delivered with the kind of precision only a genius of wit and observation can muster.

The short story Taylor is perhaps best known for is ‘The Fly-Paper’, which has the same speechless horror about it as ‘The Lottery’, by Shirley Jackson (who I sometimes think of as the dark American cousin to Taylor’s sharp-edged Englishness).

But I’ve picked ‘The Devastating Boys’. It’s a fairly challenging read to begin with, because the language describing the two Black boys who come to stay with a middle-class couple in Oxfordshire in the sixties is very much of its time. If you can’t get past that, then perhaps avoid. But if you *do* get past it you’ll find a novel’s worth of characterisation in barely 20 pages, as well as perhaps the best description of the tendency we’ve come to call ‘white saviourhood’ I’ve ever read. It is gloriously funny and just gorgeous. I can’t say better than that.

‘Amundsen’ by Alice Munro (First published in The New Yorker. Collected in Dear Life, Chatto & Windus, 2012)

I thought I’d read this story decades ago, but it turns out to only have been published in 2012, so I suppose it’s become mixed-up with one or more other Munro stories from over the years. She is such an encompassing presence that the stories do seem to merge together into a sense of a single person, a kindly presence who has known great sorrow and is far more passionate than she appears.

‘Amundsen’ tells the tale of a young teacher arriving in a small Canadian town to work in the classroom of a sanatorium dedicated to those suffering from tuberculosis. It has the precise world-building of a refined historical novel but that’s only the background – the foreground, of the narrator and the doctor with whom she falls in love – is told with an exquisite eye for gesture, nuance and speech and what they say about character. It’s an utterly delightful and softly tragic thing, as are all the Munro stories I’ve read.

PS: I’ve just looked Munro up on Wikipedia, and I find the bookshop she founded with her first husband James is still open. It’s a grandly opulent place, oddly out of keeping with her stories. The website is https://www.munrobooks.com

‘She and I Walking’ by Isaac Marion (Collected in The Hungry Mouth, self-published by Marion, 2012)

Marion’s novel Warm Blood, about a zombie who develops feelings for a living girl, was a massive worldwide hit, and was even turned into a successful movie. So there was something glorious about this collection of self-published stories emerging at around the same time – you could only order it directly from him, and he signed each copy.

Every story in the collection is weird, wondrous or wacky, and sometimes all three. You’re never quite sure where you stand, or even what you’re standing on. This story is a perfect example – a boy and a girl meet in a bar and then spend the evening walking along power lines and robbing banks. Are they not human in some way? Vampires? Lizard people? Or is this all just a metaphor for being high on someone else when you first meet them?

Marion continues to be super-interesting. He seems to have been burned by his fliration with Hollywood and Big Publishing, and now produces lovely music and videos from a shed he has built on land he bought in East Washington State. Look him up on YouTube. You’ll be intrigued.

‘Thunderstruck’ by Elizabeth McCracken (Story Quarterly, collected in ‘Thunderstruck and Other Stories’, Random House 2014)

I have just reread this because it’s been nearly 10 years and once again it completely knocked me off my feet. Elizabeth McCracken is the first writer I’ve discovered on social media not through personal recommendation, but through just liking her so much. Her Twitter account has for years been a font of delight, affection and humour.

So it was a shock – albeit a pleasant one – to discover that McCracken’s short stories are mini-masterpieces of pain and love. Or rather, the pain that comes from love, but is assuaged by it.

The story ‘Thunderstruck’, which closes this volume, is a perfect example of this. It’s about an American family – wife, husband, two daughters – who travel to Paris and suffer a tragedy which reframes their entire existence. If you’re a parent, it describes your darkest fears, but also your most intense joys. Love and pain, in fact.

‘Wodwo’ by Mark Haddon (Collected in The Pier Falls, Jonathan Cape, 2016)

I could have picked almost any of the stories from Haddon’s collection The Pier Falls. It’s a masterful set of tales, and I find Haddon to be extraordinarily interesting – a poet, a novelist, a short story writer, and an artist, he seems to ooze a frenzied creativity which is paradoxically under iron control. ‘Wodwo’ tells the story of a middle-class family settling down for Christmas Eve, with their complex power structures and and rancid complacence beautifully rendered with telling detail after telling detail, when they are interrupted by a terrifyingly earthy figure at the French windows, carrying a gun and offering a game.

Rereading it just now I realised that I did not know what ‘wodwo’ even means. An Internet search reveals a Ted Hughes dramatic monologue which I have not read, and the information that a ‘woodwose’ or ‘wodewose’ is Middle English for a ‘wild man’, a staple of Medieval literature who can often be found carved into cathedrals alongside the Green Man.

That should give you a flavour of what is going on here – a social satire surging on waves of deep myth. It’s a fabulous story.

‘Omphalos’ by Ted Chiang (Collected in Exhalation, Picador, 2019)

Ted Chiang is an unclassifiable phenomenon. His second collection, Exhalation, is recommended by both Barack Obama and Alan Moore. How do you file someone who appeals to minds as different as those? His short stories are magnificent thought experiments, packed with precise erudition, as if Borges had written a series of Black Mirror.

The story I’ve chosen, ‘Omphalos’, asks what the pursuit of science would look like in a world where God was definitively, provably real; that the Creation could be dated, and evidence of it was everywhere. What would it mean to be a scientist in a world like that? Chiang makes this feel astonishingly vivid, and when doubt intrudes into the cosy scientific world he sets up it lands with frightening intensity. But the collection is full of moments like this. It is just beautifully done.

‘Love Letter’ by George Saunders (Published in The New Yorker, April 6 2020, and available to subscribers to read here)

I can vividly recall reading this when it was first published, when Trump was still president, when we all thought Biden could never take the fight to him, when four more years seemed a probability, not just a possibility. And then what? What would he have done with four more years?

‘Love Letter’ gives one possible answer to that. A loving, beautiful letter from a grandfather to his grandson in a future America, where the Trump family has stolen the presidency, where letters are opened and read and keyboards are tracked. My new book, After London, describes a Britain under a surveillance government, and this does the same for America, but in only three pages, and with Saunders’s exquisite eye for human love and pain.

I’ve just reread it and it is still chilling. How close American came to disaster. And how close it may come again.

***

Lloyd Shepherd is an author and digital product strategist based in London. His latest book, published on November 2, is After London. He has four other published novels: The English Monster, The Poisoned Island, Savage Magic, and The Detective and the Devil. He also co-produces and co-presents a book podcast, The Curiously Specific Book Club. He was head of product for BBC Sounds, and previously worked for the Guardian, Yahoo and Channel 4. You can find him on his website at lloydshepherd.com, as @lloydshep.social.bluesky on BlueSky, @lloydshep on Twitter, as Lloyd Shepherd on Facebook and LinkedIn.

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,600 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com. 

* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He is Programme Director of the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.

* If you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors!

* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a new Substack originating from the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. The third edition will be out next Wednesday, featuring pieces by Jessica Andrews, Joe Thomas and Rebecca Tamás on the sometimes messy relationship between fiction and real life. Read it and subscribe here.