A Personal Anthology, by Tim Jeffreys
Though I consider myself a horror writer, I’m not a big reader of genre fiction. My definition of what constitutes a horror story is quite broad. Broader than most people’s. I look to find horror or strange stories or weird fiction or whatever you want to call it in unexpected places, often written by authors not associated with genre writing. All I ask is that the story be disturbing and odd and chilling. That it might make me laugh with some horrible black humour while at the same time thinking, ‘Should I really be laughing at that?’ That it might stay with me. That it might haunt me not because of ghosts or vampires or zombies, although those things might be present, sure, but rather because some unwelcome truth has been exposed. Something that resonates with my own life. For me, this is what makes a horror story work best. And ambiguity. Tons of ambiguity.
There are a few writers missing from my list who I would’ve liked to have included. Robert Aickman sets the tone but has too many wonderful stories to choose from. Andre Dubus’s stories didn’t quite fit the theme. And then there’s Rebecca Lloyd, Robert Pope, and L.S. Johnson, three great short fiction writers currently working.
The stories listed below would, in my opinion, make a wonderful anthology of strange tales. Some are very dark and serious, some are more fun (but still dark). These are stories that, if I’m being honest, I’ve tried to emulate over and over again, arriving at my own versions, hopefully unrecognisable from what inspired them. Isn’t that the biggest compliment one writer can give to another?
‘Vision’ by Alistair MacLeod (First published in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories, McClelland & Stewart, 1986, and collected in Island, McClelland & Stewart, 2000, and again in Island: The Collected Short Stories, 2017)
While there are quite a lot of weird goings on in Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod's wonderful collection 'Island', I was surprised by the supernatural elements found in one story, ‘Vision’. Like all the stories in the book, ‘Vision’ is set in Cape Breton, Nova Socia. While sea fishing, a father recounts to his son a tale of a trip he and his twin brother took as children to Canna Island. They were paying a surprise visit to their grandparents, but got lost and ended up in the filthy, cat-infested home of an old blind woman. They eventually find their grandparents house, but their connection to the old blind woman runs deeper than they realise, and she will end up saving one of their lives on the beach at Normandy during World War II, many years after her own death.
I also have to mention the opening story in this collection, ‘The Boat’, which is my favourite in the book. It’s a fantastic story but not one for this anthology.
‘The Frozen Fields’ by Paul Bowles (First published in Harper’s Bazaar, 1957, and collected in The Time of Friendship, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967, and then in the Collected Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009)
Reading Paul Bowles’s Collected Stories, it was this tale that stood out. While containing nothing fantastical, it does have little sprinklings of magic. It could almost be a fairy tale. In this story, a six-year-old boy called Donald, who lives with his parents in New York City, visits the New England farm of his maternal grandparents at Christmas. There, he fantasizes that a wolf smashes through a window and carries away his bullying and physically abusive father. Donald views the farm as an enchanted and magical place, a place where perhaps his rebellious spirit can take the form of a wolf and rid him of his father for good.
Except from Autobiography, by Morrissey (First published by Penguin, 2013)
As a life-long fan of The Smiths and Morrissey solo, I obviously couldn’t wait to get my hands on Autobiography. Largely, it didn’t disappoint. Maybe throw in a paragraph break here and there, why don’t you? And what’s with all the alliteration? I expected the book to make me laugh, cry, maybe roll my eyes occasionally – which it did. What I didn’t expect was to be sleeping with the light on after reading it. That’s because, embedded within the book, is one of the best and most chilling ghost stories I’ve ever read. I’ve often thought that this section of the book, if removed, would make a brilliant addition to a collection of ghost stories. For me, it’s with this section that Morrissey proves that in another life he could be a celebrated fiction writer.
It purports to be a true story, about a jaunt Morrissey took with some friends one evening in the late 80s onto Saddleworth Moor (Morrissey’s fascination with the Moors Murderers is well known). Returning after dark along a windswept moorland road, they see a figure “rising-up from the black earth…standing upright and then throwing his arms towards our lights.” It’s an apparition worthy of an M.R. James story: “a boy of roughly 18 years wearing only a humiliatingly-short anorak coat that was open to the rest of his body.” Between them the four friends search for an explanation, then at the first phone box they come across they call the police only to be told to keep an open mind. To my way of thinking that’s the last thing anyone in that situation wants to hear from the police!
‘One Warm Saturday’ by Dylan Thomas (First published in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Dent, 1940)
A young man goes to the beach, having spurned his friends because he’d decided he wants to spend the day alone. Once there, “among the ice-cream cries” he’s lonely and bored. He falls in love with a young woman “willing and warm under the cotton” who smiles at him in a communal garden. But he is too shy to talk to her. Luckily, they encounter each other again later that day in the pub where he’s been kicking himself for his shyness. After getting acquainted, they head back to her room, taking a party of people from the pub with them. She tells him the others won’t stay long and that he must be patient. Once in her room, he starts to fantasise about the time they’ll spend together, not only that night but for the rest of their lives. He’s sure the two of them are made for each other. It all seems too good to be true. But don’t worry, the only climax on offer is the devastating kind. Stepping out of the room to use the toilet, the young man gets lost in the dark hallways of the house. After disturbing many of the occupants of the other rooms, tearing up and down the halls shouting the woman’s name, and almost falling to his death down a shaft, he fails to find his way back to his lover. The horror!
Perhaps what appeals to me about this story is that Thomas sets up a kind of fantasy for the retiring type (of which I count myself), wherein despite being too shy to talk to the woman in the garden the young man gets a second chance (which never happens in real life, let me tell you!) and looks set to spend the night with her, only for this fantasy to be cruelly dismantled at the end. It’s almost as if I can hear Dylan Thomas laughing in my face.
The young man, we can only assume, will be haunted by this missed opportunity for the rest of his life, and will be forever wondering ‘what if?’ As, of course, is the reader. By this, and by his or her own lifetime’s worth of missed opportunities. How delicious. Right?
‘The Headless Hawk’ by Truman Capote (First published in The Tree of Night and Other Stories, Random House, 1949, and collected in The Complete Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 2005)
In ‘The Headless Hawk’, Vincent – an art gallery employee – has a painting presented to him by a girl with “trancelike eyes” who he initially dismisses as being “dressed like a freak”. The painting, though lacking “technical merit” nevertheless has “that power often seen in something deeply felt, but primitively conveyed”. Entranced by the painting, which the girl possibly painted while housed in some kind of institution, Vincent buys it for himself. Somehow, the painting conveys all Vincent’s life’s failures, which leads him to a fascination with the painter, as he wonders “who was she that she should know so much?”
He embarks on an affair with the woman, though he is ultimately disgusted by both her and the painting, possibly because he sees himself reflected in both.
This might be a study of psychosis or insanity. If the girl is crazy, does that mean Vincent is too, given that he sees himself in her painting? Is his appearance of sanity simply an act? Though there’s something dark and unpleasant at the heart of this story, it remains elusive. It’s a puzzle that the reader can return to over and over again, trying to figure out its meaning.
‘The Bottomless Hole’ by The Handsome Family (From the album Singing Bones, Carrot Top Records, 2003)
The horror of the human mind when it won’t rest, eh?
Given their association with the TV series True Detective (their song ‘Far from Any Road’ was the theme tune of its first series), it shouldn’t be too surprising to find The Handsome Family on this list. In fact, many of their songs function like short stories. Take ‘The Snow White Diner’, in which the occupants of a diner watch a car containing a deceased mother and children being hoisted out of a river, or ‘So Long’ in which the narrator bids adios to all the pets he ever owned, as well as “whatever was in that hole that I raked over”, and lists the manner of their deaths.
In ‘The Bottomless Hole’ a farmer discovers “the mouth of a deep dark hole” behind his barn. He tests the depth of the hole by chucking stuff in – broken tractors and dead cows, that kind of thing -– but never hears anything hit the bottom. So, unable to stop wondering if what he has here is a bottomless hole, he does what any reasonable person would do in that situation and makes himself “a chariot” using ropes and “a rusty clawfoot tub”. He then bids his wife and kids goodbye and rides down into the hole. Having cut himself free when he ran out of rope, he’s singing to us as he falls. He can’t remember his name. All he knows is that he must satisfy his mind as to whether or not this damn hole he’s in is, as he suspects, bottomless.
‘Stone City’ by Annie Proulx (First published in Grey’s Sporting Journal, 1979, collected in Heart Songsand Other Stories, Scribner, 1988)
To my mind this is a ghost story, although it doesn’t contain any actual spooks or spectres. What it does have is a family so bad, born bad, that though they’re long dead, or driven off, they continue to haunt and terrorise the people of Chopping County where the story takes place. An abandoned farm, once known as Stone City, a place where “the buildings were gone, collapsed into cellar holes of rotting beams” and “blackberry brambles boiled out of the crumbling foundations”, is their castle of Otranto. “There are some places that fill us with an immediate loathing and fear,” as Proulx puts it. And Stone City has “something evil tincturing the light”.
The farm was once home to the Stones, a family group led by Old Man Stone, the worst of the lot, “a dirty old tyrant” as one character has it, a man said to “have kids who were his grankids” and who “ought to have had nails pounded into his eyes and a blunt fence post hammered up his asshole.” Yep, he’s that bad. And even though he died a long time ago, his evil still permeates.
The story’s narrator is new to the area, and all this is related to him by Badger, a local man foolish enough to have gone hunting on the Stones’ property when he was a kid. “My dog,” he tells the narrator one day when they meet at Stone City “All I got in the world, ain’cha, Lady?”
Badger will come to wish he’d kept this thought to himself, at least while he was on this land, because somewhere in those cellar holes are the lingering spirits of the Stone family. And they are listening.
‘Prey’ by Richard Matheson (First published in Playboy, April 1969, and collected in Shock Waves, Dell, 1970 and a couple of Matheson Collecteds; also widely anthologised, including in American Fantastic Tales: Terror & The Uncanny From Poe to Now, Library of America, 2009)
Okay, so we’re edging into genre territory now, but at this point I think we need some light relief and this story, well, it’s hilarious.
It’s the story of Amelia, a young woman who one day brings home a package. Inside is a wooden box resembling a casket. Inside the box is “the ugliest doll she’d ever seen. Seven inches long and carved from wood, it had a skeletal body and oversized head. Its expression was maniacally fierce, its pointed teeth completely bared, its glaring eyes protuberant.” Also in the box is a tiny scroll which states “This is He Who Kills. He is a deadly hunter.” We, the readers, already know that this isn’t going to end well.
The doll, we’re told, is a rare Funi fetish doll which Amelia found in a curio shop, which is supposed to have the spirit of a Zuni hunter trapped inside, and which is a present for her boyfriend, Arthur. Instead of casting the damn thing out of a window, which is what anyone in their right mind would do, Amelia sets in on the coffee table and heads off for a bath. Once she’s gone, though, the doll falls off the table and the silver chain wrapped around it which prevents the spirit trapped inside it from escaping, slides off. Ah, shit. Here we go.
When she returns from her bath, Amelia is unable to find the doll. She goes into the kitchen and finds that a small knife is missing from the knife rack. We know what happens next. She’s pursued about the flat by the doll, which is intent on stabbing her to death. Even when she locks herself in the bathroom, she sees the knife blade being jabbed beneath the door. My favourite moment in the story comes when Amelia traps the doll inside a suitcase – this thing is only seven inches long, remember – and we breathe a sigh of relief and think she might survive this ordeal after all. But uh oh she hears a cutting sound and when she looks at the suitcase she sees a knife blade “protruding from the suitcase wall, moving up and down in a sawing motion.”
I wonder if James Cameron read this story before he wrote his script for The Terminator. Remember Kyle Reece’s line in the film? “Listen, and understand. That Terminator is out there, it can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop… EVER, until you are dead!”
‘Wingstroke’ by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov (First published in Russian, as ‘Udar krïla’ in Russkoye Ekh, 1924, and then in English in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Knopf, 1995)
‘Wingstroke’ is a fabulously strange and over-looked piece of weird fiction. It concerns a man named Kern who, reeling from the suicide of his wife, finds himself at a European ski resort where everything appears to be loaded with meaning and coincidence. There is also a touch of the fantastical about his surroundings, as well as with his fellow skiers. Marooned in the hotel, he notices himself being watched by “some pale girl with pink eyebrows”, and at dinner he encounters a “man with goat eyes”; whilst his creepy acquaintance, Monfiori, is described as having “pointed ears, packed with canary-coloured dust, with reddish fluff on their tips.” Kern appears to have entered a new reality, one where when it snows the hotel seems to “float upwards”. The perfect setting then for a supernatural encounter.
Also at the hotel is Isabel – known about the resort as ‘Airborne Isabel’ - an attractive and popular young woman whom Kern befriends and quickly becomes obsessed with. She inhabits the room next door to Kern’s. Much to Kern’s disbelief, Isabel likes to stay out on the slopes after dark, leaping, as she says, “right up to the stars” and encountering who-knows-what in the snowy darkness.
One night, unable to sleep, Kern hears guitar music, laughter and strange barks coming from Isabel’s room. The next night – drunk, half-crazed, and suicidal himself – Kern notices that Isabel’s key has been left in the door. What Kern does next, bursting into the room and telling Isabel that he needs her love, sets off the chain of bizarre and unexplained events which reach their sad conclusion the next day when Isabel takes part in a skiing competition.
The sudden intrusion of the supernatural into this story is what, for me, makes it such a great read. There’s a chance, obviously, that what Kern encounters in Isabel’s room could be a figment of his increasingly unhinged mind. Told in vivid and descriptive prose and packed with unsettling imagery, ‘Wingstroke’ is one of the finest weird fiction tales I’ve read. We’re left feeling as if the ending hasn’t been adequately explained, whilst at the same time secretly understanding everything. What hasn’t happened is that what we understand about the ending hasn’t been confirmed, which is of course what makes it so memorable.
‘The Pipe’ by Jack Pendarvis (First published in The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure, MacAdam/Cage, 2005)
Some years ago I went through a McSweeney’s phase – collecting the McSweeney’s editions, and the short story collections of authors whose work I discovered in those pages. Jack Pendarvis was one such author. In his story, ‘The Pipe’, a radio DJ has been buried underground for 46 days “to break some kind of record”. The frightening thing about this story is that guarding the DJ’s air pipe on the midnight to 6am shift are a security guard and a paramedic, two people – it quickly becomes apparent – you wouldn’t trust to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.
On the first night they smoke dope and discuss what things they could drop down the pipe, such as fire ants or cotton balls. Some nights the paramedic doesn’t turn up (he’s writing a rock opera), leaving the security guard to whisper to the DJ and force sandwiches down the pipe when he worries the DJ might be hungry. One of my favourite moments is when the paramedic plays a self-penned song for the security guard called, “Half-Hearted’, and we realise why no one has ever written a song with that title. “Half-hearted when you told me that you love me,” the song goes. “Half-hearted when you told me that you care.” (Try singing it and you’ll understand.)
I remember not being able to stop reading as the days counted down, increasingly concerned as to what would be found when they eventually dug the DJ up, given that he’d been under the not-so-watchful eye of these two imbeciles. Had Pendarvis actually provided an answer to that question, I probably wouldn’t still be thinking about this story all these years later.
‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard (First published in We are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (a collaboration with Robert Aickman), Jonathan Cape, 1951. Collected in Mr. Wrong, Jonathan Cape, 1975 – more latterly Picador, 2015 – and in Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories, Tartarus Press, 2003)
A very Aickman-esque tale. I’ve heard it suggested that Aickman actually wrote this story when he and Howard were in a relationship together, which seems like a misogynistic viewpoint. It could be that this is Howard trying to out-Aickman Robert Aickman. Whatever, this is an extraordinary story with just the right amount of weirdness and ambiguity to leave the reader haunted and having to come up with their own conclusions.
‘Three Miles Up’ concerns two friends, John and Clifford, as they embark on a barging holiday. Following a furious row they pick up a mysterious but friendly young woman called Sharon. We realise something is not right about Sharon because when John and Clifford speak to a small boy who’s watching them from a tow path, she emerges from the cabin and the boy gives “a sudden little shriek of fear…and turned to run down the bank the way they had come.” Whatever spell Sharon has cast over John and Clifford to veil her true self, the boy obviously sees her for what she is. After they encounter a turning on the canal not shown on their map, which Sharon gently encourages them to take, they soon discover that they've made a terrible mistake.
‘The Familiars’ by Micaela Morrisette (First published in Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between: Impossible Realities, 2009)
With only a handful of short stories to her name (only four that I'm aware of) Micaela Morrissette was, for a time, one of my favourite writers.
‘The Familiars’ is a beautifully written tale of a mother vying for her son against the imaginary friends who keep appearing from under his bed. The great thing about this story is that there is so much detail and such ambiguity that it can be read and enjoyed anew again and again with the reader noticing different things each time. I’ve read ‘The Familiars’ about five times now and I still haven’t quite grasped what’s actually going on in this story. Are the boy’s friends real or only imaginary? There does seem to be some sort of magic going on. In one scene the mother visits her dead husband’s grave, then goes to a stream and casts away some of his belongings. Yet we are never told why. This made me wonder if the friends are actually the father returning in a different form, and this was the mother’s way of trying to be rid of him/them. Or perhaps the story is about the mother’s attempts to rein in her son’s imagination before he starts school and enters the real world. Or perhaps it’s merely about loss and mourning, and the ways that people deal with it. That’s the beauty of this story, it seems designed to make you ponder and speculate; an approach that in the wrong hands could simply frustrate the reader, but here it keeps you coming back again and again to re-read.
Tim Jeffreys’ short fiction has appeared in Supernatural Tales, The Alchemy Press Book of Horrors 2 & 3, Nightscript 4, Stories We Tell After Midnight 2 & 3, Cosmic Horror Monthly #1, and many other places. His ghost story novella Holburn was released by Manta Press in 2022. The sequel, Back from the Black, came out in 2023. Other work includes the comic horror novella Here Comes Mr Herribone! and sci-fi novella Voids, co-written with Martin Greaves. For updates: www.timjeffreysblogspot.com. Tim also edits the Dark Lane Anthology series
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with nearly 2,900 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.
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