Best Short Stories of 2013 (Somewhat Biased & Woefully Uncomprehensive)

This year, I've been keeping a log of the best short stories I read; I was initially going to only record those that were actually published this year, but I got slightly confusing with reprints and the like, so this list includes some stories pre-2013, but they're all comparatively recent.

To be eligible, the stories had to be ones I read for the first time at some point in 2013, and ones that impressed me enough to make a note of them. Then I reviewed the list prior to writing this blog post; any I couldn't really remember and that hadn't stuck with me were discarded.

In general, I've tried to avoid listing any author more than once, but I weakened a few times.

Nina Allen: The Phoeny War (NewCon Press Sampler)
Simon Bestwick: Lex Draconis (Tales Of The Nun & Dragon, Fox Spirit)
Simon Bestwick & Gary McMahon: Thin Men With Yellow Faces (This Is Horror chapbook)
Keith Brooke: Beside The Sea (Memesis, Infinity Plus)
Ramsey Campbell: Holes For Faces (Holes For Faces, Dark Regions Press)
Ramsey Campbell: The Long Way (Holes For Faces, Dark Regions Press)
Mark Chadbourn: Whisper Lane (The British Fantasy Society: A Celebration)
Ted Chiang: Story Of Your Life (Stories Of Your Life And Others)
MR Cosby: Unit 6 (Darker Times)
MR Cosby: In Transit (Darker Times)
Nicole Cushing: The Peculiar Salesgirl (Polluto #10)
Christian A. Dumais: Leave Me The Way I Was Found (Shock Totem #2)
Cate Gardner: Pretty Little Ghouls (Shock Totem #2)
Jessica George: New Town (Impossible Spaces, Hic Dragones)
John Greenwood: Puppyberries (No Monsters Allowed, Dog Horn Publishing)
Shaun Hamilton: The Shuttle (Ill At Ease II, PenMan Press)
Lauren James: Fences (The Side Effects Of The Medication)
Lauren James: The Side Effects Of The Medication (The Side Effects Of The Medication)
Hannah Kate: Great Rates, Central Location (Impossible Spaces, Hic Dragones)

Gary Kilworth: Filming The Making Of The Film Of The Making Of Fitzcarraldo (Infinity Plus Quintet)

BV Larson: Beside Still Waters (For When The Veil Drops, West Pigeon Press)
Amelia Mangan: Some Girls Wander By Mistake (No Monsters Allowed, Dog Horn Publishing)
Gary McMahon: Just Another Job (Urban Occult, Anachron Press)
Gary McMahon: The Grotto (NewCon Press Sampler)
Mark Mellon: Asshole Factory (Polluto #10)
Steve Mosby: Fruits (author's website)
Tony Rabig: The Other Iron River (The Other Iron River & Other Stories)
Iain Rowan: The Singing (Supernatural Tales #23)
Christina Scholz: The Lost City Of Emory Winters (The Big Click)
Steve Rasnic Tem: Wheatfield With Crows (Dark World, Tartarus Press)
Lisa Tuttle: Flying To Byzantium (Infinity Plus Quintet)
Stephen Volk: The Arselicker (Anatomy Of Death, Hersham Horror)
Mark West: The Bureau Of Lost Children (Ill At Ease II, PenMan Press)
Leslianne Wilder: Sweepers (Shock Totem #2)
Conrad Williams: The Fox (This Is Horror chapbook)
Jennifer Williams: Spider Daughter Spider (Urban Occult, Anachron Press)

Review: The Side Effects Of The Medication - Lauren James

Lauren James’s book The Side Effects Of The Medication is one of the strongest short story collections I've read all year, and almost certainly the best from a début author bursting into the party out of nowhere. The stories veer between horror, crime, and even science fiction. The tone is equally varied, James handling black comedy and grim horror with equal aplomb. She even writes a story in the second person that doesn't sound awful.

 

Fences starts the collection and it’s a riveting tale about the fear of our neighbours, and of trespass. Marianne and her husband have their garden invaded by their neighbour's big, black dogs, and put up a fence to stop them returning. But the intrusions, of various kinds, keep occurring... and escalating. As the plural title suggests, there are multiple boundaries erected and being crossed here, not just the physical one that marks off one property from another. The theme of lines being crossed – physical, mental, or ethical – and of boundaries being blurred is central to many of the stories here. As such, Fences is a perfect opening story to the collection, and one of my favourites.

 

Others that especially stood out were:

Cover Yourself – here James mixes science fiction with the kind of ambiguity found in the best weird fiction: although ‘what’ is happening is clear enough, the significance of it to those participating is vague; in fact exactly who is participating is vague. (As is this description, because I don’t want to ruin things for you.) 

 

The Devils is the first of two stories about an exorcist called Reese Campbell, who deals with human created horrors as much as anything supernatural. The lesson being, I guess, that if we believe in devils and demons of any stripe we legitimise evil behaviour in ourselves. Not that this story is that simply black and white, for there is an outside evil here too. The final story in the collection, Full, is also about Campbell, investigating a too-perfect house.

 

Maybe best is The Side Effects Of The Medication - the title story contains the kind of surreal magic realism you might find in someone like David Barthelme’s work. In this story some people’s dreams are physical, fragile things like soap bubbles – these dreams are the ‘side effects’ of the title. And other, dreamless people, pay good money to see the dreams. Again, boundaries are crossed as the personal becomes public and all too visible.

The Side Effects Of The Medication (UK | US)

Distorted Visions

I like to say, in glib self-promotional moments, that the sort of horror that I write is one where the story reflects the psychology of the characters. You can probably find me saying something similar in the About Me section on this very blog. It’s a short hand, really, to say that my stories aren't just about people having their spleen eaten off by zombies, oh no. It's true as far as it goes. But like most marketing speak it’s too simplistic to mean much.

Thinking about it more, I think that what I am trying to say is that a lot of good horror reflects the world-view of the characters (and readers). But like one of those funfair mirrors, what comes back is distorted. Or even broken.

Clichéd example alert: Lovecraft is well known for his ‘cosmic horror’, one of the central ideas of which is that mankind is meaningless to the universe at large. This is a direct challenge to the prevailing Christian view of earlier times, that mankind was essential to Creation, because God. And even 19C atheists seemed to have a very smug, aren't-we-swell view of humanity. Maybe its because that kind of small-r religious view of the life is less prevalent that explains why Lovecraft’s legacy, amongst his more second-rate followers, seems to have been reduced to pop-culture wowing over the cool monsters with funny names. Few seem to grasp that the Outer Gods are scary because they are gods; debased, insane gods who don’t care about us enough even to punish us.

I'm not religious myself, which is probably why I merely admire Lovecraft’s work as one horror author amongst many rather than hero-worshipping him like some in the horror community (oh, and there’s his repellent racism, too). But I have my own views on life and the horror that I most admire is probably that which challenges these views and throws them back at me in distorted ways. Of course, some opinions I hold are too trivial or subjective to be considered here – my contention that Giant Steps by The Boo Radleys is the most underrated album of the 90s is certainly one that’s been challenged, mainly by my mates in the pub, but such ignoramuses disagreeing are hardly going to destroy my entire world view. But how about these statements, all of which I ‘believe’ to certain degrees and with the usual caveats:

That we have free will, to a greater or lesser degree, and therefore at least some influence over our own destinies.

That logic and cause and effect mean that life is relatively stable and sensible, and that we can understand the reasons why.

That although people don’t have a soul they do have a personality that remains largely the same over their lives.

That despite all the setbacks, society is slowly becoming more civilised and tolerant; we are moving away from the jungle.

All these beliefs are pretty fundamental but I can see that a lot of my stories are essentially trying to test these principles to destruction; to attempt to prove them wrong. The doppelgängers and the ghosts; the conspiracies and the inescapable deaths are all suggestive of the fact that what I believe might be as fundamentally wrong as the idea that humanity is at the centre of you universe. That such fundamental truths are little more than smoke and mirrors. And what could be more horrifying than that?

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Over on Martin Cosby's site, you can find a new interview with me, should you be so inclined. Lots of talk about influences and crippling writer insecurity.

I've always found Lauren James to be a very acute and interesting writer about literary horror, and so I was pleased to see the title story from Falling Over discussed in this excellent piece about the theme of 'the double'.

Guest Post: Lauren James

Today on Scattershot writing we have a guest post from Lauren James. Lauren's new collection of short stories, The Side Effects of the Medication, is one of the best début collections I've read for a long time, her stories mixing horror, crime, and general weirdness. I heartily recommend it.

Take it away, Lauren:

“I don’t like horror because I scare too easily,” a friend of mine once told me. He said that during horror movies, if things were too intense, he would try to pick out the shadows of boom mikes or visualize the cameras just outside of the frame.

A few months after that, I called to tell him that I’d had an unnerving thought. Even though nighttime usually turned my bedroom an ashy sort of gray rather than a pitch-black, I’d woken up and not been able to make out the square corners of the door. The shape of it in the dark, as constant as anything else, had vanished. I went on to tell him that even though I knew it was impossible, for a heartbeat—a two in the morning heartbeat, which is longer than any other kind—I had felt like the door itself had disappeared. Something happened—the moon came out from behind a cloud or a car passed outside—and the door leapt back into its soothing geometrical presence.

“But what would you do?” I said. “If you woke up in the morning and your door had disappeared? What if you couldn't get any signal on your phone? You’d have to assume the whole world had disappeared.”

“No,” he said. “I’d just assume there had been some sort of mistake.”

I ask you, of the two of us, who scares easily?

The question about the missing door, by the way, is neatly and conclusively answered by Michael Marshall Smith’s “What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night,” which is obviously the work of someone who scares easily—and then thinks about it.

Longtime horror readers and viewers may be immune to the simpler jump scares and decapitations, but if my own experience is any judge, we’re all too ready to be terrified by the subtler, deeper horrors. Our minds go to work easily on worst case scenarios.

A creaking floorboard in the hall isn't the house settling but a stranger walking softly towards your door. The cracked mirror may really give seven years bad luck. Most frightening of all is the suspicion I have sometimes that, elusively, there’s simply something wrong: with the world, with what’s happening, and—especially—with me. Sometimes horror shows us that we can’t separate ourselves from the darkness, because it’s lodged inside us like a rotten tooth.

I sometimes write stories about horrible things happening to apparently good people, but I just as frequently write stories about apparently good people doing horrible things. Sometimes we’re the horror, tipping over the edge of doing the worst things we can think of, either accidentally or willfully. I'm afraid of what I might do in a moment like that and I'm afraid in a different way of what the aftermath would look like.

What happens when you ignore your husband’s locked freezer in the garage? What happens to the people who used to be zombies? What would you give yourself permission to do if someone else was less than human—or even just a figure on a screen?

I don’t think my friend worries about these things. He’s not a horror reader.

Whereas I need horror to give concrete shape to the fears already in my head. I need it to pose questions and—sometimes, at least—propose answers. I have to read (and write) horror. I scare too easily not to.

The Side Effects of the Medication is available now (UK | US)