Andy Hedgecock introduces a callout for short stories. Image above: not Lenin writing flash fiction, but Lenin in Smolny, by Isaac Brodsky, 1930 (detail) Photo: Tretyakov Gallery/CC
In the summer of my 15th year, in a room with a view of Loch Linnhe, I read The Sixth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. I had no presentiment of the enduring influence of this 35p paperback. I still have my copy: it includes six well-written and entertaining excursions into the supernatural and two explorations of more ambiguous territory: The Door In The Wall by HG Wells, and The Grey Ones by JB Priestley. These stories have several features in common. They were written by socialists, they undermined the anthology’s title by failing to include a single ghost and – more significantly – they are narratives of transcendent complexity and weird resonance. For me, as a teenage reader, they were a revelation. In a few thousand words – without breaking the spell of their relentlessly engaging plots – their authors played with structure, language and symbol to challenge perception and provoke speculation.
For example, The Grey Ones reflects on psychiatry as a means of control, historical representations of evil, fear of otherness, and the tension between individualism and social cohesion. In addition, it dabbles with notions of paranoia, conspiracy, reason and intuition. These tales – steeped in sadness and primal anxiety – reinforced my relish for short fiction as a reader, writer and critic. George Saunders, a frequent chronicler in fiction of the failings of corporate capitalism and the distractions of consumerism, summed up the appeal of the form when he said: “When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.”
Ra Page, founder and managing editor of Comma Press, shares Saunders’s belief that stories can change the way we see the world. “The short story is the natural home of the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the unheard – characters on the periphery,” he says. “Like the poor sledge-driver, Iona Potapov, in Chekhov’s Misery, its protagonists are often ignored and considered insignificant in their lives, yet they still ‘thirst for speech.’ Right now, too many people in the world are being left unheard, thirsting for speech. As a form, the short story doesn’t just welcome these kinds of perspectives,” says Page, “it puts them centre-stage.”
Page’s passion for short fiction – and his commitment to bringing new voices, fresh outlooks and unorthodox storytelling to a wider audience – has led to the creation of a short fiction list of striking variety. There is sci-fi from Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Egypt and Palestine; stories exploring the intersection of art and science; tales from uncelebrated cities; and single author collections from M John Harrison, David Constantine, Sarah Schofield, Sara Maitland and Hassan Blasim.
Professor Ailsa Cox, Professor of Short Fiction at Edge Hill University, has explored the potential and appeal of the short story from the perspectives of writer, academic and critic. “It’s the immediacy and the concision of the short story that makes the writing so vivid,” she says. “You can get down to business. You don’t have to fill in all the background and explain every detail. You’re there, in the moment. That does mean you have to read in a different way, a slower way, filling in the gaps and not minding ambiguity. Page for page, a short story takes longer to read, and a good one leaves you wondering, as if you’ve just woken from a dream. Because they’re so immediate and – with luck – don’t take too long to publish, short stories keep up with a fast-changing world. In my view, the best short stories don’t usually deliver an obvious political message; that makes for dull and predictable writing that doesn’t challenge the reader. Good short stories subvert reality, sometimes through touches of the fantastic, the weird or the gothic.”
Cox notes this tendency in Lucy Wood’s short stories set in the Cornwall unseen by tourists, in Alice Ash’s linked stories of a rundown estate in Paradise Block, and in the uncanny landscape of Fen, Daisy Johnson’s debut collection. “The short story is endlessly inventive,” she asserts. “It’s where writers go to play. But it’s also a hugely accessible form.”
Sarah Schofield – author, academic and convener for the annual Short Story Prize awarded by Edge Hill University – acknowledges the progressive potential of the short form: “Short stories are brilliantly sneaky and subversive. In the UK particularly I wonder if sometimes they are seen as a little innocuous, and so writers have more room to explore an idea and address power imbalances, be they social, political, or other.”
Like Ailsa Cox, Schofield is wary of in-yer-face moralising and stresses the importance of crafting an effective interaction between reader and author. “The short form is unique in its ability to explore the minute weirdness of our contemporary existence and always has been. A great short story, one that leaves space for the reader and doesn’t bash them over the head with a glib or didactic message, is an act of nuanced investigation alongside the reader.”
Stories don’t work well as policy documents or draft manifestos, but the best of them offer more than mere entertainment. They illuminate specific aspects of human experience. Examples of nuanced and collaborative investigation can be found in the stories of China Mieville, SJ Bradley and Schofield herself. Covehithe – a haunting collision of absurdist nightmare and rational anxiety – is one of several explorations of ecological disaster in Mieville’s 2015 story collection, Three Moments Of An Explosion.
Despair does battle with resilience in SJ Bradley’s Backstreet Nursery, 2050 (from the collection Maps of Imaginary Towns, 2024). As the title suggests, this is mundane, near-future science fiction. In a few pages, Bradley sketches a society that extrapolates from our own; a sham democracy in which the population are neglected and coercively controlled. Rejoice, from Schofield’s collection Safely Gathered In, appeared as a special feature in the Morning Star (December 24 2021). Themes of loss and vulnerability are counterpointed by a child’s fascination with Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s evasion of scrutiny through her use of spin and divisive language has obvious contemporary echoes, but the story has multiple layers of meaning.
These are terse but powerful tales, and we need more of them. We need stories set in workplaces, estates and decaying city centres; stories exposing abuses of power, corporate calamities and government deceptions; stories powered by the hopes, fears, experiences and imaginations of working-class writers.
So, we’d like you to send us your stories. We wish to publish them. Contributions are voluntary, and any profit will support the Morning Star. To quote Sarah Schofield again, “Developing skills in story writing, storytelling, is a delightful and empowering process. Looking at something through the lens of fiction gives you the space to see it afresh.”
Stories, of up to 1,600 words, should be submitted to: Morningstarshortstories@gmail.com
