Here are two more pocket paperbacks of short stories from the 1995 Penguin 60s collection for you for #ShortStorySeptember, hosted by Rebecca. Both also fit the RIP XXI challenge with their dark themes…
The Portobello Road and Other Stories by Muriel Spark
This little volume comprises four stories selected from Penguin’s The Collected Stories of Muriel Spark, originally published in the late 1950s, early 1960s.
The title one is a cracker with a real sting in its tail. Narrated by ‘Needle’, an epithet gained from an incident in childhood where playing in a haystack with friends George, Kathleen and Skinny, the protagonist finds and is pricked by a needle! Whether said sharp was an actual needle or just something capable of puncturing the skin is never told – I went with the latter – but the nickname stuck.
Years later she is mooching about the Portobello Road market stalls when she sees her old friends George and Kathleen, and she says hallo. . .
‘Look!’ said George. ‘Look who’s there, over beside the fruit stall.’
Kathleen looked but didn’t see.
‘Who is it?’ she said impatiently.
‘It’s Needle,’ he said. ‘She said, “Hallo George.” ‘
‘Needle,’ said Kathleen. ‘Who do you mean? You don’t mean our old friend Needle who. . . ‘
‘Yes. There she is. My God!’
He looked very ill, although when I had said, ‘Hallo George’, I had spoken friendly enough.
‘I don’t see anyone faintly resembling poor Needle,’ said Kathleen looking at him. She was worried.
George pointed straight at me. ‘Look there. I tell you that is Needle.’
‘You’re ill, George. Heavens, you must be seeing things. Come on home. Needle isn’t there. You know as well as I do. Needle is dead.’
That’s all you need to know really. Needle tells her story of how the friends split into two couples, and she went off to Africa with Skinny, returning to England after he died, and then something happened… Classic Spark with great characterisation of Needle and George – and a nice sting in the tale.
The middle two stories, Bang, Bang You’re Dead and The Seraph and the Zambesi didn’t grab me as much. In the former, a woman watches reels of film taken in childhood with an audience, and the truth is rather different to what’s on screen, the latter is set in Africa and involves a Nativity and an angel!
The final of the foursome, The Dragon, was another classic though, and could easily have been the inspiration for the movie Phantom Thread with Daniel Day Lewis as the designer obsessed with his craft. It concerns an exclusive dress designer, and the assistant she employs to maintain her privacy – to be her dragon, so to speak. And when the dragon rather takes over, something must be done . . . Loved it.
His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood and other stories by Poppy Z Brite (aka William Joseph Martin)
The four stories that make up this selection are taken from Brite’s second book after their 1992 gothic horror debut Lost Souls which I read when it came out in paperback. The short stories in Swamp Foetus (titled Wormwood in the US) were published a year later. Brite is now known as William Joseph Martin, a gay trans man.
The title story is a dark tale of sado-masochism, sex, graverobbing and voodoo which begins…
‘To the treasures and the pleasures of the grave,’ said my friend Louis, and raised his goblet of absinthe to me in drunken benediction.
‘To the funeral liles,’ I replied, ‘and to the calm pale bones.’ I drank deeply from my own glass. The absinthe cauterized my throat with its flavor, part pepper, part licorice, part rot.
Our narrator tells of finding a kindred spirit in Louis, and the pair embark on lives of sado-masochistic debauchery, but all too soon, that’s not enough to satisfy their spiritual needs! So they start graverobbing for treasures which excite them – and it’s when they steal a voodoo fetish from the neck of a newly buried young man that it all goes wrong.
The second tale, The Sixth Sentinel starts out as a touching story, where a ghost is able to communicate with a young woman who’s down on her luck, but that takes a creepy turn too born out of the ghost’s growing love for Rosalie. The third story is based in Calcutta, (now Kolkata) where a young American-Indian man walks the streets observing life particularly at the temple to Kali. However, Calcutta by night is a different world where the Dead roam (zombie-like).
The final story, How to Get Ahead in New York, features the rock duo Lost Souls, aka Steve and Ghost, who feature in Martin’s debut Lost Souls. They arrive in New York at the Port Authority, and after an encounter with a group of bums there, make their way to Greenwich Village for their gig. It’s fair to say, their first visit to the Big Apple is an eye-opener. I enjoyed these gothic horror tales a lot.
If I have time to fit it in this month, I also have an anthology of short stories set in Berlin kindly sent to me by V&Q books. I have enjoyed these Penguin 60s though, and plan to include more of them dotted through my reading in the future. Thanks to Rebecca for actually getting me to read some of them!
