This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
When is a short story not a short story? Earlier this year, we reviewed Colwill Brown’s excellent debut novel We Pretty Pieces of Flesh. Last month, one chapter of Brown’s novel won the BBC National Short Story Award, as a stand-alone work of fiction. The borders are permeable. Which makes it a good time to use this month’s fiction column to look at a sample of this season’s short story collections.
Welsh writer Cynan Jones is known for two things: writing about men and the natural world and cutting his stories to the bone. Cove, one of the greatest short novels I’ve read, was about a man stranded on a boat. His previous novel The Dig was about lambing and badger-baiting.
Pulse follows this pattern: its six stories feature a runaway bear, theft of peregrine eggs, a tempest and more. The men here are battling animals, the landscape and themselves. In the stories, a place of belonging and even opportunity becomes hostile — often through the character’s own actions.
Nothing is overstated: if you skip a line you could miss a revelation about a man’s character, such as one opening line where a passing reference — a man landing a fish thinks, “if I still had the dog I would give it to the dog” — evidences loneliness.
Everything is physical, even the way intensifying thoughts batter the men’s heads as they push on: tracking a bear, trying to prune a tree in a storm. Descriptions are sensory: smoking fish turn “from silver grey to soft brass”. Milk bottles on a vehicle are “achatter in the crates, the chickeny chatter of a chicken coop”; the man tackling the tree observes “the lifting bubble of the ground around its trunk”. The close-cropped prose brings us as close as possible to the action and emotion, but it also forces the reader to slow down and sink in deeper.
The stories “Cow” and “Stock” are the longest, but Jones uses the extra length to tighten the cord of tension even more. The latter has the amplitude of a novel, where even secondary characters feel developed. A man visits his housebound grandmother, whose reduced limits of life are encapsulated by her comment when a bus drives by her home and “the tiny space trembled”. “They don’t stop, those buses,” she tells him. “I don’t know where people are going all the time.”
One thing that might initially seem to be missing from these dark stories is comedy. Yet even here, Jones can deliver. “Reindeer” develops in an outlandish, almost surreal direction which can only evoke barks of laughter, whilst “White Squares”, where a father offers unwanted help to his estranged son, has a more directly comic premise. Jones does not publish copiously — this is only his third slim book in a decade — but each time he does, he gives us enough to delight in for years to come.
Pulse ends with floods, and Tim MacGabhann’s collection of stories, Saints, begins with one. You might contrast MacGabhann with Jones in productivity — this is his second publication this year following the widely-acclaimed memoir The Black Pool — but they have an energy in common.
MacGabhann is an Irishman currently in Paris, but he spent ten years in Mexico as a journalist — and a junkie. (The memoir covers his addiction.) I don’t know what he’s on now, but it’s working: the stories are terrific. They’re all set in central America, featuring men and women heading to, or away from, states of chaos. The opening story, “Chair”, features a man preparing to lead a narcotics recovery group and symbolically staving off the inevitable by lugging sandbags around to block floodwaters. He knows it’s futile: “One day the rains’ll close over my roof. I’ll sink and be gone in a pluming of dirt-coloured bubbles.”
Yet he persists anyway, as we all do. The characters here have a curiosity about the world, such as the protagonist of “Satellite”, who takes a trip on his motorbike (“now the city is receding below him, the road empty, his head empty too, like he’s in an ad”) to watch a Chinese satellite drop out of orbit and land in the sea beside the port of Coatzacoalcos.
“Ideal, in a way,” he tells another man. “If a satellite hit Coatzacoalcos, right? I’m not sure anyone could tell.” By the time the fall is due — “a great white scar pulls itself across the sky” — we’ve been through a torrent of experience with one man and “the world’s molecular helter baring itself all around him.”
Naturally, drugs make an appearance too, most copiously in the savagely titled “Better”, where the hero Diego dabbles in heroin, cocaine, cannabis and wine in the space of two pages. His history of substances mean that he had to stop playing the guitar after he “tied off one night drunk, fell asleep [and] woke without the feeling in the fingers of his right hand”. The corollary of all this is that when the story opens, an earthquake has happened — and Diego didn’t notice.
The fun begins when the local authorities knock on the door (“This makes him sit up. A bowling ball of pain rolls to the front of his skull”) to try to get him to evacuate. After all, as a friend tells him, “there’s thousands of people missing. It’s like a trending topic or whatever.”
And so it goes, with MacGabhann offering not just style but a vision of the world: stylish, scabrous, dangerous, absurd, irresistible. And as the collection proceeds, a sort of modulation sets in, if not quite a mellowness. Characters recur, giving a sense of coherence and community.
And the tone is so seductive that we can even read optimism into the doomiest statements, as when a man avers, “You know, after humans are gone, all our last traces are going to be, like, twenty-six inches of glittery stuff at the bottom of the sea.” Warming to his theme, he adds, “All of human history, every century, every war, every landfill, just a little glitter, then a scatter, then gone.”
Has any 20th-century writer had such a great influence from such a slim body of work as Flannery O’Connor? Well, perhaps Kafka. But O’Connor’s clutch of two slim novels and two collections of stories (one posthumous) continue to define the Southern Gothic genre. Her centenary has spurred Faber to reissue a selection of her stories under the title of one of her best, Good Country People.
We open with “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, where a family on a trip encounters a violent convict on the loose known as the Misfit, like a malevolent god invoked. The matriarch of the family, the grandmother, engages him hopelessly in debate about Jesus even as his sidekicks pick off the family members one by one.
Whether this is a triumph or a failure of the human spirit is neither here nor there, for O’Connor has bigger fish to fry. The grandmother in a moment of Christian grace accepts the Misfit as one of her own, and the story exemplifies O’Connor’s blend of black comedy, empathy and Old Testament wrath.
One word frequently used to describe O’Connor’s work is “grotesque”, and her fondness for damaged characters can be unsettling to the modern reader. But they are not the butt of the joke. “In The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, a mother is “ravenous for a son-in-law” for her 30-year-old non-verbal daughter.
When a travelling handyman comes visiting, the mother proposes a bond between the two. “One that can’t talk can’t sass you back,” she assures him. As is so often the case in these stories, hubris is followed by nemesis, here personified by “a guffawing peal of thunder” that is a bit on-the-nose as a representation of God’s laughter, even by O’Connor’s standards.
Big characters are her speciality. In “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”, a young woman invites to her graduation her elderly grandfather, a retired general who “when he had been able to stand [ … ] measured 5 feet 4 inches of pure game cock”. He’s a man who forced his way through life and now “didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again” — but O’Connor and her mischievous spirit have other ideas.
The title story exemplifies O’Connor’s qualities, featuring atavism against modernity, faith against rationalism and characters who are grotesque against, well, those even more so. It culminates in a scene of seduction between a Bible salesman and an atheist with a false leg (“Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he pants), which is richly comic but also revelatory of character, of how the woman is spiritually as well as physically crippled.
There is nothing to fault here except the stories chosen, which weigh heavily on O’Connor’s early work. (There aren’t really any duds in her stories, so any selection will both satisfy and frustrate.) As she submitted each story to him, O’Connor used to tell her editor Robert Giroux, “Wait till you read this one!” The reader knows what she meant.
She once spoke about how, when giving a talk, she was asked “Why do you write?” and replied, “Because I’m good at it”. She “at once felt a considerable disapproval in the atmosphere” — but she was spot on.
