Three short story collections for fluttering minds

Lauren Groff's Brawler, Juhea Kim's A Love Story from the End of the World, and Jess Gibson's The Good Eye

I’ve been under studio lights too much recently and my brain is on fire. I’m writing this with sunglasses on, like a cut-price Anna Wintour, having spent the last week dipping in and out of short story collections.

I’m a forever fan of short stories, but they are particularly good for agitated minds. They are also famously hard to sell, which surprises me now more than ever, when we are told ad infinitum that our attention spans are shot to shit. (I only half believe this, btw. I think it’s habitual, rather than a permanent Great Human Rewiring.) For the same reason, I’m surprised there isn’t more of a yen for short films. (I adore short films.)

First up, Brawler. Steel yourself for Brawler. These tense, tender stories will sock you in the throat. The first one I finished with my mouth agape, like a stunned fish. Lauren Groff is a magnificent writer - I’m due a Fates and Furies re-read, and I must try Matrix now I’m a little more receptive to hist-fic - and this collection is brutal and poetic.

A teenage swimmer and petty thief cares for her germ-phobic mother, who lies dying on the sofa, too terrified to eat. (“Her mother drank nothing but vodka now; it killed the germs, she said.”) A young woman chooses university over small-town life, leaving her adoring mentally disabled brother in a facility. (“Joanie, whom he blinked at, trying to understand, turned her own face from him and began to walk away, fast and did not look back.”)

A tsunami swallows a woman’s husband and child, while on holiday. From the waves, she claims an orphaned child as her own - and returns to work on Monday, telling no-one what has happened. (“The edges of the second self were becoming vague and one day it would vanish altogether.”) A mother of young children flees her violent husband, only for her tormentor to catch up with her at the last moment. (“Always inside my mother there would blow a silent wind… She tried her best, but she couldn’t help filling me with this same wind.”)

Brawler also has one of the most lyrical, expansive descriptions of death I’ve ever read:

“A slippage, a slickness, and even though it wasn’t taking place within her own body, she could see the slow and uncontrollable dilation downward and outward, into a vast sun-bright plain full of golden grasses swaying as though brushed by a great hand, and a horizon that didn’t stop in the vagueness that came at the end of sight, but pressed on into the palest and most fragmented of views.”

Sharp, unsentimental, glittering with violence and beauty, these timeless stories might be short - but they will stay with you far longer than most novels.

I didn’t realise that Jess Gibson was Margaret Atwood’s daughter until after I finished her debut short story collection, The Good Eye, and I’m glad of it. It would have inevitably coloured my reading of it. Although now I’ve told you, you will read it through the Atwood lens. (Sorry.) Reflecting on the stories, I can see a filial thread: they are peculiar and sly, with a sense of the uncanny.

The premise of The Good Eye is a persuasive one: that we all have a good eye and a bad eye. Examining something from a new angle can render it radically different: the beautiful becomes disgusting; the poetic is rendered banal. Or, as the blurb puts it (sometimes a blurb knows a book better than anyone) “the exalted disgraced, the genius an imposter”.

The stories aren’t a million miles away from Brawler: they’re surprising and unsentimental, but they’re also deliciously perverse. In ‘Pest Control’, the first story and my favourite in the collection, a psychic gets her revenge on a beautiful older woman she’s had a grudge against, since the woman dated her ex-boyfriend, an exorcist. (This is hard to describe, possibly to sell, but makes sense when you read it.)

“Even then '[Caroline] knew enough to spot a charlatan. She was a fucking psychic, after all. Oddly, it didn’t matter. The same slick charm that he turned on with clients made Caroline melt… It must have been some kind of turn-on for him: she was fresh out of college and still looked sixteen. Did you do your homework, young lady? Oh yes, teacher.”

Her writing reminds me a little of Jennette McCurdy - dry as a bone, vulgar, thrillingly well observed, sometimes disgusting, like the debonair man whose abscess bursts in his mouth. This is a perfect example of Gibson’s conceit: he’s suave on the outside (good eye), but rotting inside (bad eye).

There’s a foundation of mysticism to the collection - a clairvoyant who designs a house of glass for his wife and her girlfriend, while recuperating at some weird wellness lodge in a bygone era. Another woman who poisons her vile boyfriend after he demands her to cook a dinner party. In Italy, a Ripley-esque con artist befriends a rich older woman, but who is in control?

A deliciously satisfying collection which never quite dots the i’s - the discombobulation being key to The Good Eye’s appeal.

The last collection turns its eye outwards, to an expansive imagining of climate disaster. Juhea Kim is an advocate for wildlife conservation and her first short story collection (she’s previously published two novels) puts ecological disaster at the heart of most, but not all, of the stories: a biodome in near-future Seoul; an island made of landfill which tourists visit on day trips; a bio ark floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

In ‘Bio Ark’, the Earth has been abandoned and the only living humans have been on the Ark for almost 20,000 days. This is not a temporary living situation, many of the Ark’s residents were born on board. The Ark is as futuristic as you can imagine: there’s an Orgy Dome and a Fertility Temple; reading is considered too depressing; everyone is pansexual; the Ark’s CEO is the kind of Dorian Gray longevity bro that Bryan Johnson dreams of - no-one looks over the age of 25. There is nought to do on the Ark but work on your physical hotness and shag. It’s a mad, fun, nihilistic story.

In ‘Color of the New World’ [the book uses American spelling and so I shall too] the world is still going to hell in a handbasket, but we haven’t quite got there yet. California has “burned to a crisp” and Berlin is as hot as Baghdad. A painter meets an entrepreneur in the South of France who invents new colours, to cut through “the perpetual disorientation” of the new world. The result is ‘Knip’: a “blithe, seductive” colour that will unlock human consciousness.

“Leo is no longer smiling his concealing smile. His impatience shows. He has gambled years of his life to this sui generis endeavor; and the moment he shows anyone some animals in cages—a very nice plate-glass enclosure, by the way—they accuse him of barbarity. But what he is doing is far more humane than creating a single hamburger patty. This painter, with her penchant for deadly pigment, seemed to understand the trade-off between pain and beauty—that everything sublime has a price. He had found that sexy, along with her gameness. No he thinks she just sounds like an American. ‘This is consciousness itself,’ he says. ‘Don’t you understand?’”

Kim is an ambitious and relentlessly curious writer and I admire her scope. The stories overflow with ideas - they are sprawling, somehow fun in their level of total disaster. Some don’t quite work, which is to be expected in a collection this ambitious. ‘Biodome’ felt similar to Bio Ark, while others like ‘Notting Hill’ - where an irritating American moves to West London to live her best romcom life - lack impact when compared with the apocalyptic vision of the others.

Kim is strongest when she goes big on the disaster (I would have loved a whole collection around near-future Seoul: a dome, an ark, an island, etc.) When she imagines the most surreal, devastating planet we could live in. Not a reassuring premise - but then none of these collections are reassuring. Boy, are they compelling though. Snapshots of another world: rotating and rotting and birthing itself anew.