I was trying to think small when I started Carl's RIP Challenge, but I am finding that I like the books I'm reading so much that I want to read more of them. At the moment I've got three novels started and decided I would indeed read a few short stories as well. In previous years I've read a story a week, but I think I'll just read randomly and at whim, so I have pulled out a few anthologies to choose stories from.
First, though, a quick run down of the novels. I've started Nicci French's The Memory Game, her first book (rather should say 'their' first book as I understand this is a writing duo?). I think I'm going to like it but the story opens with what seems to be a very full cast of characters, which is proving to be the tiniest bit confusing. Jane is an architect, and though she is divorcing her husband, she is designing and extension onto her former-in-law's country home. The extended family is all present for a celebration when the builders unearth a set of bones in the construction site. The family believe they belong to Jane Martello, Jane's good friend and her husband's sister who went missing more than two decades earlier. So far so good, an interesting premise, but I do hope the characters begin sorting themselves out.
I'm very much enjoying Ethel Lina White's The Lady Vanishes, which is a short novel that could be read in just a gulp or two, but I'm taking my time with it. It was published in 1936, so just up my alley period-wise. Iris Carr, a young socialite, is vacationing in Europe (I suspect in Germany perhaps or Switzerland?). Her raucous friends have already left to return to England, but she has stayed on a few more days after an incident with one of the other women in her party. Iris does little to endear herself to the rest of the guests in the hotel, and it's obvious she's going to get into some sort of trouble as there's a fair bit of foreshadowing going on.
My best choice so far, however, is Ruth Rendell's Demon in My View. I think Ruth Rendell is an absolute master of the crime fiction genre. Even her so-so books are well written and compelling reads, but her best books are really exceptional. I know I have enthused about her before, but she is really amazing considering her writing career spans over four decades now. I'm intentionally not going to share much about the story as this one grabs you from the first page and the less you know about it the better and more surprising. I will just say this is Vintage Rendell. It's a character study of one very peculiar man, Arthur Johnson. The setting is a London house converted into flats and very soon a new resident will arrive and throw Arthur's life into disarray.
Several years ago someone recommended two anthologies of short stories that are edited by Alberto Manguel called Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature and Black Water 2: More Tales of the Fantastic. Each book is a massive compendium of dozens of stories (both books are over 900 pages) that deal with the fantastic, the unusual, the dreamlike, the frightening--perfect RIP reading I think. They are unfortunately out of print but are well worth looking for used copies. Although Manguel doesn't write an introduction to either volume, he does give a brief introduction to each story. It's quite comprehensive in terms of authors--both well known and others you may not at first recognize. Cracking the books open, it's a hard choice where to begin, but "Mr Sleepwalker" by Ethel Wilson caught my eye.
Although Ethel Wilson didn't ring a bell when I saw her name, when I discovered she had written Hetty Dorval, I realized she is a Persephone author. "Mr Sleepwalker", Manguel writes, is like nothing else Wilson wrote, and I can well believe it.
"Certain places, certain people, certain things possess an obsessive quality: there's something about them that affects a particular viewer in such a way that nothing can erase the place, the person, the thing from the viewer's mind. This notion lends, for example, an entirely different sense to the trivial expression 'see Naples and then die' or to the story about the fleeting image of the nine-year-old Beatrice which Dante saw crossing a bridge in Florence and was never able to forget. 'Mr Sleepwalker' explores an instance of such a haunting."
Wilson was Canadian and the story begins in Winnipeg where Mary Manly has followed her husband who is a forester in government service. He often travels abroad but when he must travel to other Canadian cities Mary prefers to go with him. During the war she had never shown a tendency to any undue imagination or flights of fancy, but one afternoon while riding a streetcar she encounters an unusual man who catches her eye and then seems to follow her about, much to her consternation.
Mr. Sleepwalker is a small man. She imagines that if it were a different time he would be a gentleman's gentleman. Although neat and tidy, he has a face that both attracts Mary's attention and repels her. His eyes are warm reddish brown and his hair descends in reddish soft sideburns resembling soft fur. He exudes both a sense of gentility and something decidedly feral. At each encounter, and there are several, Mary becomes more repulsed by this small man with his animal smell and small rodent-like eyes. Eventually he turns up at her door.
This is indeed a curious story--very Twilight Zone-ish, if you're familiar with the TV show. There's a certain irony in the explanation, which reminds me of Daphne du Maurier, a short story writer whose work I always enjoy returning to. I have several other collections of stories to dip into and hopefully there will be at least one ghost story amongst them, though I don't mind the absurd or unusual either.