To me, the longstanding appeal of fiction has always been to escape my limited worldview and enter that of somebody else. Now, I don’t read stories by women to find out what women are like. There’s real life for that. I read stories by women for the same reason I read stories by men. When I say I love the stories of Mavis Gallant, I don’t say so because she is a woman. I say it because she is a great writer, full stop. It’s embarrassing to belabour this point, but I feel I should, because I am a man, and because there is nothing so awful for a man to say than something like, “She’s great. And she’s a woman, too!”
Something rather dreadful like this happened recently on Twitter, when Playboy (who’da thunk a Hugh Heffner production would be so sexist?!) tried to heap praise on the musician Neko Case. The cringe-inducing tweet that Case was “breaking the mold of what women in the music industry should be” elicited more than a cringe from Case—thank God.
1. The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street, by Mavis Gallant
This story, about ex-patriot Canadians in Europe (like many of Gallant’s stories) is probably one of her most famous. It’s the kind of story you can read, not get, read again, not get, and keep not-getting, perhaps for your whole life. Because that’s how Gallant is—so astonishingly life-like are her literary creations that you never, ever feel the authorial temptation to tell you something, explain to you something. No, what you get is messiness, confusion, self-doubt. This story is about an encounter between a male protagonist with a younger woman who is originally from a small-town in Saskatchewan. It’s simple. And it’s not.
2. Dear Life, by Alice Munro
The title story of Alice Munro’s most-recently published collection is a gem, not just for all the many usual reasons that Munro’s fiction is celebrated, but also because it’s such a compelling account of how an author picks over the events of her own life—seeking stories, maybe meanings—and how both the stories and meanings change over the decades. It’s probably not a stretch to say that only a woman of Munro’s extraordinary longevity could pull off this kind of feat.
3. Bliss, by Katherine Mansfield
“Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at–nothing–at nothing, simply.” That’s how much fantastic writing is on offer just in the first line. New Zealand has produced so much more for us to marvel at than the backdrop for the The Lord of the Rings.
4. The Museum of Useless Efforts, by Cristina Peri Rossi
The imagination of the Uruguayan Rossi, is larger than the constraints of earthly reality, if one can make so bold a claim. Her highly experimental fiction is always weird, never dull. I really love this story because it starts with such a wonderful premise—a museum that catalogs all the “useless efforts” in history (“a man tried to fly seven times; some prostitutes attempted to find another job; a woman wanted to paint a picture”)—and it just gets better from there.
The classic story of a descent into madness. It’s made all the more poignant because madness, of course, plays out worse for women than men in the late stages of the nineteenth century, when this was written.
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| Margaret Atwood |
6. The Resplendent Quetzal, by Margaret Atwood
Atwood is possibly the wittiest author Canada’s given the world. Her story from 1977 about tourists in Mexico is a gem.
Intense, fast moving and with a shock ending. Frequently anthologized.
8. Why I Live at the P.O., by Eudora Welty
Set in the deep South, by an author who, like Faulkner, was determined to create narrative out of the society immediately around her, this story bursts off the page through the entertaining but also cruel conversation/argument that you get in a close-knit family.
This entry on the list is, well, me cheating, because this is not in fact a short story, but rather, a novel excerpt that the magazine n+1 published back in 2010. I was blown away by it and scant months later, bought the full work. Heti is easily one of the best young Canadian authors at work today.
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| Mavis Gallant |
10. In the Tunnel, by Mavis Gallant
I said I loved the stories of Mavis Gallant, so I had to include a second story by her on the list! This one sets a couple of stodgy old Brits in the south of France with a young Canadian guest who is sleeping with somebody she calls Professor Downcast. Brilliant.
Laurence Miall is a Montréal-based writer who spent his childhood in England before emigrating to Canada at the age of 14. Miall has contributed to The Edmonton Journal and his short stories have been finalists in the Summer Literary Awards contest and Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. Blind Spot, his first novel, is being released by NeWest Press in September. Miall is the fiction editor of carte blanche.
An ancient prophecy predicts that ‘the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it’. On his wedding day the heir of Otranto is killed, his body found crushed beneath a giant helmet. His father, Manfred, Prince of Otranto, fears the prophecy is coming true and contrives to divorce his current wife and marry his son’s betrothed, Isabella, to produce a new heir. However, Manfred carries a family secret and as his desperation to capture Isabella grows, supernatural forces awake within the castle.
One of Poe’s most famous stories, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is narrated by an unnamed man who arrives at the House of Usher to nurse his friend and master of the house, Roderick Usher. The house appears to be falling apart and both Usher and his twin sister, Madeline, are infected with a strange illness. When Madeline dies, the narrator helps Usher entomb her in the family crypt. A storm rises and strange happenings within the house begin to drive the occupants mad.
A woman suffering what we today understand as post-natal depression is taken to the counrty by her doctor husband and forced to rest in what was once a nursery decorated with peculiar yellow wallpaper. Within the pattern the narrator spies another woman creeping, creeping around the room.
A governess takes a position looking after two orphaned children on a remote country estate. Soon after arriving she begins to sight a strange man and a woman moving about the house and grounds. She becomes convinced that the couple are in fact the children’s former governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover and fellow employee, Peter Quint—now both dead. The governess becomes increasingly alarmed when she learns that these ghostly apparitions are visiting the children.
One of the most famous (and frightening) haunted house stories ever written, The Haunting of Hill House establishes many of the tropes of the modern haunted house story. Paranormal investigator Dr. John Montague is determined to find proof of the supernatural. He rents a rumoured ‘haunted house’ where several violent deaths have occurred and invites a number of people with links to the supernatural to join him in the house for the summer. Only three accept his invitation: Luke Sanderson, heir to the estate; Theodora a bohemian artist; and Eleanor Vance, a painfully shy woman who encountered a poltergeist as a child and spent her youth nursing her invalid mother.
Technically The Shining is the story of a haunted hotel rather than a haunted house, but that just broadens the scope for terror. Aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic, Jack Torrance, takes a job as caretaker at the Overlook Hotel during the off-season, bringing his wife and young son along for the adventure. While Jack hopes the winter will give him time to sober up and write his book, the Overlook has other plans. His son, Danny, has ‘the shining’—a gift that enables him to see the horror of the hotel’s past—which he must use to stop his father from killing himself and his mother.
It’s a big call to make, but House of Leaves might just be the scariest book of all time ever. The primary story follows the classic haunted house plot. A filmmaker moves his family into an old house only to discover a sometimes-there-sometimes-not doorway in the living room that leads to a dark maze beneath the house. Against all common sense, the filmmaker decides to investigate and document the process. Unspeakable terror ensues.
Winner of the 2008 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel, The Seance is the second book in what might loosely be called a trilogy, preceded by The Ghost Writer (2004) and rounded out with The Asylum (2013). The three novels aren’t explicitly linked, but they are connected through Harwood’s nuanced understanding of Victorian Gothic and all pay homage to the archetypal stories and voices of the genre.
Set in post-war 1940s England, The Little Stranger narrates the financial ruin of the noble Ayres family and general decline of the landed gentry that occurred in post war Britain. Country doctor, Faraday, befriends the Ayres family after attending a sick maid at their estate, Hundreds Hall. However, as he draws closer to the family and comes to understand the extent of their financial distress and struggle to keep the house, unsettling events begin to occur on the estate, threatening the lives of its inhabitants.
Part coming-of-age narrative, part haunted house story, White is for Witching is sinister and surreal. After the death of her mother, eighteen-year-old Miri develops pica—a rare mental illness compelling her to eat chalk, stones and other non-foods. Meanwhile, the ancestral home her father runs as a bed an breakfast stirs to life, scaring off staff and guests, and a mysterious figure, the Goodlady, walks invisible through the rooms.