The New Uncanny – Tales of Unease.

Edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page.

Review by Jeanette Greaves.

For those who appreciate the art of the short story, every anthology is an invitation to a party.

Eyre and Page threw a theme party back in 2008, and invited selected authors to present their take on Freud’s theory of the uncanny. His 1919 essay on Das Unheimliche (literally, unhomely) identified eight ‘uncanny’ themes in fiction that could be drawn upon to instil unease in the reader. The themes have in common the transposition of the familiar into strange territory, and the unfamiliar into the everyday. Most of the eight themes are represented in this anthology, which has attracted contributions from household name authors such as A.S. Byatt, Ramsey Campbell and Hanif Kureishi.

The anthology kicks off with Ramsey Campbell‘s ‘Double Room’ a story of grief and guilt, of a widower in an anonymous hotel room, alone but for a taunting echo in the next room, leading him on an emotional journey from annoyance through fear to acceptance. Dolls and dummies, real and virtual, are a popular theme, perhaps because we can so easily imagine these inanimate objects as living creatures. The fate of Matthew Holness‘s eponymous ‘Possum’ in the second story reveals a dark secret from the past, it’s a twisting tale of things discarded, of damage and disease.

The theme continues with Nicholas Royle‘s ‘The Dummy’, a story that plays on the uncanny in its use of flashbacks and changes in viewpoint between the first and second person, expertly building up a level of threat and unease before neatly twisting the perception of danger back to front with an ending that sent this reader right back to the beginning of the story again…

A.S. Byatt‘s ‘Dolls’ Eyes’ changes the mood. It’s a story filled with love and familiarity, of the bond between a woman and her dolls, and of what happens when someone new comes along and invades the cosiness of the status quo. From traditional dolls and dummies, we move on to Adam Marek‘s ‘Tamagotchi’ and Frank Cottrell Boyce‘s ‘Continuous Manipulation’, stories that peer at the new creations of the digital age. In ‘Tamagotchi’, things don’t go according to the script in the users’ manual; reflecting the less than perfect family life of the protagonist. The idea of a virtual plaything reflecting real life is turned about in ‘Continuous Manipulation’, a brilliantly dark story in which the power of need becomes a thing of true horror.

The doll as animate creature theme is again inverted in the last story of the book, Etgar Karet‘s ‘Anette and I are Fucking in Hell.’; a very short story in which free will is absent, joy becomes horror, and conscious creatures become toys,manipulated for the pleasure of others.

With Sara Maitland’s ‘Seeing Double’ we move away from the doll theme, and into a story with a fairy tale quality that simultaneously explores the themes of blindness and of the unknown other. It is expertly told, sketching a world that you don’t want to leave. It’s one of those rare treats, a short story that could so easily be a novel, and which left me wanting to seek out more from Sara Maitland.

On the same theme, Alison MacLeod‘s ‘Family Motel’ is a disquieting story set in a New England motel where everything is slightly off kilter, including the eyes of the proprietor. Returning to the blindness theme, we have The Un(Heim)lich(e) Man(Oevre), by Ian Duhig, a word-dense and dreamlike journey into the unconscious, into a young man’s obsession with his father, with eyes, with the Masons, and with secrecy.

Taking the idea of Das Unheimliche quite literally, Gerard Woodward‘s ‘The Underhouse’ is an amusing story of an obsessive and not entirely kindly prankster, it builds an image that will not be lightly forgotten.  Christopher Priest‘s masterly ‘The Sorting Out’ also builds on the idea of home being not quite home, of someone else’s order being imposed, of a controlling presence. This is one of the real gems of the book, and is worth the cover price of itself. 

‘Long Ago, Yesterday’ by Hanif Kureishi winds up the trilogy of ‘uncanny homes’ with a wistful look at the narrator’s childhood home and family as seen through adult eyes.  Jane Rogers‘ ‘Ped O Matique’ moves the collection towards Stephen King territory. Rogers takes a simple, everyday situation, and turns it into horror. When a simple foot massage becomes an exercise in helplessness, a young academic has time enough on her hands to reflect on recent decisions, and her reasons for making them.

Fourteen stories on, I’m leaving the party, entertained by every story, disturbed by several of them, and promising more than one of the authors that I’ll be looking for more of their work in the months to come.

The New Uncanny is published by Comma Press(2008).

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Jeanette Greaves’ previous work has ranged from quality controlling the exact shade of peach in recycled toilet roll, to analysing the effectiveness of reed beds in the treatment of Yorkshire’s sewage. She now writes about werewolves. She blogs at http://www.bloginbasket.com .

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