where
short story collections step into the

The great joy of this collection is its eclecticism. Muriel Spark is perhaps best known for her acerbic wit and her economic style which some call ‘sparse’. Certainly, her later novels, like The Finishing School, are pared down to the extent that they read a little like film scripts. Readers who know Spark for her novels may be surprised by the range of style and subject matters tackled in her short stories. Nearly every genre is covered here, from the ghost story to the surreal fantasy, social commentary, murder mystery, psychological thriller, even a nod at science fiction.

It’s a great collection for writers wanting to study the short story form and for readers who want to explore the same. Spark won awards for several of her stories including famously The Seraph and the Zambesi, one of the short stories in this collection, a fantastical tale of the English celebrating Christmas in the rainforest with a climatic scene set at Victoria Falls which stayed with this reader for a long time. Perhaps my favourite story in the collection is the brilliantly funny, cruel and ultimately poignant story You Should Have Seen the Mess. Spark adopts a narrative voice which is utterly alien to her – and to most of her readers – and uses it to weave a compelling story of misplaced snobbery across the class divide. Terrific.

The collection is also noteworthy for containing stories so short they would today fall into the category called ‘flash fiction’. The Girl I Left Behind Me is a superb example of how Spark can tell a complete story, in this case with a jack-knife twist in the tale, in just two pages. By contrast, The Go-Away Bird unfolds in fifty pages as a densely plotted, claustrophobic and tension-cranking masterpiece. Miss Pinkerton’s Apocalypse, about a middle-class, middle-aged, middle-England couple who encounter a flying saucer in the shape of a piece of airborne Spode, has a joyous, irreverent feel which speaks of the fun Spark had playing with, and sometimes breaking, the short story convention.

 
Sarah Hilary’s stories have been published in The Beat, Neon, SHINE, Bewildering Stories, Every Day Fiction, LitBits, MYTHOLOG, HeavyGlow, Twisted Tongue, Static Movement, Kaleidotrope and the Boston Literary Magazine. Her short story, On the line, was published in the Daunt Books 2006 anthology. She won the Litopia "Winter Kills" Contest in 2007 with her story The Chaperon. Sarah lives in the Cotswolds with her husband and young daughter.