A new anthology produces bold, stunning, and innovative short fiction
Duets: Stories | Scratch Books: £11.99
Reviewed by Paul Knowles
Tom Conaghan (the publisher of Scratch Books) has commissioned and released another daring and innovative anthology of short fiction: Duets. Duets follows in the wake of Scratch Book’s Reverse Engineering series. The Reverse Engineering series focused on acclaimed short fiction writers disseminating one of their most well-known stories and discussing the creative process behind its creation. The premise behind Duets is that Scratch Books has commissioned sixteen renowned short fiction writers to work in collaborative pairs to produce eight exceptional short stories, and then discuss the process of collaboration.
The first collaborative pair are spouses Nell Stevens and Eley Williams, who produce the surprisingly emotional and beautifully haunting contemporary ghost story, ‘Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily’, that explores the meanings we attach to the spaces we inhabit. The story is told from the switching perspectives of a new resident moving into a flat on the ground floor of a once grand Victorian house, and the ghost of the previous owner of the flat. Stevens’ and Williams’ modern ghost story tenderly explores the narratives we recall about people after they are gone, through the belongings they leave behind. A stunning story to open the anthology: full of tenderness, compassion, and grace. The next story, ‘Keep Your Miracles to Yourself’, sees Zoe Gilbert and Jarred McGinnis team up to produce a modern reworking of the Greek myth of Cassandra — a Trojan priestess cursed by Apollo to utter true prophecies which are to never be believed. Gilbert and McGinnis rewrite the Cassandra story to offer profound insight into the sacrifices we make for the people we love, and how love can both be a redemptive and a destructive force in our lives.
Adrian Duncan and Jo Lloyd produce the spectacular story, ‘The Girl Chewing Gum’, inspired by the short film of the same name by the British artist John Smith. In 1976 Smith created a sixteen-minute black-and-white film charting the daily occurrence of a London street. Duncan and Lloyd use Smith’s film to write evocative vignettes of the characters that appeared in the film and to offer fresh imagined insight into their lives. This skilful examination of how single moments can define us as individuals and collectively as a community possesses the ethereal quality of watching an old black-and-white film. In ‘Morphic Resonance’, Roelof Bakker and David Rose explore the burden of happiness and how we feel obliged to remember memories associated with the joyfulness we once possessed in our lives. The story complicates the process of how we remember moments of pleasure through creating unique and tender snapshots of happiness which have no clear links or connections between the other snapshots of happiness that occur in the story. The story is mesmeric, complex and deeply moving. A group of misfits collide in the darkly comic ‘Junction 11’ written by Gurnaik Johal and Jon McGregor, which explores the fallout of an art forgery job gone wrong. The story also offers an unexpected deeper reflection on grief and how the loss of a parent can motivate us to reexamine our life choices. ‘Junction 11’ pulls off a nearly impossible feat of being a darkly comic crime story whilst simultaneously offering a reflection on how our life choices are motivated by loss in all its guises.
Ruby Cowling and Ana Wood produce a labyrinthian espionage story in tribute to Jorge Luis Borges. The story starts off with a simple plan of exposing government secrets using a stolen pen drive but morphs into a thrilling white-knuckle ride that offers an unflinching spotlight on family legacy and female silencing by the establishment. In ‘The Grief Hour’ Leila Aboulela and Lucy Dureen create a disturbing piece of speculative fiction that focuses on a group of astronauts who are preparing for intergalactic travel. The narrative revolves around the relationship between a biologist and poet, and the mystery of what has and hasn’t happened between them. The story is a tour-de-force, offering a gut-wrenching reflection on grief, loneliness and the difficulties of forming genuine connections with other people. ‘Apricots’ by Tim MacGabhann and Ben Pester is a blisteringly good piece of hard-boiled Mexican crime fiction that tells the interconnected story between a Mexican detective and a London gangster who fate throws together through the bloody fallouts of local vigilante justice. All the ingredients of brilliant crime fiction are here: a world-weary detective, a gangster looking for a way-out, bloody retribution, and a consideration of what drives people to such horrific acts of violence. The final section of Duets — where the anthologies’ writers reflect on the collaborative process — offers fascinating insight into the creative to-and-fro between writers, and how this led to the construction of individual stories.
Duets is an astonishingly good, eclectic anthology of short fiction that covers a wide range of genres and literary styles. Every story in Duets truly sings on the page. This is with-out-doubt one of the most essential reads of 2024.
Reviewed by Paul Knowles