"Sleepless nights" by David Almond (Iron press, 1985)

Stories from Iron, etc. Single mothers. Young boys wanting to stay in countryside overnight. Stories with circus freaks and overtones of "The Lottery" or magical realism. "Elise" and "Concentric Rings" work best for me.

• "Elise" - Elise and the male narrator grew up poor in Durham and became lovers. The narrator became immersed in industrial/local history, living in his late father's house. She moved to Newcastle then disappeared. "Even the memory of her began to fade, to be obscured by my work, and appeared with less frequency, until it became a distant hidden thing, that squatted in my darkness. It hid there with the part of me that could exist only in her presence, the part of me that had grown with her, a past me that I did not want to explore". Even her mother didn't know where she went. She returns, tells him about Californian biochemists seeking the secret of happiness. They make love, confess that the other is the only one they'll love. She leaves in the night.
• "Joffy" - A handicapped boy runs off when his single mother tries to make him go away with Auntie Ellen. After dusk he hides in a quarry. The friendly butcher looks for him. He sneaks home. His mother "beat him until he could be silent no longer but protested, screamed, as flesh burst his skin and became meat". Later he slips into her bed.
• "Concentric Rings" - The narrator finds a strange contraption with springs, and asks a street performer about it. He says that a strange women plus idiot son once came into town and set up camp. Thanks to his deformity she could swing him along in a noose without dying. Followers gathered and settled, buying contraptions so that they too could be swung by their necks. "At the centre, there were a dozen who had kept their faith intact". One day they discarded their contraptions. There was a mass suicide. The mother and child moved on. Having told his tale, the performer leaves. After a while, the narrator follows him, and joins the crowds watching his deteriorating performance. The best story so far.
• "Dark Cube" - A performer has a box of darkness. Years later a troupe of performers display darkness in the shape of a man, but people weren't impressed by the old trick.
• "Chickens" - Sammy (10) likes visited his gandpa in the allotment. His brother Peter (12) used to go. Sammy is bullied on the way back by boys who are Peter's new friends. Peter gets them to apologise. They all go to grandpa's place and look at rude playing cards
• "Creeping About" - The son of a single mother goes out in the fields at night when she's out. He hears adolescents making love. He know his mother's a loose woman.
• "Hold me close, let me go" - 1st person female. Her father left (stifled by their love?) when she was 12. She cared for her mother for 18 years, bringing men home for a night as a time. Whn her mother died she travelled to the med, slept with garrisoned soldiers, got pregnant, deserted the father, had the child, deserted the baby, then returned to take him back to the UK.
• "Minimal damage" - Two PoVs - 1st person male, and omniscient 3rd person. He fell in love with the girl, Angela, whose back-garden abutted his. He had early writing success. They married. His writing goes bad. He withdraw from her though they stayed together for a while. They survive on the sales of their parents' houses. A stripper who he's met before, Susan, comes to live with him. Sex and friendship, not love. She attacks him with a knife. He recovers. He tracks Angela down at an ex-fishing village, watches her from a distance. She rejects him again.