"Best British Short Stories 2025" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2025)

In his longer than usual introduction, Royle

• lists 15 UK book publishers of stories
• lists 14 UK printed magazines that contain stories (I don't know "Extra Teeth", "Open Pen" and "Remains")
• writes that "Extra Teeth" and "Confingo" send him all their issues. Some authors send him the publication they're in. He sometimes asks for publications.
• writes that sometimes when he's tried to include stories by well-known writers they've not replied or have asked for £900.
• lists some magazines he misses - Ambit, Panurge, Warwick Review, etc

The majority of the pieces come from books, the other sources being Fictive Dream, The Brussels Review, Thin Skin, BBC (3), New Worlds, and Confingo.

• "I'm in love with a German film star" (C.D. Rose) - Some music tracks listed, all with some connection (real or imagined) to Magda (who may have been a spy, who may have married 4 times, who may not have existed).
• "Torsos" (Linden Hibbert) - a male detective visits a museum where a surly female curator shows him the torso room (where a torso had been damaged with a blunt instrument), the leg room, etc. He draws the evidence. Later he returns and finds the culprit foot outside. The smell (and here the story ends) gave him a yearning for "an outcome that could not happen. Like taking a stroll in the evening, he thought. Like wanting a child of your own. Or falling in love."
• "The incidents" (Wyl Menmuir) - From birth, animals (bees, snakes, etc) seem to be attracted to Blue. When she's 15 her father dies. She and her mother Emmaline go to Cornwall. Blue hopes to meet Daphne du Maurier there. Emmaline want to meet old friend David, who now has a wife and 2 sons. They go by car, the ocean "unrealistically blue against the green of the fields". On the beach, while the boys wrestle and David is in deep conversation with Emmaline, Blue walks unnoticed into the sea, the whales' calls sounding like home.
• "The headteacher" (Okechukwu Nzelu) - A married couple, Jeremy (his PoV, a lawyer) and Matthew (popular head of a group of schools), are in their mid-fifties. They haven't had sex for a while. It's Matthew's retirement party in their house. His colleagues and ex-students attend. Mrs P helped/coached Matthew through his career, giving him the authority and confidence that Jeremy couldn't provide. Nathan, in his 30s, had been in Matthew's drama club. Jeremy knows about drama clubs. Nathan complains about the broken shower in his expensive flat, not realising that the flat is Jeremy and Matthew's nest egg. [ I was hoping it would have more analysis (from Jeremy's PoV) of the influences on (and development of) Matthew's persona, more regrets. It's a bit too plotty/info-dumpy for me at the moment.]
• "Dŵr" (Catrin Kean) - Someone just misses their Welsh father's funeral. They have the key to his house. It's raining. They haven't seen the father for years - he was never part of their life. Next morning a neighbour delivers his dog. The dog takes the narrator on a walk to a waterfall - the water says "dŵr" ("water" in Welsh, about the only word the father has taught them). A stream back leads under the house, In the kitchen there's a trapdoor leading to a cellar which the stream runs through. There's a table, 2 chairs and glasses, a bottle of whisky. The ending is "And then I heard, just behind me, a sigh. A breath. And I knew he was here, and he knew I had come".
• "A fictional detective" (Elizabeth Stott) - "It seems he is created only to solve the endless crimes of fiction." He hopes one day that things will be different, that a train ride will just be a train ride, that he can spend a night in a hotel without notes being slipped under the door. 5 pages.
• "Junction" (Christopher Burns) - 2 men meet on a park bench. It soon becomes obvious that one (whose PoV it is) is the older version of the other. The older one doesn't want to reveal anything (for fear of changing his past) but perhaps he does. He learns afterwards that near the time of the meeting, the younger version is killed in a car accident. He muses on the consequences of this, then begins to fade away.
• "Fabrication" (Imogen Reid) - a description of a room (or of a picture of the room) in Robbe-Grillet style, with line-breaks that isolate a word/phrase that ends a sentence and starts another. I think.
• "Flatten the curve" (Naomi Wood) - Deborah (with husband Cal, 6 y.o. daughter Zara, and a baby) is in lockdown. Andrei, Julia and 6 y.o. Joey live next door. Zoom, phone-calls in the garden, and childcare are a struggle for Deb. Zara flirts with Joey. Deb fancies Andrei (who's a meat-eater, unlike Cal, and sneaks off to play poker - Cal's covid-vulnerable). One night she cooks meat, angering Cal. She stays up late, drinks a bottle or 2 of wine. Next morning Joey charges in and cuddles Zara. Andrei comes to collect him. Deborah tells him to go away.
• "You" (Roger Luckhurst) - The collective narrator follows the life of "You", a child who's like cracked vessel, the cracks just the right size for the narrators to squeeze through. You struggle through school, have a tempestuous adolescence, wonder about spiritualism. The ending is "This is how it will be until you join us, and we begin again the search for another vessel"
• "Lord of the fruit flies" (Pippa Goldschmidt) - Herman Muller is carrying vials of flies. He's been zig-zagging arond the world because of his political views. He hasn't seen his son for 4 years. He's on a train to Edinburgh, sharing the carriage with a female farm vet and a war-time refugee boy. [Is that it?]
• "Laughter ever after" (Mark Valentine) - he's a collector. He takes a rural bus to Biggleswade in seach of a rare leaflet about the singer of "The Laughing Policeman". A gust of wind enlivens the quiet town square. He lets the wind take him over. He's exhilarated, in ecstasy. There's booming laughter.
• "Helium" (David Bevan) - A sad OAP's on a country walk alone. He's spent his life alone. He sees a silver-clad figure on the other side of the lake and walks round to it. He thinks over a new love - his first. They'd slept together. He wonders why he put her off by not wanting to meet her friends. When he reaches the figure it's only "L" and "O" helium balloons. Valentine's Day has just happened. The balloons blow away.
• "The ice tigs" (Rose Biggin) - A single male who gets a temp admin job at a university has problems with bad circulation, maybe triggered by encounters with a ghost. [No]
• "The portal in Lisbon" (Baret Magarian) - From BBC radio 4. Peter, an English lecturer, a man whose friends have married and abandoned him, whose mother has recently died, who had a scooter accident, who's been pick-picketed, goes to Lisbon for a break. He attends an ethnic music concert in a cellar, hoping it will lift his spirits. "Peter could not rid himself of the impression that reality had somehow changed ... He just wanted the music to make him insensate or to restore some spark of life after all the bruises and loneliness life had bequeathed him". After, he's told that the cellar is a museum that doesn't host concerts. Well, well. [No]
• "When viewed from the head rather than the foot" (Simon Okotie) - 6.5 pages. One sentence. One paragraph - "such that the angle subtended by the upper and lower legs would progressively decrease in proportion to that decreasing distance" etc.
• "Flight of the albatross" (Hannah Hoare) - In Turkey a young man takes tourists tandem paragliding. One day his passenger falls to his death. A year later his father tells tourists that his son flies like an albatross - "Albatross flies for joy and finds all he needs up there. He sees the world below and knows he cannot be happy down here."
• "Ghost walks" (Ian Critchley) - Sarah and Tom revisit a town they last went to over 30 years before, when they first slept together. Back then, she'd stood at their window and a woman below waved and stepped back into traffic. No injury. Tom apologies again about something. Next day, alone, she finds herself at the B&B they'd stay at before. She sees a face at the window and steps back into traffic. No injury. She returns to her hotel room, stands at the window. No woman waves back. She collects her things and leaves.
• "Under the flyover" (Iain Sinclair) - 27 pages of sporadically interesting text, with surrealism being a leit-motif. I know something about David Gascoyne, Ballard, "New Worlds", Burroughs, London, etc. Even so, I can't help feeling it should be several pages shorter. Here's an extract - "To be walking with wombats, wind-surfing salt deserts, coupling in non-judgemental sexual bliss under a weightless waterfall, swooping like a killer drone through the private apartments of the Vatican, under stupendous ceilings manfully toshed into a steroidal superhero drama by Michelangelo ... The orbital motorway, turning octopus sprawl into a traffic island, was elastic. Sometimes stretching to accommodate a pregnancy of private estated and revamped asylums, sometimes biting hard like a whale-bone corset"
• "The junction" (Alison Moore) - Paul, driving home to his ill mother after a week away, is hit by a car. The driver, Neville (a widower), invites him to his nearby village house. Paul's fiancee has changed her mind. The pick-up lorry doesn't come. He has to stay the night. He's well looked after. Next day he finds his car in pieces in the garage, and a dead woman in a bed. He discusses with Neville how to spend the day.

Ghost/gothic stories easily predominate over mainstream. The well-crafted New Yorker story is far away. It feels less representative than usual.