"City swimmers & other stories" by Steve Clark (Black note press, 2024)

These stories seem previously unpublished. He's had fiction published in "The Paris Review" and poetry published in various magazines.

• For the love of Wasabi peas - A couple who have married 3 times (for 7 years, then 4 years, then 2 years ago) and divorced twice meet in a hotel bar after an argument the day before. He's prepared for a new adventure. She's angry and wants to learn from the experience. She says "I'm not taking about us. Don't worry. That's done". When she leaves through the revolving door she gets stuck because he followed her and pushed the door. "When you fall in love, no matter how old you become, how many years pass, a part of you remains that age for each other forever"
• City swimmers - It begins with "1. This is a story about a run. He runs. Pages fall behind him with the changing leaves. Mental scribble. Knots in the plot come loose. He's trying to figure out the story. Clara on the 6 train ...". It turns out that the text in italics is (I think) drafts written by the running man. Nikolai walks son Sasha (6) to school. Clara has twins, almost 10. Clara is 75, wandering in New York. Nikolai finds himself in the same street as Clara. When Sasha is 7, Clara tells him she's having another baby. Sasha can tell that his father's not happy. Towards the end "At some point, he will have to meet her. He knows what the story is about; he's not someone who doesn't know what the story is about. Sasha will be old enough then."
• A small yellow space - Billy is married to Maude. They have a little boy Leon. Billy answers the land-line. It's Malachi (Maude's brother) asking to speak to Maude. Billy says no. Malachi didn't organise or attend his mother's funeral. He apologies about something else. After the call Maude asks "What'd he say?" and Billy replies "Same as last time".
• The revenge fund - A bouncer (who's also an artist) refuses entry to a woman because she's not pretty. Someone organises an exhibition for him. When he and his guests turn up they find an empty room - she'd planned it all.
• Pizza thanksgiving - Banter while watching skaters
• His day at the beach - His (soon to be ex) wife Marika and kids are at the beach. She calls him and puts his son Mighty (11) on the line. He's having panic attacks and says his mum's crying. He takes the train. At old women leaves her crossword behind. He takes it with him. At the meal table little Minty says "Lobsters are people too. Mighty giggled and looked at his father (apparently, these pronouncements from his younger brother were not unusual). "They are?" "Yes, red and yummy like my brother". Back at his motel he thinks about past lovers. A fire-alarm goes off at 4:26am. He looks at the crossword.
• Strange beds, strange houses - A 29 y.o. woman has rented a home for a few days with her brother, 36. She's been with Walter for 8 years or so. She's invited him to the house. He's asked her to marry him. He can't drive. He reads her brother the break-up letter she intends to gve Walter. The week before she'd suddenly fancied an old, married friend.
• A last stroll through her favorite city - He's wandering in Paris while his wife is in bed with flu and his 2 young sons are with the nanny. He's going to die today. They've been in the States for a few years. He'd wanted to be a writer but ended up in Finance. He sees an ex, his father, his wife as she was when a girl, then he dies
• Aren't you glad I called? - John and Linda have a daughter Josephine. When she was about 20, Linda went with Adrian to work in an Alaskan cannery. They lasted 3 years. "he married a marine biologist with a tolerance for pain and moved to Rajasthan". Decades later he phones her out of the blue. Later, she hears of his death
• The reunion - He's offered a ride by one of his female creative writing students, in her boyfriend's car. Later she shows him her poems and they have an affair. Her boyfriend tells him that he forgives her. 2 years later the lecturer has his first novel published and he marries his pregnant ex-student. Her ex-boyfriend starts appearing on TV, eventually getting his own right-wing show. After 19 years, the narrator divorces. His wife re-unites with her ex-boyfriend. His 2 sons become Trump fans.

Many young children. The dialogue isn't crisp - more novel-paced than story-paced. "His day at the beach" might be my favourite.

Other reviews

• goodreads ("His Day At The Beach", “The Revenge Fund” and “A Last Stroll Through Her Favorite City” are singled out)

"Gravity" by Erica Wagner (Granta, 1997)

Stories from Critical Quarterly, BBC R4, etc.

• Gravity - A male astronomer (his PoV) in a remote observatory receives a fellow astronomer, Victoria, who sometimes comes to his room at night. When they're both at the top of the structure she slips and dies. He says he didn't push her. The language is lush with scientific imagery (Special Relativity moreso than General) -
  • "An night one sees further, more clearly, past the haze of atmosphere and without the distraction of other waking voices. My night vision is very keen and I saw her coming from a long way away, the jeep winding slowly up the road that runs like a thin blue vein on the skin of the mountain"
  • "There are some who say that there are gravitational fields in space so strong that they might act as time machines; that could we survive their tremendous compression, we would emerge in ancient space, return to see a hot dust cloud spinning where we look for the blue eye of our home planet. We would find worlds strange and marvellous to us, suspended in the void of space: there would only be the void to recognise" (the ending)
  I admire the ambition. I like enough of it.
• Stealing - from when she was younger than 11 she started stealing money from her parents, buying candy so that she got fat despite her mother making her do dance classes. Then she more or less stopped eating at home, still not losing weight. The ending is "Some days I wonder if I'll tell her, tell her about the quarters and the bills and the lost afternoons that ate into my life and made my first husband say, Jeannie, I'd stay if you'd lose some weight - but I don't think I will". No.
• Please Don't - When a woman researches in a library about Iceland for someone else, there's a note each time she returns to her desk, telling her not to sigh, etc. At the end she hears a man saying "Please don't cry". It's the librarian - "his eyes as blue as polar drift, the silver at his temple, the roses of colour still bright in his cheeks." She asks "Is it against the rules?" He replies "No. But like bottles of ink - it shouldn't be necessary anymore."
• A Monkey - A married German man, about 30, is with a boy, about 3, in Thailand. They've recently met. The boy was starving. The man (at least) will return to Berlin ("The doubtful legality of his errand assails him"). They've a day to kill. A truck stops. The boy seems interested in a ride. The German, using mime, says he wants to see a church. They get in and are driven away from the city into the hills - "The town disintegrates at its edge: seems to crumble like biscuit into expanses of half-cultivated fields littered with broken cement blocks". They're stopped at a checkpoint with 6 armed soldiers. They get through and reach a temple shrouded in mist. On a statue of Buddha is a monkey with glowing eyes - "When it leaps, skittering across the icy floor and disappearing out into the forest below, it is as if it had never been". I like it.
• How Many There Are, How Fast They Go, The Direction They Go In - The first-person female narrator met Jackson at a rodeo. She recalls them driving drunk through a desert, looking at stars. He died in a car accident. While their 2 little kids were with neighbours, the narrator went with Jackson's mother Janice to the funeral home. The narrator fell asleep. No.
• The Great Leonardo - a priest recalls a woman's first visit to his church. He fantacises. A ringmaster recalls a stranger arriving, wanting to be a lion-tamer. The current lion-tamer is an alcoholic so the ringmaster takes the stranger on as an apprentice. The stranger says he used to be a priest. The apprentice soon takes over, not saying a word during the act though as a priest he'd been praised for his beautiful voice. When woman finally starts confessing, the priest runs from the box and defrocks. The circus act ends by him putting his head into the lion's mouth. One evening the loin closes its jaws. He recalls the stare of the woman in the church. Not bad.
• Haircut - Jim, married 5 years to Linda, sees/overhears in New York 3 people he's not seen before - Sandy (ex art student, now law student), Art and Felicity. Jim suddenly decides to have a haircut. The barber starts using a cut-throat razor. No
• Jamie - "He" dreams of driving in a Grand prix race and crashing. He's not a fan of car racing. Jamie, 19, returns after his first term at uni to parents Ellen (a potter) and Simon. When Simon and Jamie go to the pub, Jamie's drawn to an arcade car racing game. Later, Simon writes Jamie a letter, writing things he'd been too shy to say, "blinking away the prism that threatens to explode the neat black lines of his being". He doesn't send the letter. Simon and Ellen visit Ellen's parents as they do each fortnight. He sees an album of photos that he's not seen for years, of Simon as a toddler. He says "He's doing well. At college. Don't you think?" Jamie was killed by a careless driver before he was two.
• A Simple Question - Suzanne (just separated from her husband of 5 years) is on holiday in France with Freya, a rich friend who she's known since childhood. When they were 9, cycling out together, Suzanne had an accident, losing teeth, making her less of a risk-taker. In France she's being interviewed at 2am - "While we talked, he took my fingerprints. He held my fingers as if they were newts and pressed them down firmly on a pad of ink, then pressed them again on cards that said main gauche and main droite. He talked to me all the while, as if he didn't want me to notice what he was doing.". We learn that they got into an amphitheatre in the night and Freya was climbing high - presumably dying after a fall.
• Pyramid - In the year of her birth, her father's pyramid was started. "On these nights with no moon the light from the stars stops far short of the ground and hangs like a distant celebration at which no one is welcome". After 16 years, building stops. She is offered to the chief mason. She refuses him until building resumes.
• A Few Hours at Home - Her lover's away for a week with others. Will he phone? She misses him. should she phone him? No.
• The Bends - "Songs are like smells, insiduous: they bubble into your blood and stay there like pearls of nitrogen, giving you the bends". The first-person photographer, female with a PhD boyfriend liked "running along the road to Grantchester. I ran every day then, the same route, from my house along the road past the Unicorn, the Green Man, the Red Lion, the Blue Ball" - my nearest pubs! She falls in love at first sight with a thatcher. She drives to Norfolk with him. Together they save a sheep. They hug. The narrator tells us that she wanted to end the story there, but she knew they weren't suited. She will accept the PhD student eventually. No
• Back Home - The female (late middle-age?) narrator returns to her dead mother's plush New York appartment after years away. She recalls how at 9 she saw a dead man in the street and her mother was over-interested. She recalls how later she and her parents played in the snow like a normal family. Her mother's bedroom is like a hospital room. She finds a stash of letters she's sent her parents dating from 1951 when she started boarding school. She leaves, then returns to fetch the letters. No.
• Mysteries of the Ancients - Greg (first-person narrator) is with brother John (12) and dad watching a TV program about ancient wonders. His mum left 6 months before. Dad decides to start car trading. Greg has to stay home from school to deal with phone inquiries. Dad bemoans the lack of greatness in modern society. He takes them to see London Bridge (the one at Lake Havasu). Old cars that he's bought begin to fill their street. Out of the blue his mum briefly phones. Dad sells their truck and quits his factory job. He buys a plot of land and covers it with concrete. His cars arrive in a cavalcade and are winched into the concrete. In time it becomes a tourist attraction. At 35 pages the longest story, and one of the best

Other reviews

• goodreads ('Mysteries of the Ancients', 'A Simple Question', 'Please Don't', 'Pyramid' and 'Stealing' are singled out)

"The Seven doors" by Agnes Ravatn

An audio book.

Nina, a Literature prof, and Matts (doctor) live in Bergen, Norway. Their house is about to be knocked down - compulsory purchase. They've been there for 35 years. They'll miss their allotment opposite. Their daughter Innabor (who has a daughter Melia) need a new house too. Innabor and Nina knock on the door of a house they rent out to tell the tenant they're likely to want it soon. Nina does a talk about how literary scholars would make good detectives - it goes viral. The tenant disappears, leaving a box of her stuff behind. Nina discovers that Mari's been a violin prodigy. She meets Mari's separated husband, who's just become conductor of Bergen Philomonic. She says he's dedicated his first performance (of Bluebeard's Castle) to Mari. She meets her parents. They say that she left her 3 y.o. son with them, that they'd sacrificed a lot for her, that she'd given up her career and sold her violins and had been editing/translating instead. The father tells Nina that Mari and her mother didn't get on. The little boy's father isn't the husband, which is what caused the separation. Nina goes to the police, who've read the article about her. She explains that the Freudian interpretation of the opera (which mentions 7 doors) is male rage at female unfaithfulness. After 2 weeks, still no leads. Looking through Mari's notebook, Nina deduces that Mari was moody and interested in Freudian transference - was her lover a therapist? Nina reads that transference depends on a power difference. The more neutral the person with power, the more easily that transference is possible.

Mari's found in the sea. Her parents seem unemotional about it. Her husband said that Bluebeard was her favourite story.

Her husband reveals that she had cancer four years before. Matts reveals that her lover was his brother, an oncologist. She became obsessed with him, threatened to kill herself. His brother's wife doesn't know. Nina is angry, but accepts that revealing the fact will solve nothing. But shouldn't a doctor who exploits their patient be exposed? Then she discovers that actually her husband was Mari's lover. She accuses (with no evidence) her husband of drowning her in their bath, then dumping the body. He points out that nothing would be gained by getting him arrested. Their daughter may have overheard and called the police.

I don't like "Nina shakes her head inwardly" and there are at least 4 instances of "she thought to herself". I didn't believe in the husband.

Other reviews

• jenmed ( Each of the characters are flawed but the revelation of these flaws is slow and purposeful adding to the tension within the book.)
• Kim Evans (What follows is a readable, if predictable mystery tale. The story, and title, is inspired by the fairytale Bluebeard and its subsequent adaption into an opera by the composer Bartok. This fairytale is discussed at length several times by Nina and her close friend and sometimes feels like it’s being hammered home a bit too forcefully, so that any subtext just feels a lot more like text.)

"Maps on the ceiling" by Philip Ward (Oleander press, 1970)

It's a pamphlet of poems, many of them short - often there are 2 poems per page. There's often end-rhyme - regular and irregular. I don't understand all the pieces. I like "Lunatic St." and "In Another Sense". I'm interested by passages like "Infinity is where/ in a hypothetical dispensation/ some of us meet:/ bricks and Bushmen,/ ticks and parallel lines,/ lakes, ideas, and the batteries of cars" (from "Infinity"). I think some of the short pieces don't do enough - e.g. "A knot in oak, a flaw in emerald:/ these concentrations of attention/ rightly resist carping./ What if the blemish were perfect?/ See the mole on her neck!"

"Decomposition Book" by Sara van Os

An audio book. Chapters alternate between Savanna's story and sections from Ava's journal.

Ava writes in her journal about how she, Megan and Chad got lost in the woods on a camping holiday. Megan and Chad argue. Chad earned 4 times what Megan did. She was hoping to ask Chad for a rise. She'd invited Ava along so she'd feel safer. Ava never found out if Megan was gay. She's the only one remaining.

In Jan 2023 Savanna, 18, (taking a break, living with only her cat Zelda because of mental problems, comforting herself with drink and porn, having appointments with a therapist) finds a dead body in the woods. On the body there's a journal written by Ava. She imagines that Michelle (her ex best-friend) is there and talks to her. She muses over the body, wonders if she, Savanna, had been the murderer. She visits the body often, studies the changes in it, slowly reading the journal. She comes out to the corpse. She finds the Twitter account of Ava and creates a character profile. She sees that the Megan/Ava relationship is like the Michelle/Savanna one. Then the corpse starts to stink.

After 2 weeks, Savanna's woken by Ava, who accepts she's a ghost, a solid one. Michelle says that Savanna's hoping that Ava's "developed enough of a Stockholm Syndrome to love you back"

Chad started adopting the male roles - hunting and climbing trees. Weeks pass. He eats a toadstool and dies. Ava and Megan sleep togeter through grief, then have sex. Megan says she come on the holiday intending to seduce Ava. Megan gets ill and dies.

Savanna agonises [too long and often] about whether to report the finding of the corpse. Ava's interested in seeing her own corpse. Ava and Savanna have sex, partly so that Savanna can decide whether she's a lesbian. [It's a too long sex scene]. Savanna finally reveals the event which pusheed her over the edge. Savanna had confessed her love to Michelle, who arranged for a boy to have sex with her against her will.

At the end the sections from Ava's journal sync with Savanna's reading of them. We learn that Ava ate Megan.

I was worried that it would be a standard "lost in the forest" plot with people dying one by one - with bear attacks, cannibalism, etc. Actually, that part of the book is rather standard, but that's offset by Savanna's tale where a corpse and an embodied ghost help with a troubled person's mental problems. Would Savanna's mother really be comfortable with Savanna being alone for so long, even though she's tracking Savanna's phone? Would Savanna really have had the internal resources to perform self-therapy?

Other reviews

• Esmay Rosalyne (Decomposition Book uses the stages of decomposition to gradually expose more layers of rot, pain, trauma, and emotional messiness. ... There is no denying that Decomposition Book will not be a book for everyone, but I am honestly so glad I gave it a shot despite my wariness because this is just a macabre masterpiece in my eyes. It’s unapologetically weird, unconventional, feminist, queer, messy, and morbidly funny, and I love how it just embraces every unhinged corner of its premise and somehow turns rot, loneliness, ghosts, and emotional breakdowns into something so beautifully bittersweet.)
• kirkus review (The book targets a Gen Z audience; slang like “sus” and “slaps” can be jarring, though some pop-culture moments (“Bobby Flay pulls out crispy rice again. The judges eat it up, literally. He wins, again. The crowd boos”) land well.)
• Mahvesh Murad (The one part where some suspension of disbelief is required is that three adults with existing family, friends and colleagues are lost in the woods for many months with apparently no one being able to find them, or any trace of them. ... This is in turns a body horror thriller, a coming out and coming of age novel filled with queer longing, an examination of a debilitating invisible mental illness, and a young woman’s attempt at moving on from a trauma that she does not want to let define her. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out who you really are, and sometimes it’s the ghosts of the people we wish we’d been who help us find ourselves.)
• Elizabeth Broadbent ( As Ava’s survival becomes more desperate, so does Savannah. Their stories make for an interesting juxtaposition, and they marry well, despite the dire circumstances of one and the easily dismissed nature of the other. How do you compare starving to death in the woods to a friend’s betrayal? You don’t, and that’s the novel’s point. You can’t.)

"Be mine" by Lizzy Barber

An audio book. 2 alternating timelines.

2013. San Francisco. Beth arrived 3 weeks ago. She's a consultant. It's 3 months since she took too many pills because her partner Matt had been unfaithful. She'd awoken in hospital to be told that she'd lost her baby. She hadn't known she was pregnant. She's given a card about Elixir. She spends money to join, tutored by Morisa. We get extracts from Elixir pubicity, and transcripts from sessions with Morisa and Beth. The courses are expensive - she borrows money to pay. Tate is like a cult leader. Morisa suggests that Beth tries to seduce Tate to get rid of the memory of Matt. She succeeds. The relationship isn't exclusive - Morisa still sleeps with him, though he suddenly goes off her. Morisa tells Beth that she's pregnant - a rape. She exposes Tate as a fraud in front of his acolytes.

2023. London. Beth (partner Adam, baby Etta) receives an invitation to the 10th anniverary of Elixir. She thinks that Adam might be having an affair, that he might be gaslighting her. She's finding motherhood hard. She joins a young mother group, befriends Mia, suspects Mra is an ex-Elixir member. Adam returns and finds her in a mess. She admits that she used to be Morisa and that she'd had an abortion. Mia says that she's the original Beth's sister. Adam and Etta disappear (taken by Tate?). Mia and "Beth" go to the Elixir HQ in San Francisco. Beth is there. Adam arrives. He says he'd been an Elixir member for years and had contacted her as a job. Their baby came from Tate's sperm - "Etta" is an anagram of "Tate". It had all been Beth's idea to help Tate produce a super race. "Beth" tells the group of women that when she'd tried to shoot Tate he'd used Beth as a human shield. Beth's injury meant she could no longer have children. There's a rebellion. Tate dies.

2042. London. An 18 y.o. girl is going to a university interview. A woman befriends her, offers her info on a self-improvement group, Euporia. The girl is Etta.

Even granted the cult influence, there are people who live false lives for so many years that in the end nothing surprised me. Mia was hard to believe. The extracts from Elixir were standard fare. In "Questions were asked about her past history", are both those final words needed?

"Little Children" by Angela Marsons (bookouture, 2025)

In a 1.5 page prologue a reporter, Steve Ashworth, threatens to expose policeman Kim's behaviour.

Woody, Kim's boss, tells her that the Blackpool force has a whistleblower. They want to know whether the allegations are true, and who the whistleblower is. In addition, 2 young boys have recently disappeared in Blackpool. So Kim's unit of 4 (!) go over to help. Kim gets them to play various roles (distrust of female bosses etc) in order to get the Blackpool police to talk. So there are several characters, some assuming roles.

• Blackpool - DCI Miranda Walker, Red (Mike Butler), Roy Moss, James Dickinson, Adil, Carly Walsh
• Birmingham - Kim Stone (boss), Stacey (female), Bryant (role: about to retire, wants an easy life), Penn (role: very ambitious)

Then there's the corruption issue and the missing boys to deal with. This is all presented in the first twenty pages or so, using short sentences, paragraphs, and chapters -

Stacey found herself still thinking about the exchange between the teams that had taken place in the briefing.    How the boss was keeping hold of her temper she couldn't even imagine, as all the hostility seemed to be aimed at her. The rest of them were being met with mainly silence and strange looks.    That had remained the case once the boss and Bryant had left, with Penn not far behind.    The other team had gradually filtered out ...

One of the missing boys, Noah (11), (his PoV) is locked in a dark room. Lewis (12) was last seen in an arcade. He's left home before. His brother Kevin seems a nasty piece of work. His stepfather Bobby Stevens doesn't like him. A schoolmate says his parents have discussed how to get rid of him. Roderick Skidmore is a local paedo, a millionnaire. He has a locked cellar. After being interviewed he suddenly disappears on a business trip

A piece of paper is left for the Birmingham team with 3 names on it. The team interview them. Jasmine Swift has been pestered by Red and Roy. Dean Jackson was assaulted. Pippa Jacobs has sex with Roy in return for silence. Re-examination of CCTV recordings of the arcade when Lewis disappeared show that Kevin and Skidmore were there though both said they weren't.

Halfway through, we get Kevin's PoV. He's not a baddy. He's helped his young brother Lewis through his problems.

Bryant is disgusted by Roy, who is sexist and uncaring. They're called to a murder - of Jasmine Swift. Penn thinks Dickenson is gay and moral - the snitch? Kim and Penn have to return to Birmingham for a murder case - Josh, a 15 y.o. boy beaten up (strung up and used as a punchbag), missing since has was 12. Josh and his twin Harry had been adopted when they were 6 by a lesbian couple.

Further CCTV footage shows that Lewis had been abducted by a woman in a van, with help. The same van was around when Noah disappeared. From Lewis's PoV we learn that he's imprisoned with another boy. Lewis's family admit to the Birmingham police that they sold Lewis for £5k to a boxing coach. Roy tricks Bryant to the top of a multistorey car park. Red helps to save him just in time. Photos on Roy's phone show that he's murdered before.

On the dark web they discover that an illegal boxing event is due. Ashworth interrupts Kim while she's on her way. He says that a 14 y.o. girl had gone to her to say she'd been abused by her father. Kim had destroyed the father's life. He'd killed himself though he was innocent. Kim tells Ashworth to follow them to report a real crime. They attend the boxing event. Kim hides in a van and is taken with Lewis to a hide-out. She frees the boys. The police get there in time before Kim is hurt. The boys were being held by the sister of Miranda Walker, who'd provided info to her sister. Ashworth praises Kim on TV.

Re-examinining a case means that the boring routine questioning can be omitted. It's fast. Sentences are short and snappy, style sacrificed for speed - "Her expression said that every word in that sentence travelled up her throat with razor blades". Red (like Kevin) turns out to be not as bad as first feared. The other police are good or bad - nothing inbetween. The Frost subplot doesn't seem useful - I presume it's from a previous story. What about the lesbian parents?

Other reviews

• jen med (Twenty two books in and Angela Marsons’ Kim Stone series shows no signs of going stale.)