Best British Short Stories 2025

 

Best British Short Stories 2025 edited by Nicholas Royle (Salt Publishing), just published, includes my short story ‘Laughter Ever After’ (from Lost Estates, Swan River Press, 2024), and contributions from, among others, Roger Luckhurst, Wyl Menmuir, Alison Moore, Simon Okotie, Imogen Reid, C. D. Rose, and Iain Sinclair.

My story came about in an unusual way. I was contributing entries to Literary Hauntings, A Gazetteer of Literary Ghost Stories, co-edited with R B Russell and Rosalie Parker (Tartarus Press, 2022). We wanted to have at least one entry for every county, but this looked a bit tricky for some of the smaller shires, and we could not at first think of any ghost story set in Bedfordshire.

I therefore wrote a fictional entry (it is a tradition for such guides to have at least one of these) about the quest for a rare ghost story booklet published in Biggleswade in that county. It begins: 'In the unattributed ‘Laughter Ever After’, an assiduous collector of ghost stories is in pursuit of a tale he has read about in a gazetteer of ghost stories but has never been able to find.'

However, it was then suggested that the story at least (if not the booklet) ought to exist, and so I had a go at writing it. The story is about the protagonist seeking for the rare ghost story pamphlet described in the entry. There’s probably something about metafiction I ought to invoke here but I’m not sure I can work it out. Anyway, the fictional entry in the gazetteer is for a story about the quest for a rare ghost story booklet mentioned in a gazetteer, and the actual, but subsequent, story is about the quest for the same booklet.

As it happened, we didn’t need the invented entry anyway, because shortly after I discovered that the climax of The Beetle by Richard Marsh is a spectacular train crash just outside Luton railway station in Bedfordshire, with a notably grotesque disintegration of the villain. But we still kept the imaginary (but now becoming more real) entry.

There were two other components of the story. One was the journeys I made in my youth on the great green swaying United Counties buses to obscure South Midlands towns in search of I didn’t quite know what, probably just the journey itself (although admittedly Biggleswade doesn’t have quite the same ring as Ithaca). The other was a record that was always on the radio in those days, ‘The Laughing Policeman’ by Charles Penrose, who was born in Biggleswade, the son of a watchmaker. I had often wondered about what else he did and how he felt about being mostly known for this one rather peculiar song. 

If you like the sound of any of these things, rare ghost story booklets, book-collectors, bus rides or vintage music hall artists, all with a twist of wonder, well, this might be the story for you. And, if not, to judge from his earlier anthologies in the series, Nicholas Royle will also have gathered a gallimaufry of adventurous and unusual shorter fiction for your delight.

(Mark Valentine)

White Spines - Nicholas Royle

All book-collectors, all list-makers, all minimalists, all monomaniacs, all connoisseurs of second-hand bookshop owners and of things people say in bookshops, all who like finding letters, shopping lists, tickets, cheques, postcards, enigmatic numbers and other inclusions (©) in books, all wanderers in the backstreets of cities and of provincial towns, all fastidious arbiters elegantiarum (that's your actual Latin, to adapt K Williams, who also appears) of book design, all paperback writers (paperback writers, pa – per -back, der der der der dum dum de der, der der der der dum dum de der), all those who now think that though it wasn’t perfect far from it actually it had some things going for it did the 1970s, all those who fret about whether ‘the 1970s’ is or are singular or plural, all who would like to meet the Albanian Ambassador and his wife, all who wonder whether the difference between A-format and B-format is really the secret key to a Thomas Pynchon novel, all who study the dated plastic ties around the puckered tops of bread packets, all who read the preliminaries and the apparatus of books and want to know whether this one can be lent, resold, hired-out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s permission in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published, and whether Granjon is the name of a dragon in a high fantasy epic, or a font designed by George W. Jones for the British branch of the Linotype company in the United Kingdom, all who wonder how many Nicholas Royles there are and whether really we could do with a good few more of them, should at once get a copy of White Spines, or a wall-full. 

(Mark Valentine)

Le Visage Vert issue no. 21

My apologies for the late notice, but I do want to spread the news that issue number 21 of Le Visage Vert came out late last year. As always, it's a beautiful production. Writers represented range from the older John Bedoit (1829-1870), Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), Marcel Schwob (1867-1905), Richard Marsh (1857-1915), and Bodo Wildberg (1862-1942), to the contemporary Nicholas Royle (b. 1963). The Hearn story is from Kwaidan. The Schwob story is from The King in the Golden Mask.  Richard Marsh's tale, "The Mask", includes illustrations from its appearance in The Gentleman's Magazine, December 1892 (the story was later collected in Marvels and Mysteries). Nicholas Royle's story, "The Lure", is translated from it's appearance in The End of the Line: An Anthology of Underground Horror (2010), edited by Jonathan Oliver. Michel Meurger contributes a long essay "Le Secret du masque", setting up the major theme for the issue. To order, visit this website and scroll down to find the issues of Le Visage Vert. Recommended.