I think I’m falling in love with dark and twisty short story collections
It’s been years since I read a short story collection; they just weren’t clicking with me. I stopped trying them.
And then I saw Noelle Gallagher on YouTube fall in love with ‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies’ by Deesha Philyaw and it lingered in the back of my mind for weeks and weeks before the audiobook popped up in my library catalogue following the UK release and I snapped it up.
From there I ended up devouring two more collections, and I noticed some similar themes threading these collections together. I’m desperately searching for more like these stunning collections to scratch that itch.
‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies’ by Deesha Philyaw
This collection blew me away.
‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies’ delves into the secret places of desire, lust, want and ‘naughtiness’ in a society that forces black women to be good and respectable according to the laws of the Church. The exploration of the clash between these women’s internal lives and the Church’s often unreasonable standards, and the freedom and joy of themselves winning out.
‘Life Ceremony’ by Sayaka Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)
I’m a huge fan of ‘Convenience Store Woman’ and I have ‘Earthlings’ on my TBR so Murata’s debut English-translated short story collection was an auto-buy.
Murata is the queen of the comfortably weird and these stories are no exception to that at all. We have stories from the perspective of a curtain, the habits that link food and culture, the normal use of deceased loved ones being repurposed into homeware and clothing, and the weirdness of romantic love.
I loved each and every story. It was challenging and thought-provoking in the best way.
‘Salt Slow’ by Julia Armfield
After reading ‘Our Wives Under the Sea’ earlier this year, a novel where I loved the writing and the themes but wanted something more from, I had to try and find more of Armfield’s work and stumbled across her short story collection.
‘Salt Slow’ tracks bodies and the way that they change and transform. Men turn to stone, women metamorphose into insects, and an entire city forgets how to sleep and slowly stops being able to function. It blends myth, legend and folklore with magical realism in the most beautiful, spellbinding way. It was my favourite collection of the three.
Although these collections seems very different to each other at first glance, they’re actually striking similar. They’re dark and subversive, dipping into topics and ideas that spark discomfort and even slight disgust sometimes. There’s body horror, fantasy, magical realism, natural horror and the realest of realism, but they all take about the inner lives and minds, and the bodies of women. The expectations projected onto them by society, by ourselves and by men.
These stories twists those ideas and beliefs of what women should be and project them, or even reverse them, in a way that highlights the cruelty and the ridiculousness of it all.
If you’d like to get your hands on any of these collections while also supporting us and an independent bookshop, all at no extra cost to you.
Written by Sophie
