Review: Unthology 4 - edited by Ashley Stokes & Robin Jones

The latest instalment of the Unthology series from Unthank Books sets out to showcase a ‘variety of styles, voices and visions of what it is to be human’. The publishers are keen supporters of creative writing, through their evening classes and online modules, and the anthology features an interesting mix of new and established writers. There’s no overarching theme to Unthology 4, but editors Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones have exercised good quality control, and put together a collection which is broadly cohesive without becoming stale. Generally, the writing would be called ‘literary’ – there are a couple of entries which verge on the dystopian edge of sci-fi or psychological horror, but generally the ‘genre’ quotient is low.

The collection kicks off with a Rodge Glass story, A Real T.O.A. I was a big fan of his travel-themed 2013 collection LoveSexTravelMusik, and this story treads over similar ground. His characters, a relatively wealthy professional couple, have travelled across the globe, but find their problems have hitched a ride with them. There is a sense of frustration, or guilt, that they are not able to enjoy the pay-off from their work: ‘If this is prison then why is there sand in your cell? Maybe your skull is an open prison’. Travel becomes almost a compulsion, a senseless reaction to stress: ‘you think about whether you’d just crack and end up one morning in Uruguay, nails painted blue, dancing the tango’. Maybe the problem lies in their decision to follow the beaten path, doing typical tourist things, instead of trying to find a deeper connection with their new surroundings; a failure of the imagination which is reflected in the couple’s relationship.

There is a sense of ironic understatement in Glass’s story, and this is also true of many of Unthology’s highlights. Carys Bray’s Treasures of Heaven uses an exhibition of religious artefacts at the British Museum as a launching point for reminiscence about her protagonist’s Mormon upbringing, in particular her experience, at the age of 12, of being interviewed by a Bishop about masturbation and other sins of the flesh (‘you had quite liked yourself up until that moment’). Bray discusses the pains of trying to overcome guilt, gradually coming to terms with your own desires (sexual and social), and the lingering effects of childhood influences. The story may well appeal to fans of Jenn Ashworth’s The Friday Gospels. Sarah Bower’s Finished takes a similar approach to the lives of upper-middle class women of a certain age. The story focusses on Charlotte, who has ‘a mediocre degree from a respectable university in something like art history or English literature. She has completed courses in cordon bleu cookery and flower arranging… even leaned how to climb out of the passenger seat of a low-slung sports car, wearing a short skirt, without revealing her underwear’. Anger gradually rises from the previously genteel narrative, as the sense grows that Charlotte’s life has been wasted by following the path mapped out for her. Suicide Bomber, by Melanie Whipman, is another interesting piece, which captures some of the everyday cruelty and frustration of school and contains a nicely understated surprise in its ending.

Anger is also a feature of Barnaby Walsh’s Violet. There is an echo of Shane Meadows in Walsh’s account of small-town lives which are seemingly pre-programmed to go down the wrong path. A barely suppressed violence seeps through this account of a school drop-out whose chance of happiness with a girl he meets in a library is put into jeopardy by his uncle’s criminal scheming. If all the stories mentioned so far have a sense of ‘normal people leading normal lives’, elsewhere the anthology heads into more unusual grounds. Eden Dust, by Michael Crossan, and The Murder of Crows by Marc Owen Jones both explore dystopian themes. Of the two, I found Jones’s more interesting; starting with the idea ‘what would happen if all the birds suddenly disappeared?’, his story mixes gentle humour (the first sign of disruption is that ‘Nando’s was switching their menu to ribs and KFC was going out of business’) and insight (the profoundly disturbing effect of the absence of birdsong in public areas). There is a hint of John Wyndham about the way the story mixes the speculative and the everyday. Adrian Slatcher’s contribution, The Cat, is a creepy, unusual story, in which the ‘black dog’ of legend is replaced by a mysterious feline. Rather than being oppressive, life with the cat becomes something comfortable, easy to slip into. There is a pleasingly whimsical side to the writing which leavens the account of depression and squalor. Less whimsical, Sarah Evans’s The Angel is an effective psychological horror story, in which cracks in a couple’s relationship, heightened by differences over religion, are bought into the open by a horrible discovery on Christmas Eve.

A couple of contributions address current issues. Burning Man, by Rowena MacDonald, is an opposites meet story; a beggar, horribly disfigured following a friendly fire incident during the first Gulf War, does a favour for a drunken city-boy, and is invited back to his flat in return. Gradually, the beggar reveals more of himself, describing the way that his injuries dissolved his sense of self, leading him to embrace Buddhism and become a sort of ‘holy mendicant’, a public reminder of the impermanence of possessions and the physical body. The title is an interesting play on words, referencing both the beggar’s physical change, and the festival held each year in Nevada, at which hippies come together to find spiritual solace through rituals, workshops and drug taking, while the way in which MacDonald focusses her attention on the beggar, providing him with a rich and surprising back-story, is an inversion of the attention normally paid to upper and lower class individuals.

Meanwhile, Administration: An Intern’s Guide by Joshua Allen is a surreal take on the hoops job-seekers need to jump through to find employment. Allen creates a Chris Morris-esque parody of corporate-speak, creating adverts which read ‘We require a seething intern, who knows there is no ‘I’ in salary, to implode our nest of dust-busters’. Over the course of the whole story, the cumulative effect is a little wearisome, but Administration is a reminder of the benefit of including some humour in anthologies – the story immediately stands out, and has a refreshing effect. Finally, The Laundry Key Complex by Aiden O’Reilly goes deeper in its attempt to analyse the human condition, using residents’ misuse of the system of signing out the key for the laundry room in a student dormitory building as an indicator of a malaise in our social structures and attitudes. There is something almost Selfian in the way O’Reilly psychoanalyses wider cultural problems through a seemingly absurd microcosm, making this one of the most satisfying stories in Unthology.

Overall, Unthology 4 is a good read. Its varied focus makes it hard to draw conclusions, although in terms of the modern short story, there are some common threads. The contributions are largely third person narratives, and generally eschew verbal pyrotechnics or unusual occurrences in favour of understatement and the slow reveal. However, there’s enough diversity in terms of theme and style to keep the reader interested - my own preference would be for more stories along the lines of The Laundry Key Complex, but I enjoyed sampling stories like The Angel too. The authors themselves are a mixture of the established professional, the up-and-coming, and the hobbyist, but the editors maintain a good standard of writing throughout; some stories interested me more than others, but there were none I would call badly written. The news is that short stories are enjoying a resurgence, and Unthology 4 backs this up – there are clearly lots of good ones being written. If you’re a fan of the form, or you’re starting to get interested, I’d recommend it.