Unthology 7

The latest instalment of the Unthology series promises eclecticism and astonishment, and it delivers. Taking in body horror, double entendre, satire and the state of the nation, Unthology 7 has enough surprises to keep the reader on their toes, whilst still maintaining a consistent level of quality throughout. As anyone who spent their teen years making compilation tapes will know, the skill doesn’t lie in throwing the best selections in one after the other, but in ordering them effectively to create moods and themes. With plenty of experience under their belts, this is what editors Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones succeed in doing here, ensuring that the series continues to go from strength to strength.

Although the prose styles and narrative voices vary considerably, from the outraged prophet of George Djuric’s opener The End Justifies the Means but Who Will Justify the End? to the reflective private tutor of Sonal Kohli’s One Hour Three Times a Week, some themes do emerge throughout Unthology 7. Disappointment, redundancy and divorce all feature heavily, as writers continue to grapple with the social effects of austerity.

Spiders, by David Martin, is infused with paranoia bought about by the combined effects of job losses, bomb scares on the tube and hangovers. The story charts the ‘zombie afterlife’ of ‘something which used to be a bank’. In the wake of extensive cost-cutting, a bunker-mentality has developed; the breakdown of order and social norms is particularly noticeable in the ‘increasingly feral gents’ loo’. The narrator also notices that spiders have begun to colonise the windows on the upper stories of the building. The trace of horror gradually becomes something more palpable, as Martin satirises the violent ecosystem of business cost-cutting and downsizing, making for an effectively grim and darkly comic story.

Gary Budden’s The Hollow Shore is another highlight with a similar theme. Here, the narrator’s life collapses in the space of a few short paragraphs as his wife walks out, he begins drinking and allows bills to go unpaid, until he finds himself sacked and moving back in with his parents. This pattern is repeated among his friends, who increasingly find themselves single and alone, moving back to the towns where they grew up and signing on. It gradually dawns on the narrator that life holds fewer possibilities for his generation than they had been bought up to expect. Budden’s writing demonstrates a strong sense of place, as his characters search for the few remaining places untouched by Harvester and wi-fi, where they can simply exist.

Elsewhere, John D Rutter explores a particular type of modern scandal in B, the story of a Twitterstorm. A minor blogger claims to be in the know about a celebrity paedophile, dropping hints based around decades-old hearsay. They swiftly gain a huge following, with journalists parking on their lawn demanding information. By focussing exclusively on the person generating the rumour, Rutter puts an interesting new spin on the story, whilst also examining the double standards of online moralising: what we look at in private vs what we condemn in public. Cleverly, the dropped hints help to implicate the reader, offering the temptation to join in the game of guessing the identity.  

Charlie Hill’s On The Truth and Lies of the Love Story deals with a more familiar theme, but takes a novel approach. Hill presents the reader with two monologues, running side by side, taken from two different points in time. The first is from a man’s point of view, describing with excitement the opening phase of a relationship. Running alongside, we hear the voice of a woman discussing the same events, from the perspective of the end of the romance. The effect is similar to the balcony scene in Annie Hall, where Woody Allen uses subtitles to reveal his characters’ real thoughts.  

By breaking up the text, Hill moves away from traditional short story structure, and adds sardonic wit into the mix. One of Unthology’s strengths is the editors’ willingness to allow some humour into their collections, and this continues with Adrian Cross’s The Morning Person, a piece of noir in which an alternative medicine practitioner plots the murder of his housemate (‘I’m a homeopath. I can make a remedy out of almost nothing’) and Dan Powell’s double entendre-filled Free Hardcore, which has a hint of Monty Python in the character of a nodding and winking old man.

Other highlights include Roisin O’Donnell’s Death and The Architect, based on the life of Gaudi, and My Lobotomy by Barney Walsh, which starts out with the narrator being lobotomised as a way of leaving behind his drug, violence and sex-filled lifestyle. As the story develops, the sense of Cronenberg-esque body horror grows, leading to the moment when his girlfriend steals the part of his brain which has been removed, and uses it to masturbate with. Possibly the most memorable voice, though, is that of the narrator in George Djuric’s opening story, an outcast literary prophet who declares 'I am outside life, I am above life, I have miseries which the ordinary man does not know; I exceed the normal level, and it is for this that simple minds refuse to forgive me... no-one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modelled, built or invented except literally to get out of hell. Everything else is vanity'.

With this collection of engaged and diverse stories, Jones and Stokes have delivered possibly the best edition of Unthology yet. I’ll be looking out for a number of these writers in the future, and waiting to see what the Unthology team will bring us next.

Come back on Thursday for an interview with Unthology editor Ashley Stokes.