My seasonal reading has been grotesque, unsettling: just as it should be. (Except for Witch Hat Atelier: #cute)

There have been a lot of short stories. Not only the Gardam, Carter and Saona pictured below, but also selections from a volume of Shirley Jackson’s stories, and a few from McSweeney’s Issue #71 pictured even farther below.

(Anyone looking for five lovely winter tales will be very pleased with the first section of stories in Gardam’s Missing the Midnight.)

The McSweeney’s has been on my shelf for a couple of years, but I could hardly even look at it. You can see why: all those slipcovers are simply horrendous. (Although it is a delight to peel them off, one by one, anticipation building with each extraction.)

Finally, once I withdrew the volume itself and hid the slipcovers out of view, I could read a story on the occasional bright early morning and ignore that imagery.

It’s the quality of the writing that pulled me past all that: these anthologies are always top-notch. This collection by some of the most remarkable writers in the genre will pull me back for another year or so as well, based on the four I’ve read this year.

One of the funnest parts of a McSweeney’s issue? The letters at the start. In this case, for instance, one by Megan McDowell (whom many will recognise for her translation of Spanish-language writers) and one by Luigi Musolino. They do feel like the kind of editorial letter you might find on the opening pages of The New Yorker, but they also feel like they are a submission to the anthology itself. Part real, part imagined…somehow.

The four stories I read (I think they are commissioned as original works, but I can’t say for certain) included: Mariana Enriquez’s “The Refrigerator Cemetery”, Nick Antosca’s “The Noble Rot”, Kristine Ong Muslim’s “Heartwood”, and Attila Veres’ “Here and Now and Then and Forever”. I loved and hated them all: three of them left me squirming, but only one of them actually made me gasp out loud and squeeze shut my eyes.

Refrigerators, an inherited vineyard, trees, and a pyramid scheme: each of these stories drags readers through dark places, but ultimately their power resides in relationships and the heaviest of human emotions and conditions (guilt and greed, love and loss). These storytellers go to the root of horror, never stepping far from the reality that humans create the most monstrous conditions.

The thread of darkness in Cyrille Martinez’s 2018 short novel The Dark Library (in a 2020 translation by Joseph Patrick Stancil) is but a shadow, comparatively. (And I read it some evenings right before bed: so some might say, not dark at all.)

It’s one that I purchased based on the description and cover art alone (and Coach House’s reputation for quality work). And, once again, you can see why: isn’t this how every reader feels at times, climbing into a narrative.

It’s a slim volume—just 162 pages, with generous margins—divided into three distinct parts and subdivided further, so that one can read just a few pages each night (or you could gobble it up in an afternoon).

Most books about books leave me feeling a little disappointed in the end. Even Murakami’s The Strange Library (a  2014 novella that I read in translation by Ted Goossen) wasn’t quite enough about the actual books in the actual library to suit my taste.

Martinez does spend more time on the actual books in the library: I loved that. And there is a story of sorts (such as can exist in such a slim volume) and it made sense to me (bonus).

But what I really loved was the sense of reading a book by a writer whose love of reading is every bit as all-encompassing as his love of writing.

Here are two passages for flavour: each seems as though it could be something around which one would build a story, but that’s not the case.

They do, however, give a sense of the book’s bookishness overall. And, c’mon: don’t YOU think that Library should always be capitalised?

When they said he’s read everything, they weren’t just saying that, they weren’t far from the truth. It was enough to spend a little time with him to know that he knew practically all of the books. I mean he knew them personally. You gave him a title, he gave the author’s name; you gave him the author’s name he recited their complete bibliography. You could have sworn that not a single book in the Library was a stranger to him. In his mind, it was clear that all the books were waiting for him to read them. This was a tremendous reader. His disappearance was a shock. It was fraught with consequences.

If you decide to play along with Martinez after this next passage, please do share your list. (I also love the pile-on of phrases: it does spark a sense of urgency, doesn’t it!)

Imagine you have to leave your home urgently, you have ten minutes, right now they are heading toward you with the intent to eliminate you, they are violent, armed, determined, don’t waste any time, don’t waste any time, each second counts, it is your life on the line, you can only take with you one suitcase in which you will have put ten books not a single one more, hurry up, you only have nine minutes and fifty seconds, you have to decide now, answer, which books would you take?

Have you been doing any seasonal reading? I still have a couple of autumn reads in my stacks, but the temperatures have dropped so dramatically recently (which has translated into the remaining leaves on the trees falling dramatically in recent days, too), that I’m tempted to skip straight to snowy stories.