Five Short Stories You Must Read - Wayne Marshall

‘American Dreams’ by Peter Carey

Thematically, this classic from Peter Carey’s debut collection The Fat Man in History rails against the march of American culture through even the smaller pockets of Australian society. But the great pull of it, what brings me back time and time again, is its tantalising premise: on a hill overlooking a rural Australian town, one of the residents has built a wall. What, exactly, lies behind this wall up on Bald Hill, as the locals have dubbed it? And why on earth did Gleason – ‘this small meek man with the rimless glasses and neat suit who used to smile so nicely at us all’, a council worker on the verge of retirement – have his brick wall built in the first place?

This story endures because when that answer comes, it not only rises to meet the expectation of the set-up but surpasses it, in what is probably my favourite scene in all short fiction. So, when Gleason dies and the wall comes down, what does it reveal? Beauty and wonder and terror and love. And art – the transformation of the raw stuff of everyday life into something higher, something new. I’ve read ‘American Dreams’ dozens of times, and am still profoundly moved – and surprised – by what happens when the townspeople flock to Bald Hill to discover what Gleason has left for them. And also, of what comes after. Because the story doesn’t end there, but spirals in another surprising direction, a testament to what can be achieved in the space of a short story, and the dazzling imagination typical of all the short fiction produced by Carey in the 1970s, before he departed for the land of the novel.    

‘Paradise Park’ by Steven Millhauser

For those who don’t know of him, American writer Steven Millhauser has been working predominately in the short story form since the early 1970s (although he won a Pulitzer for his novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer). His story worlds are a beguiling mix of the mundane and the magical. A bunch of bored suburban teenagers embrace a fad of laughter contests, with dangerous consequences. A small town falls prey to a serial slapper. A young woman disappears from another of Millhauser’s small towns – or was she simply ignored out of existence?

There are probably other Millhauser stories I enjoy more, or others I enjoy more consistently on re-reads, but as a must-read, I can’t go past ‘Paradise Park’. In it, Millhauser takes his obsession with amusement parks and other astounding feats of architecture to the very limit and beyond. Over 38 pages – rendering it almost novella length – and via a springboard of forensic detail, Millhauser documents in faux journalistic style the twelve-year rise and fall of the eponymous amusement park. The story is almost characterless; with little dialogue and dense paragraphs, it’s by no means an easy read. But as Paradise Park expands at the hand of its mysterious creator, opening up a shadowy underground level filled with illicit thrills, and its popularity soars, we are taken to a place that gives me shivers still.

An incredible work by a committed writer, which can be found in Millhauser’s 1998 collection The Knife Thrower and Other Stories.     

‘How To Tell A True War Story’ by Tim O’Brien

The war story is a slippery thing in the hands of Tim O’Brien. How do you tell a true war story, he ponders throughout this story from his 1990 linked collection The Things They Carried. On the first level, we’re presented with a story: that of Rat Kiley, an American soldier serving in Vietnam, and his grief at the killing of his best friend and fellow soldier Curt Lemon by booby trap. This is all observed and relayed by another soldier in the platoon – a fictional version of O’Brien. On another level, we have O’Brien the writer, at his desk years later, looking back on his experiences in the Vietnam War and trying to make sense of it all. He is a man obsessed with story and storytelling, with finding a way of telling it just right.

This is a masterpiece. It would still be a masterpiece if it only operated on that first level. O’Brien takes you right there, to the living, breathing, fatal jungle. Every detail is perfect, each observation cutting, the atmosphere of collective madness palpable. There are also a few scenes (such as Kiley’s attack on a baby water buffalo following Lemon’s death) that are shocking in their power. But it’s that second level – O’Brien’s meditation on storytelling, his metafictional interjections – through which ‘How To Tell A True War Story’ becomes something extraordinary. Elsewhere in his collection, O’Brien comes to the epiphany that thirty years on, what he’s really doing is trying to save his life through story. And what a magical thing that is.

‘The Quiet’ by Carys Davies

One of the hallmarks of most great stories, for mine, is an unexpected turn. A twist, a sting in the tail, a surprise that at first might appear to come out of the blue, but on closer inspection is inevitable, given the crumbs sprinkled throughout.

In ‘The Quiet’, the opening story of her collection The Redemption of Galen Pike, Welsh-born Davies presents us with a lonely, isolated homesteader named Susan Boyce, newly relocated to the Australian outback. The story begins in decidedly gothic fashion. Susan’s husband is away, rain pelts her tin roof, and her creepy neighbour – the only other person for miles around, a man whose visits she detests – appears at her window. That neighbour, Henry Fowler, has ‘the look of a convict about him’, and as Susan reluctantly lets him inside, you sense something awful is about to happen. When Henry begins to undress, while Susan has her back to him at the stove, these fears seem confirmed. 

Well, something awful is about to happen. But not at all in the way you’d expect.

To say any more about what happens next would be criminal.  

‘Escape From Spiderhead’ by George Saunders 

The world of a George Saunders story is a wild, wild place. Case in point: ‘Escape From Spiderhead’, from his most recent collection Tenth of December. From the very first sentence, we’re dropped without preamble – this immediacy being one of Saunders’ many strengths as a writer – into an experimental lab facility that doubles as a prison, where radical new drugs are tested on human subjects. One of those subjects is Jeff, the story’s narrator. Jeff, like the other ‘inmates’ at Spiderhead, is serving time for a heinous crime. Does this crime justify the shocking – and darkly funny, I also have to mention – tests that he and the others are subjected to? Such are the epic moral conundrums that fuel the bulk of Saunders’ fictions.

What makes ‘Escape From Spiderhead’ more of a must-read than a dozen other Saunders stories I could name? Honestly, it’s a flip of the coin. What I love about his writing, what will keep me signed up for anything he writes, is his roaring imagination, his anarchic wit. Here, that combo is not so much cranked up to eleven but shatters the dial. It’s a mad story, an insane story, and that’s kind of the point.

‘Escape From Spiderhead’ contains another feature of a Saunders story: the gradual shift from being almost a piss-take of his hapless characters, to a deepening that occurs late, a plumbing of his characters’ humanity in the face of the American capitalism that degrades them at every turn. For Jeff, that occurs when Darkenfloxx enters the scene – a drug that sends recipients into lethal fits of rage. When told to administer a fellow inmate with Darkenfloxx, Jeff is faced with a decision. That decision leads to one of the most brutal yet strangely uplifting endings I’ve ever read.

Honourable mentions:

‘Moonfish’ by Shaun Tan, ‘One Night’ by Wayne Macauley, ‘Last Night’ by James Salter, ‘The Dragon’ by Vladimir Nabokov, ‘The Wall’ by Julie Koh, ‘Rush’ and ‘Octopus’ by Nic Low, ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson, ‘The Lottery’ by Marjorie Barnard, ‘A Short Story’ by Ryan O’Neill, ‘A Quiet Call’ by Andrew Roff.

Wayne Marshall’s stories have appeared in Going Down Swinging, Kill Your Darlings, Island, Review of Australian Fiction, and other places. His story collection Shirl (then Frontier Sport) was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and was published in February 2020 by Affirm Press. He is the co-founder of the Peter Carey Short Story Award and lives in regional Victoria with his partner and two daughters.