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The Time Out Book of London Short Stories
Edited by Maria Lexton
Penguin paperback, 245 pages
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)

Twenty-five diverse, distinctive short stories to celebrate twenty-five years of London's premier listings magazine. The brief is to use the city as a setting. The disparate list of writers chosen (all in some way or other associated with the magazine) is reassuringly accomplished. It’s also top heavy with what might be regarded as ‘genre’ writers.

British crime (rarely a pretty thing in itself) is well represented with contributions from new kid on the block (two novels) Charles Higson, as well as the more established names like Mark Timlin and John Milne. But the latter pair are curiously slavish to convention, providing well-enough told, but ultimately unrewarding pieces. It’s left therefore to Higson to fly the flag, which he does superbly in ‘The Red Line’, tale of an act of senseless Tube violence that keys itself in beautifully with the sense of the city better than almost anything else in here. Similarly, Gordon Burns’ ‘Memorials’ posits a bizarre thriller strain wrapped about the monuments to fallen police officers to some major effect.

Perhaps even more reassuring is the plethora of first rank horror writers on parade, from Clive Barker and Anne Billson, through the great Jonathan Carroll and Kim Newman to Christopher Fowler and the ever welcome Lisa Tuttle. Of them, Fowler’s ‘Mother of the City’ makes the most valiant attempt to address the capital, but suffers from a pay-off too sharp and hurried to work successfully, while Newman, with typical invention, postulates all too well in ‘The Blitz Spirit’ the human propensity for nostalgia taken to extremes. Billson and Tuttle are less sure of location, but produce small, well-turned stories with pleasing pay-offs.

Being an American, resident in Vienna, it’s difficult to square Jonathan Carroll with the rest beyond Time Out magazine’s evident love of his novels, and his ‘Waiting to Wave’ has little grounding in the city that supposedly inspired it, but is a characteristically small, genuinely inventive fragment of personal horror that could stand being slightly longer, but is still one of the book’s real highlights.

Outside of genre constrictions is where the collection is at its most problematic – John McVicar’s ‘Fuck Off’ is an excellent, albeit bleak view of women and AIDS in the 90s, whereas Nick Hornby’s football oddity ‘Faith’ is laboured and slight. Chris Petit (‘Newman Passage’) and Lawrence Norfolk (‘Drug Squad Smeeched My Hoover’) are obscure and lack-lustre, while current sensationalist bad-boy of the literary scene, Will Self, offers the surprisingly deft (and non-violent) ‘A Short History of the English Novel’, a London take on resting actors with a propensity to wait table in Los Angeles.

The best of an impressive assortment however (maybe surprisingly so) are offered by the Barker and, horror of horrors, Julie Burchill. The enfant terrible of newspaper columnists volunteers a wonderfully depraved, deliriously funny contemporary London love story, while it’s left to Barker to recover from the inertia of his recent career with a Books of Blood-esque twelve-pager. ‘Pidgin and Theresa’ kickstarts with a visiting angel in Crouch End before turning seriously surreal. Perversely, since the book is ordered alphabetically, Barker comes first and overshadows the remainder of the book with his sheer resourcefulness. Would that his novels were half as fertile.