‘Illuminations’ (which, let’s be clear, is a wanky title) is a collection of stories that showcases Alan Moore as more than just the Greatest Comics Writer ever. It seems that he’s now in a position to do whatever he wants. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing. I have no idea if his first novel ’Jerusalem’ is any good, because it’s over a 1000 pages and it sounds boring as fuck. But a collection of stories seems like a good way to get into his fiction. If nothing else, his early work writing ‘Future Shocks’ for 2000AD showed that he could do great things in a small amount of space. I would have liked ‘Illuminations’ more if that central tenet had been in place. There’s a lot to like in this collection. The story about fantastic creatures infiltrating the groups formed to catch them was quite nice. There was also a section in one of the stories that made me laugh out loud - hard. The novel-length story about the comics industry could have been published as a book and you wonder if the other stories are just there to give it cover. I don’t know how much of “What We Know About Thunderman” is true (albeit fictionalised), but I’ve read a bit about the two main companies and even I recognised some of the stuff that was in there. It really feels like Alan Moore having The Last Word on the industry that betrayed him. There’s stuff in there that is probably true and other parts that feel mainly like settling scores. If it had been published as a novel, it’s possible it would have caused more of a stink. Or maybe not. Perhaps other people don’t care about it as much as AM does.
In any case, this isn’t a novel, it’s a collection of stories. Some of them are quite good. Most of them are awfully clever, at least in parts. A few of them had endings I didn’t really get, but this didn’t really bother me that much as I felt the main point of the story had come across. One of them felt very much like The First Good Short Story I Ever Wrote, to the point where you can almost read the tutor’s notes in the margins (“Excellent characterisation, Alan!”, “Nice twist!”, “Good use of call-backs”). It’s fine. Like all the stories, though, it goes on a bit. I got it in hardback because it was in the January sale, but it’s an unwieldy volume and I’d recommend getting it as an ebook.
Mick Herron’s collection is more focussed than ‘Illuminations’ and I can’t decide whether that’s a good thing or not. Almost all of the stories are about couples, particularly white middle-class couples, dealing with infidelities of one sort or another. There is a story featuring Jackson Lamb, the recalcitrant farter at the heart of ‘Slow Horses’ (which I am watching on Apple TV+ but have not read). That, too, is about relationships. There are also several stories featuring a pair of married private detectives. All of the stories seem to run on the premise that men are idiots and women are cynical schemers. There’s conscious call-outs to Philip Marlow and the ongoing sense of dames and saps runs through everything. It’s OK, but it starts to feel predictable.
There’s also the reliance on twists that, while I didn’t guess exactly, I could sort of see coming. Things didn’t pan out quite how I guessed from the beginning, but the over sense wasn’t that I was having the rug pulled out from under me so much as shifted slightly underfoot. It felt weirdly unsatisfying, like revealing an answer on the quick crossword and thinking ‘Oh, yes, OK, technically that is that, but still…’.
I suppose I’ve been wondering lately how to go about collecting short stories into coherent volumes. I’m not even convinced it’s a good idea. An individual short story feels like a treat, whereas a bunch of them lumped together somehow adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Perhaps that’s just how I read. I tend to chew through them quite quickly and that works for novels but tends to make short work feel a bit insubstantial.
Although collecting stories on a theme seems like a smart move, the danger is that it seems repetitive. The Herron collection feels like this. I don’t know. Maybe if you write a series of novels with the same characters in the same organisation, you’ve found your groove and there’s no sense moving out of it. This isn’t meant as a criticism, by the way. It’s probably healthy and rewarding to know yourself, what you like and what you’re capable of. I wish I had more of that. But, as a reader, ‘Dolphin Junction’ felt strangely flat.
‘Illuminations’ is the more typical approach to the short story collection, showcasing a range of techniques and talents. It’s fine, but it being Alan Moore, it does go on a bit and everything in it feels a bit flabby. This is possibly just my own preference for short stories. In any case, the Afterword indicates that these stories were written at various different points, for various different outlets and maybe that’s why these two collections feel underwhelming - because they are, essentially, bowls of scraps. Top quality scraps, but they weren’t ever meant to be presented together.
I keep thinking about albums (an increasingly old-fashioned concept in the age of streaming and music-as-content) and wondering if that can be applied to writing and stories. The best albums aren’t just collections of songs, but they cohere in a way that is pleasing and right. Each song has its own identity, but it also exists in a context. I’m wondering how to accomplish that with stories. Is it enough for the stories to be written in the same period of one’s life? Musicians record an album and then tour/publicise it. Can you do that as a writer? I’m sure there are examples of this, but I need to expand my reading to try and find ‘albums’ of writing that work in that way. Or perhaps make them. They must exist, though.
‘Olive Kitteridge’, which I read over several sleepless nights on holiday, had been recommended to me as an example of stories combining to tell a larger narrative. It’s definitely a novel, but a novel of short stories, and it’s really good. I’d be interested to go back to it and see if you can read the stories individually, but as a whole it works really well. It seems so simple, but that’s the trick of good writing, isn’t it? Anyway, that would definitely be my recommendation as to what to read out of the three books mentioned here.
Or maybe short stories should remain just that - little things that stand independently. I can’t shake the suspicion that they’re collected only so they fit the publishing paradigm of bookshops and shelves full of 250-500 page volumes (which, to be honest, is how I still think of books a lot of the time). I can see that there are economic factors which lead to that working, but we can expand beyond that, surely? I’m not convinced that stories are meant to live together, unless there’s a very good reason for it. That said, I still haven’t come up with one of those very good reasons. Not yet, anyway, but I keep trying and I live in hope.
