posted on 17 Dec 2023

Scablands and Other Stories by Jonathan Taylor

Here at the Letterpress Project we’ve been fortunate enough to have a long-standing connection with the talented author, Jonathan Taylor. Back in 2016 he was good enough to give us an exclusive interview (which can be read here) and followed that up in 2019 by giving us the right to publish his short story, ‘You Keep It’ (which can be found here). Now in 2023 we have his collection of 20 short stories – Scablands and Other Stories - a collection that includes our sneak preview from 2019.

I’ve been thinking about how best to characterise the 20 short stories that occupy the just under 200 pages of the book. Some are very short – just two or three pages - and none of them over 30 but each one creates an atmosphere, even a mysterious sense of ambiguity, that lingers long after you’ve finished it. In this sense I was reminded of the U.S. short story writer, Raymond Carver, who also stripped his stories down to their bare bones without losing substance or presence. Although Taylor’s work is firmly rooted in the working class cultures of the UK and has a different sensibility to that of Carver, both find themselves fascinated by life on the margins or in that liminal space between the insider and the outsider.

The title of the collection, Scablands – which is also the title of the last story in the collection – should give you a pretty clear signal about the tone and content of many of the stories. Here is a world of poverty, crushed dreams, toppling mental health and it’s also a world of cruelty and pointless violence. All this would be unbearable were it not for the fact that many of the grim scenarios are shot through with an odd sort of burst of optimism or sunlight, maybe an unexpected act of kindness or a hint of inexplicable magic.

Nothing captures the ambiguities or potential contradictions of Taylor’s world better than  the story he has chosen to open with, ‘A Sentimental Story’ in which a woman who seems to have run out of options when it comes to scraping together enough money to just survive, hits on the idea of selling hugs and kisses to people in need of simple human contact. There’s a dreadful hopelessness at the core of this woman’s life and yet she finds a way of bringing warmth and meaning to her existence and the experiences of others. 

And the fact that magic might exist and just maybe we are more than our corporeal bodies or our commonplace experiences and traumas is there in ‘Bee in the Bonnet’ and ‘Staring Girl’. Humanity and simple empathy are the salve that dilutes the dreadful raw violence of ‘Outside the Circle’ and, time and again, Taylor falls back on his obvious love for music. Music here can save us or doom us – it can take us to fabulous places but it can also lead us into nightmare labyrinths. In ‘Zoë K’ a neurologist, Dr Sollertinsky has to deal with a woman who can’t find her way to the end of the music she plays but finds himself also losing his own path through ‘reality’.

Music also dominates my very favourite story in the collection – and I think the longest – ‘Adagietto’ – in which an aficionado of classical music pays a visit to a man living in Stoke-on-Trent who claims to be Gustav Mahler.  Although he is clearly deluded about his identity, the man has an amazing collection of gramophones and classical recordings, including, it would seem, a shellac recording of Mahler himself conducting Adagietto. The recording so enchants the visitor that he becomes obsessed, possessed by a different kind of madness.

The stories in this collection will haunt you and you’ll find yourself constantly changing your mind about which is your favourite. It’s published by Salt Modern Stories and is available now. You can get it from your local independent bookshop – who will be happy to order it for you if they don’t have copies on their shelves.

 

Terry Potter

December 2023