Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond

LoveReading Says

I associate the short story collection as a genre with stories like these — uncanny or supernatural morality fables, though they may often side more with the underdog monster or old, dark magic than the voice of ‘normal society’. Garland’s collection gives us snapshots of werebeasts and ghosts, delusions and scales finally falling from eyes. Something that struck me as being different from comparable collections however is that they were not AS often about the intimacies of sex or desire between people, leaning more towards exploring other worlds, or relationships between strangers, or accidents. In setting I felt they tend towards being disembodied from specific times or places, though sometimes have a sense of being written in ‘the past’, like fairytales. 

Somewhat inevitably with a short story collection, there are going to be some which stand out more in the subjective reader’s opinion than others. My favourites tended to be the slightly longer ones, where I felt Garland really hit her stride and showed that balance of development within brevity that the best short stories can achieve. For example, my favourite was the story of ‘The Red Glasses’, where a woman makes a Faustian bargain for a pair of rose-tinted glasses which makes the world around her perfect and dreamlike, as long as she keeps them on and doesn’t step out of her parameters. Some of the shortest of stories too, though, have the oomph of a horror story told off the cuff around a fire — ‘What Goes on in the Bushes’ is barely longer than a page but lingered in my mind vividly afterwards. 

Lily Lindon

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