Broken Ground
Uncertain Stories - Volume 1
Rob Redman (Editor), Lucy Scott (Illustrator)
I have long been a fan of The Fiction Desk, a journal of contemporary short stories that has consistently given priority to narrative over formal experiment, championing solid, finely-crafted storytelling. The Fiction Desk has also served as a springboard for authors who have gone on to issue critically acclaimed work with other publishers. Among others, I would mention two authors I have previously reviewed on my blog: Douglas Bruton (whose subsequent novellas Blue Postcards and With or Without Angels left a strong impression on me) and Kate van der Borgh, author of the gripping, music-infused dark academia novel And He Shall Appear.
The Fiction Desk has never shied away from genre fiction and has published anthologies dedicated to contemporary ghost stories. This has led to the launch of an interesting new project by Rob Redman, the editor behind The Fiction Desk, and artist Lucy Scott. Their new venture Uncertain Stories is a publishing house that will be issuing anthologies of speculative fiction – work that resists easy categorization, but can broadly be placed on the “weird” and “supernatural fiction” shelves.
The debut anthology is called Broken Ground. It features stories by David Frankel, Jack Edwards, Eva Carson, Mark Taylor, Tamsin Hopkins, Nathaniel Spain, and Flo Ward. While they tend to share a similar melancholic, slightly eerie and/or disturbing aura, the settings and styles are pleasingly varied. The malevolent forces at work in Eva Carson’s Owen’s Wynd echo M. R. James. Jack Edwards reinterprets the traditional ghost story in What Remains of Us. The whimsical What My Father Left Behind by Nathaniel Spain brings us face to face with a mermaid who may (or may not) be a hoax. There are elements of futuristic or science fiction in both Mark Taylor’s All Seasons Sweet and Flo Ward’s The End of the World. The latter is one of my favourite stories in the anthology, the speculative concept of an eternal sunset setting the scene for a surprisingly optimistic and heart-warming ending. The Builder and Shadow, by David Frankel and Tamsin Hopkins respectively, opt for a more oblique, metaphorical approach.
In a world where readers are increasingly turning to alternative media (I have become a great fan of ebooks, despite my love for physical books), Uncertain Stories is, counterintuitively, placing its faith in the book as artefact. The accompanying artworks by Lucy Scott – beautiful, atmospheric, slightly surreal – are an indispensable part of the reading experience.
Uncertain Stories is also publishing a series of Little Uncertainties – very short books, each containing one illustrated short story, distributed for free in cafés and bookshops. My order of Volume 1 of Uncertain Stories kindly included Chalklands by Richard Smyth, as well as two postcards, one featuring a piece of flash fiction by Eva Carson.
Such thoughtful and imaginative
endeavours, launched at a moment when independent publishing is becoming ever
more precarious, deserve our wholehearted support.
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