Best British Short Stories 2019 - Nicholas Royle Page 0,2

horror magazine Black Static during 2018, it would be Giselle Leeb’s ‘Everybody Knows That Place’, set on a camp site, which immediately makes it pretty horrifying for me. Some people find taxidermy horrifying, whereas I’m drawn to it, and that’s one reason why I liked Sally Jubb’s ‘The Arrangement’ so much. It appears in issue 42 of Brittle Star alongside other stories, Ren Watson’s ‘Sky-sions’ (reprinted in the current volume, under another title) and Josie Turner’s ‘The Guide’, that emerged as winners in the Brittle Star short fiction competition.

A friend alerted me to the fact that Ambit, the great avant-garde arts magazine founded by novelist and consultant paediatrician Martin Bax in 1959, had recently started charging for submissions. To submit a short story used to cost nothing, unless you counted the cost of photocopying, stationery and postage (not forgetting the stamped addressed envelope); now it costs £2.50, which Ambit says is to pay for the cost of using Submittable, a service that charges Ambit a monthly fee. There are advantages to Ambit in using Submittable, editor Briony Bax tells me: it enables their editors to work wherever they are; they can respond to submissions in a timely manner; it creates a virtual office for their eight editorial readers for whom an actual office would be prohibitively expensive etc. All reasonable arguments, of course, and Bax emphasises that there is a student/unwaged category with no proof required of such status, or people may still submit by post for free.

I don’t much like this development, even as Ambit celebrates its sixtieth birthday, but I haven’t let it stop me selecting two stories from last year’s issues of the magazine: Stephen Sharp’s ‘Cuts’ from Ambit 231 (in the same issue I also liked John Saul’s ‘Tracks’) and Adam Welch’s ‘Toxic’ from Ambit 232.

Ambit is not alone. Magazines such as Ploughshares and Glimmer Train in the US have been doing it for years, and, as Rory Kinnear says as Stephen Lyons in Russell T. Davies’s post-Brexit drama Years and Years, ‘We are American. Our business is American, our culture is American. We’re certainly not European, are we?’

Also doing it is the Fiction Desk, whose £3 fee can be avoided if instead you buy one of their anthologies, the latest of which, their twelfth, is And Nothing Remains. I may not like submission charges, but that’s not contributor Alex Clark’s fault and so I will say I enjoyed her story ‘Briar Rose’, as I did her story ‘The Thief’ in Stroud Short Stories Volume 2 (Stroud Short Stories) edited by John Holland. This second volume in the series features stories read by their Gloucester-based authors at Stroud Short Stories events between 2015 and 2018. In particular I enjoyed Joanna Campbell’s ‘The Journey to Everywhere’, its exuberance of language and character reminding me of the great William Sansom.

There was no shortage of anthologies published last year, among them Unthology 10 (Unthank Books) edited by Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones – congratulations to them on reaching that milestone. The blurb on the back of Tales From the Shadow Booth Vol 2 edited by Dan Coxon describes the Shadow Booth as a ‘journal of weird and eerie fiction’, taking its inspiration from Thomas Ligotti and Robert Aickman, but nothing in it reminded me of either writer. It feels more reminiscent of The Pan Book of Horror Stories, and, speaking as someone whose first short story sale was to that long-running series, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Mark Morris, a contributor to the Shadow Booth, is the editor of New Fears 2 (Titan Books). In his introduction he acknowledges the lasting influence of un-themed horror anthologies, such as the Pan series and others. He goes on: ‘My aim with New Fears, therefore, is to bring back the un-themed horror anthology – and not as a one-off, but as an annual publication, with each volume acting as a showcase for the very best and most innovative fiction that this exhilarating genre has to offer.’ What a shame, then, that publishers Titan pulled the plug after this second volume, in which a highlight for me was Stephen Volk’s stomach-churning ‘The Airport Gorilla’, which may be narrated by a soft toy, but is extremely hard hitting.

Jez Noond’s ‘Zolitude’ drew my eye in The Cinnamon Review of Short Fiction (Cinnamon Press) edited by Adam Craig. I liked it, even if I didn’t really understand it. I sense strongly that the lack is within me and not the story. I always enjoy