Reality (2020)
240pp, Fiction
Notes
2020-11-25
I finished reading John Lanchester’s recent short story collection (Reality and Other Stories). They’re ghost stories with technology/ social media/ modern angsts as their fulcrum. There’s a decent MR James pastiche and a couple of interesting ideas but there’s just nothing that scary in there. Broadly, it feels to me that people like Kelly Link and to a lesser extent China Miéville are doing a much better job of highlighting the unheimlich in the contemporary world.
During Saturday’s Lefrt 4 Dead session I discussed it with renowned horror lit fan/ practitioner Dan and he felt the same; Lanchester just wasn’t familiar enough with the genre to know that the moves he was making were the most basic.