Sarah Eyre

The editors of this anthology asked contemporary authors to read Freud's 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche", translated as "The Uncanny", and then to write "fresh fictional interpretations of what the uncanny might mean in the 21st century."

If interested, you can read Freud's essay here

This anthology won the Shirley Jackson Award last year. I recognized about half of the authors in this anthology and of those, I had read other work by them. These stories are not ones of overt horror stories, but are meant to give one some unease or "the creeps". While I certainly enjoyed some of them, others were kind of meh.

Favorites were: A. S. Byatt's "Doll's Eyes" a delightfully subtle, creepy tale about what happens when a woman gives her lover one of her precious dolls from her collection only to see it turn up on Antiques Roadshow. Jane Rogers' "Ped-o-matic" tells the story of one young mother who is leaving her infant for the first time to return to work. On a business trip to Paris she stops in the airport for a foot massage...but the machine won't let go of her feet when she needs to leave.
Etgar Keret's "Anette and I are Fucking in Hell" - which is not much more than a page long - is a creepily funny sex scene in hell. And In Christopher Priest's "The Sorting Out," a young widow and ardent bibliophile, who is in the process of ending a relationship, returns to her home to discover it has been broken into. The story is suspenseful as she must go through each of the rooms of the house oen by one, but interestingly, the only things out of place are a few books here and there --- the authors' names all begin with "D". What does it mean?

It seems to me that I responded best the stories where the creepy element is sort of a manifestation of or connected somehow to the character's internal conflicts. There were other stories that were interesting and imaginative but didn't seem to make an emotional connection. Still, this is a worthy collection to explore if one is interested in the elements of unease in fiction (fiction like other 2009 Shirley Jackson Award Winners like [Disquiet] by Julia Leigh and [The Diving Pool] by Yoko Ogawa)… (mehr)