Short Stories: Hook + Ó Ceallaigh

Two very different, but outstanding collections I want to speak about - one probably known to most of you checking in here, the other from a writer with little connection to horror or slipstream fiction.

The first is Andrew Hook's latest collection, Somnambulant Hearts, compiling 17 of his recent stories, with two of them familiar to readers of Black Static and Interzone.

I can't recommend this one highly enough. Hook's preoccupation with art and its contradictory consoling and destabilising effect on both its creators and spectators, alongside his fascination with questions of identity in crisis - how we adapt or succumb - give these stories a subtle and unsettling power. The best of them - 'The Redeemers', 'The Enfilade', 'Throttle Body', 'The Malaise Trap', 'Sundowners', and 'Water in the Wrong Light' - share a concern with seeing and misperceiving, with truth undermined by compulsive desires. Some of Hook's characters achieve a form of enlightenment, but most of them struggle to reconcile the world as it is, with the world as they imagine it to be.

Hook writes with real compassion for his characters, no matter how fucked-up they may be, and there's a sly, dark humour at play in many of the stories. To read a longer review of Somnambulant Hearts, take a look here

The other writer I've been reading is Irish author Philip Ó Ceallaigh, whose latest collection Trouble (his third) gives us 13 stories, one or two set, at least partially, in Ireland, but most of them elsewhere — an island in the Mediterranean, Bucharest, other corners of eastern Europe.

What ties these geographically scattered stories together is evident in the title. Trouble, in one form or another, just keeps turning up, and it's what gives the collection its shape. Most of it's self-inflicted — difficult relationships, tight money, drink, desire — men who want easy, unattached sex but can't quite cut the tether to partners they're desperate to escape, partners who give as good as they get: unfaithful, embittered, controlling. Nobody gets a clean resolution here. Every story settles into an uneasy calm that you know won't hold.

Fatherhood crops up in three of the stories, almost as a counterweight to all that instability. 'Spring' and 'Dead Dog' share the same narrator, following him and his young daughter as they scrape together a life in a crumbling apartment building — there's real tenderness in how it sits with the daily uncertainty of raising a kid largely alone. 'Graceland' comes at the same theme from another angle: a father's bond with his daughter, and a mother who wields access to the child like a weapon. Together the three stories form the collection's most sustained meditation on parenthood, and its most tender writing.

'My Life in the Movies' and 'My Life in the City,' form another pair, linked by the same narrator and cast — a screenwriter this time, drifting through both stories with his friend Ritzi a constant presence. Between them we get his tangled relationships with Dia, the wife of a close friend, and Carmen, who works for an NGO supporting victims of domestic violence. Read back to back, they cover two or three years, tracking one feckless, occasionally delusional man's drift through friendship and love affairs. Near the end of 'My Life in the Movies,' in a rare flash of self-awareness, he admits: "I wonder why I seem to observe these scenes from the outside, unsure what will happen next, and pretending that I feel no confusion."

Elsewhere, the collection shifts into a stranger, more dreamlike register. "Island" moves away from the grounded realism of the domestic stories into something more disorienting and symbolic. "Bells Bright in the Air" pushes further still, conjuring a city that feels to be edging toward some kind of collapse — a social order fraying at the seams, rendered with the same unsettled, hallucinatory quality as "Island." These pieces read less like slices of a particular life and more like fables about breakdown, sitting at the more surreal end of Ó Ceallaigh's range.

Taken together, Trouble works two registers off each other: the grounded, often painfully intimate stuff about fractured relationships and single fatherhood, and the stranger, more symbolic stories where that same unease gets scaled up to an entire society coming apart. Whether it's one man's marriage falling apart or a whole city on the brink, trouble's the connective tissue — and it makes for a collection that feels genuinely sustained, not just a grab-bag of good stories.