'Animals' in You Should Come With Me Now

"Yes. I think M. John Harrison is one of our best living writers. He’s underrated because he works in genre fiction. This is the highest quality volume of stories he’s ever produced. They’re not explicitly about ghosts; they’re often just ideas – sometimes sketches, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a page – which have this kernel of bitter humour and unknowability in them. Then in the midst of them there’s this almost-straight ghost story, ‘Animals’, which is probably my favourite. It’s about a woman called Susan, who is staying in a holiday let in Pembrokeshire – which is kind of a classic M. John Harrison doorway to a nightmare, really, as he delights in the most painfully realistic settings possible. But the trick that he does here – and it’s a brilliant trick, I don’t know anyone who does it quite so well – he has a way of making our world seem alien and strange. Everything he describes seems odd. In his science fiction, he describes all these different planets in this sort of matter-of-fact, clipped way, as if they’re not really that interesting, whereas our world is much more richly realised, in terms of the light and the smells, details like that. He seems to realise that the moment we are living in now is always fascinating. Anyway, Susan in ‘Animals’ is staying in this holiday let, and after a couple of days this couple… comes to her attention. It’s very ambiguous – maybe fifty-fifty whether she’s imagining them or not. And she starts to imagine them going about their mundane business. They smoke a lot, they talk about books, it’s all very dull. And they start to impinge more on her consciousness. The longer she’s there, the more weird and violent their story becomes. Again, nothing adds up. It does everything it can to dislocate you in time. “In the handwritten manuscript, an unseen hand starts to write messages” There’s a bit when Susan’s looking out over the sea, and there’s a sand bar. She says that it’s ‘the same colour as the coffee in the Tudor Rooms.’ You read it and think, ‘okay, is this a reference I should get?’ then some time later she goes to the Tudor Rooms, apparently for the first time. It’s that way of introducing things in a nonlinear way. It starts to make you doubt Susan’s narration. It’s hinted at, rather than made explicit. But it’s such a clever idea, and a very odd way of doing a ghost story. And a beautiful story, because it’s beautifully written. Harrison is clearly enjoying himself in this collection, its unmistakeable in the writing. And there are lots of stories that are much funnier in here. There’s one about a man who goes missing inside his own house. They’re funny and tragic. He’s unfailingly honest about people and their limitations. This particular story does have a sort of kick in the guts at the end, but it’s done so beautifully – and even then, that might not be the correct interpretation of what’s happening. It stands up to being read again and again. I read it twice this weekend. I just really like it."