How to Write A Story

Nothing about these stories is horror, or even scary. I wasn’t expecting gore or extreme horror, or even Victorian ghost stories. But there wasn’t a single good story in this bunch of duds. And certainly NOT the supernatural or anything you’d get from reading the back of the bookcover.

This book literally would put me to sleep. Boy, there are MUCH better short story collections out there in this genre.

This black book is worse than Possession which I found grossly over-rated. Anything by this author is horrible and only the literary types seem to like her work.
Rating: 1 / 5

As the sole dissenting view so far, I’ll say that perhaps one has to have read Byatt’s critically acclaimed “Possession” in order to appreciate what she’s done here but I must admit I was unable to do so. I found it sorely misleading to lable these stories as horror stories since absolutely nothing about them was scary or even remotely horrific in any way. I wasn’t expecting to find a Stephen King story here but neither was I expecting to find “Body Art” – a story about a doctor who gets a young woman pregnant and forces her to have the baby. An interesting character study perhaps but nothing at all supernatural or like anything that’s advertised on the back of the cover.

Something may be said for the author’s poetic writing style and she does effectively pull off the modern fairy tale for grown-ups tone but frankly it was a tone that lulled me to boredom and eventually to sleep. I found most of the characters dull and many of them unlikable. I thought that these stories would be an interesting and short introduction to an author I keep hearing so much about. Sadly, as I was barely able to finish this little black book I doubt I’ll be picking up any of her longer works. If you’re looking for poetic character studies with dark tones, I recommend this one. If you’re looking for something scary that won’t bore you to death with page long descriptions of nature at every turn look somewhere else because you won’t find it here.
Rating: 2 / 5

The tone of this collection is best summed up when a character in the last story, `The Pink Ribbon’, reflected on another episode involving his wife’s dementia: “This then, was a tale of strangeness he could just about tell to a friend in a pub. It had an aesthetic horror to it that was pleasing”.

From the literal and physical in `The Thing in the Forest’ and `A Stone Woman’; to the metaphysical in `The Pink Ribbon’; and possibly psychical in `Body Art’ and `Raw Material’, the stories all deal with characters wrestling with monsters of some kind, while preserving that “aesthetic horror”.

As a first-time reader of Byatt, I felt torn between admiration and frustration when confronted with her descriptive prose, which while arguably rich and metaphorical, also came across as opaque and ponderous, especially in large sections of `A Stone Woman’ and `Raw Material’. In the former story especially, the reader is given quite a vivid picture of the strange metamorphosis of a woman into stone, but at the same time, one does get lost in the laborious detailing of stone types and textures, as seen in this extract:

“There were whole ranges of rocks and stones which, like pearls, were formed from things which had once been living. Not only coal and fossils, petrified woods and biohermal limestones – oolitic and pisolitic limestones, formed round dead shells – but chalk itself which was mainly made up of micro-organisms, or cherts and flints, massive bedded forms made up of the skeletons of Radiolaria and diatoms. These were themselves once living stones – living marine organisms that spun and twirled around skeletons made of opal.”

This goes on for another paragraph. But minus these passages, the stories are still worth a read.
Rating: 3 / 5