In Competition No. 3118, which was inspired by Joan Didion’s wonderful essay of that title, you were invited to submit a short story whose last line is ‘I can’t get that monster out of my mind’.
Another notable American female essayist, Susan Sontag, has come in for a bit of stick in these pages over the past few weeks, and she popped up again, in Hugh King’s short story: ‘Susan Sontag, naked, terrifying, had come to him in the night, pinned him down with hawser-like arms, and demanded to know his views on post-structuralism.’ Other memorable ‘monsters’ included Beowulf, the Minotaur and Jacob Rees-Mogg.
The winners earn £25 each.
It seemed that I passed through a gloomy cathedral and into a chamber of oppressive noise; and in that chamber was a beast with six hundred heads.
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