Sarah Hall should probably stop publishing short stories for a while to give other writers a chance. If she’s not the best short story writer in Britain, then — but why even finish that sentence? Her novels are good, but it’s in the short form that she excels, with strange, unsettling tales that have made her the only author to be shortlisted three times for the BBC National Short Story Award. (She won it once.)
Her greatest gift is, through a blend of the carnal and the cerebral, to invoke a physical response, something atavistic, in the reader. This response could be close to disgust — as when someone’s ‘tongue was oversized, a giant grub inside his mouth’ — or something more hot-cheeked, even when the character is doing nothing more than having a cream tea: ‘She pushed her thumbs into the body of the scone and split it open.’
In Hall’s stories, life is appetite.
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