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. This sense is on display in the opener here, ‘M’, which reads like a companion piece to ‘Mrs Fox’ and ‘Evie’, exceptional fictions of female transformation that bookended Hall’s previous collection, Madame Zero. But it is not a retread: ‘M’ goes further, and is weirder, like a feverish cross between J.G. Ballard’s The Unlimited Dream Company and Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle. You know you’re in safe hands from the opening lines of the story, where ‘darkness moves like an ocean above the roofs and streetlights’ as an unnamed woman feels pain in her body like ‘a hot zipping feeling under the skin, moving from hip to belly’. Each night it gets worse — ‘violent alteration, acceptance, discarding’ — until her human form is disrupted, and the story bends into a new shape with one foot on solid land and one in myth, where sex is both disease and cure.
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