Полная версия
What You Make It: Selected Short Stories
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
WHAT YOU MAKE IT
A book of short stories
Dedication
This collection is dedicated to the three people without whom … to Nicholas Royle, Stephen Jones and Howard Ely.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 - More Tomorrow
Chapter 2 - Everybody Goes
Chapter 3 - Hell Hath Enlarged Herself
Chapter 4 - A Place to Stay
Chapter 5 - Later
Chapter 6 - The Man Who Drew Cats
Chapter 7 - The Fracture
Chapter 8 - Save As …
Chapter 9 - More Bitter Than Death
Chapter 10 - Diet Hell
Chapter 11 - The Owner
Chapter 12 - Foreign Bodies
Chapter 13 - Sorted
Chapter 14 - The Dark Land
Chapter 15 - When God Lived in Kentish Town
Chapter 16 - Always
Chapter 17 - What You Make It
Chapter 18 - The Truth Game
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise
By Michael Marshall Smith
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I like short stories. I hope you do too, because this isn't a novel. If an honest-to-goodness novel is what you're looking for, then put this volume back on the pile. Propped up, so other people can see it. Or better still, take it with you anyway. You can snuggle down into novels, draw them over your head like a warm duvet and go away for a while. It's like taking a road trip in another country – while the land's got you in its clutches, you can't go home again. Short stories are different. They're evenings out, or day trips, an hour spent gazing out to sea. You don't have to do lots of packing beforehand or set timer switches or arrange for someone to feed the cat, but they leave their mark on your life all the same. Sometimes more so: short stories don't have the luxury of time to draw you in – so they have to come in low, under the radar, and hit you with the very first shot. They're doorways to other worlds, perpetually left ajar, dreams that you experience while you are still half awake.
Novels are time out of time: short stories are part of real life, and sometimes the shortest song can contain the longest single note.
What follows is a selection of the stories I have written in the last decade. Some of them are about fairly normal things, others less so. A few come at similar ideas from different angles, others stand alone; some have a life of their own now, having previously appeared in a variety of formats, while others are shiny new. They include both the first story I ever wrote, and the most recent. Everything else is bracketed between them. Through one of those coincidences which seem too telling to be merely random, while I was putting this collection together I was in Edinburgh for the Book Festival. In the evening I took my wife – who was but a dot on an unseen horizon when the first of these stories were written – to the place where I was sitting when I got the idea for that first short story, just over ten years previously. It was a strange feeling. Two days later, back in London, I attended a book launch for the writer who did more than any other to inspire me to write in the first place – and whose fiction I'd been avidly reading on that day in Edinburgh a decade before. This was the writer's first official visit to this country in seventeen years, and it seems odd that it should fall in the same week that I had stood on The Mound in Edinburgh and remembered how it had been.
But that's the way life is, a sea of coincidences and strangenesses and dark heartbeats – and what follows is an attempt to capture something of it. Then it was 1987. Now it's 1998. These stories chart the journey from there to here, and I hope that amongst them you'll find a couple of evenings to remember.
Michael Marshall Smith
London, October 1998
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
