This week, we had the brilliant John Connolly in the London shop to sign copies of his latest short story collection, Night & Day, which spans across genres from the supernatural to science fiction.
Once they were all signed, we got some answers about the craft of writing short stories and some thoughts about particular ones in this collection.
What draws you towards writing short stories compared to full length novels?
First thing, I don’t write that many short stories. There are nine short stories in this book and it’s been nine years since the last collection so the maths got to do it themselves. I found that I have to set aside writing novels to write short stories. I think sometimes they’re treated in creative writing workshops like training wheels on bicycles, that you write a short story and then you move onto your novel. But they’re completely different beasts, it’s like comparing a sprint to a marathon, they use completely different muscles. It’s why I find I have to set aside time to write short stories so actually five of these short stories were written in one go. I think they’re a useful outlet for ideas because not every idea is transferable to a novel. Writers hate leaving ideas unused so short stories become a very good outlet. But I only tend to write, by and large, supernatural short stories. I don’t even read mystery short stories, they don’t tend to interest me very much, I like the long form for the mystery and I think the short form is ideally suited to the supernatural because you don’t have to explain. If you’re writing a long novel, a long supernatural novel, at some point the reader requires some sort of conclusion and explanation. Short stories don’t have to do that. William Trevor used to describe them as the art of the glimpse. The idea that you just get a moment, I think Joyce called it an epiphany. There’s always an incident or a moment which a short story revolves around and it leaves hooks trailing in the reader’s imagination. Readers are often left with something slightly unresolved in a short story, they don’t really mind it. And so that’s ideally suited to the supernatural form, to leave it unresolved, to not have to explain the monster, to explain the manifestation so that’s what appeals to me about them.
Whether or not you would ever do it, are there any short stories in this collection or others in the past you see the potential for a full length novel?
When I did the first volume [Nocturnes, 2004], I did a Parker novella because it seemed to suit the collection and I wanted to signal to readers back then that this was all part of the same universe. That this was all part of me being a writer, that the Parker novels had that supernatural element to them so this was the shared part of the venn diagram, I suppose, where my novels crossed over between the supernatural and mystery. But I wrote a long short story called The Wanderer in Unknown Realms [2013] and someone had originally asked me to write it for a collection of stories about books and I actually set it aside because I thought that was quite interesting and then I ended up writing a series of stories that drew on that and then that then became part of the sequence of novels that began with The Wolf in Winter [2014]and ended with A Book of Bones [2019] that began with The Fractured Atlas [Night Music: Nocturnes Vol. 2, 2015]. A short story kind of inspired a whole different train of thought that then led to six novels, I suppose. So that will occasionally happen. But, by and large, I find they’re slightly separate things, and most particularly with Night & Day because I had edited Shadow Voices [2021] and put together that anthology from history. And that opened my eyes to a different kind of Irish writing, I suppose, that we had a kind of shadow history of writing science fiction and fantasy and so the stories in Night & Day are a little more varied for that reason. There is a science fiction story in it, there are kind of literary fantasy. So not all supernatural stories and I guess that might throw some readers expecting a collection of horror stories, it’s not quite what it is, they’re all slightly odd stories, not necessarily fitting into one genre.
In this collection, was there one that was the most enjoyable to write? And why would you say it was?
I’m glad I got Abelman’s Line done, I’ve never written science fiction before. I’ve written science fiction with Jenny [Jennifer Ridyard] but I’d never written the kind of contained science fiction short stories. That was a completely new genre for me so to move into that and try and adhere to the rules of that genre was kind of interesting to me. I like coming back and writing the Caxton stories. I just like the idea of that as an institution, I think most readers will probably like that idea of a place that’s devoted to books and characters. Those ones take a long time to write because they require a written knowledge of this particular short story or genre that’s being used and I need to research it. Although some nice things fall into your lap, for a long time I would want to write an origin story and then found a little piece in the library from the library magazine that opens that story where with Caxton there are these unexplained house that they had acquired in Westminster and then effectively there didn’t seem to be any reason for them and then they simply fall off the books at one point. I thought then, when you’re presented something like that you think “Okay, I’ll use that”.
Conversely, which story was the most challenging to write and what was it that made it so?
Maybe the science in Abelman’s Line. You need to have an air of plausibility to it. But because I’m hopeless in science - I’m interested in it but hopeless at it - so that is the reason it is written from the point of view not of a scientist but of the accountant. The person who just says “I don’t understand, I’m going to give you a vague idea of what this is about” but it kind of gets me off the hook! “It’s not me, it’s the narrator! The narrator’s unreliable.” And the Caxton one just to get right, there’s a lot of historical detail that isn’t in it but I wanted to make sure that the historical detail that was in it was right so that means actually doing a lot of reading for very little input in the story.
Is there a story in this collection that stands out the most to you? And is there something about it you hope resonates with readers?
I think The Evenings with Evans is a lovely story. There I am, that sounds so pretentious, but it’s not because it’s about grief and it’s about loss and those are universal things, we’re all going to lose people, we’re all going to endure grief. So it’s a story about coming to terms with grief and I think for that reason I was quite careful with it. That had to be handled very gently. And when I was done and I revised it, because it was quite a long time ago when I’d gone back and revised it for this story, and it kind of ironed out little edges I wasn’t happy with. So I think the story’s okay.
Our edition of Night & Day is SOLD OUT!
