A few weeks ago when in London, I went to see my friend Jenny’s art show at Burgh House. I ate a hunk of babka on the train there from a friend’s house I was staying at in Highbury, and stopped in the Hampstead Daunt books, and opened a little novella at random. Sometimes I like to buy books this way, just to check if the sentences are good, and the one I came across was

‘ When Melita was painting plums, and only plums, and Peter was shooting and painting rabbits and ducks, I was painting tangerines, brown teapots, rolls and books. These objects were unstill, scattered about falling and flying- not purposely but because of something inside me.’

Ellen is a former art student in 70s New York. Generally I don’t like New York set novels, and the way a lot of literary British people in particular make’ New York in the 1970s’ their whole personality despite not being there grates me, but this book has the same energy and soiled atmosphere as the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy, admittedly one of my favourite films. There are quite a lot of contemporary novels set in the art world, both in the now and historical, too many, but having grown up with a painter for a mother, I don’t think they get it right and are full of hoity- toity descriptions of light, what someone who can afford to buy art thinks an artist’s life is like . The Princess of 72nd Street (139 pages) gets it right the same way the novels of Barbara Comyns do, that is being able to write the way a painter sees the world. Like Comyns, Kraf was also a painter. I wish more visual artists also wrote novels instead of writers using the ‘art world’ as a thinly disguised book world.

‘.. I decided to gather whatever was white, which included white bread, toilet paper, paper plates, candles, eggs. I remember weeping because the fruits were not white, then looking again and realising that if seen in opposition- that is- opposite to the way I used to paint white tablecloths, these fruits were by nature of their colour pure white especially when spinning.’

The narrator is Ellen, who during her ‘radiances’ ie psychosis becomes Princess Esmerelda, and takes home ancient male fruit sellers to sleep with, wears astrological medallions or ankhs, ‘ floor-length skirts patterned with a yellow and black abstract design’, and dances topless in public parks imagining herself like Isadora Duncan1 and philosophises

‘ Men should be blind. This is something I have worked over in my mind after taking careful note of the way they use their eyes. They cannot focus, have in fact darting eyes, spinning thorny eyes. If a married man looks at a woman younger than his wife or prettier or even of the same prettiness, then he shall forever dwell in darkness.’

She lives off Medicaid payments as she hasn’t worked since ‘teaching arts and crafts to senior citizens’ after an ex-boyfriend told her to leave the job.

Her artist friend Melita wears purple and is obsessed with plums.

‘In those days Melita painted plums- three plums on a horizontal canvas, or one plum all alone on a square canvas, or plums scattered about, or plums cut open, an occasionally plums on a white plate. When plums were out of season, Melita got upset and sat in the corner of the studio.’

Melita’s boyfriend grows to hate plums because Melita loves them, and blames his impotence on their presence (naturally, he has to test his impotence by trying it on with Ellen) so Melita brings her art supplies over to Ellen’s house and paints there.

Ellen’s boyfriends include George who has a big beard, likes to read her ‘The Communist Manifesto and when he gets into a rage ‘ he drooled and tore rags,’ Alan a lawyer who hates her creativity and imagination and checks out other women when they are out to dinner , Rambert, a urologist who likes piss coloured roses, offers urinary analysis and during sex likes to flip women over ‘like a duck in a frying pan’ and Auriel, a street performer with overgrown toenails who wears silver stars on his face and unnerving wigs, a kind of T.Rex glam rock figure. They live in a world of delis, Orange Julius, Burger King, a greek diner called ‘The Oedipus luncheonette’ , cockroaches, terrible sounding art projects involving traffic lights and spools, tv dinners and late night psychiatrists, Cuban restaurants full of purple wax grapes.

During her radiances, she doesn’t feel pain, but does after, noticing bruises and bumps and in her apartment ‘ two rotting soggy watermelons smelling sickly sweet’ and ‘invaded by roaches’ and her bed ‘ripped apart’ the sheets stained with ‘thick brownish blood’ and craves the radiance again. Tony, the ancient fruit seller, who has ‘greedy eyes, broken teeth and black fingernails’ runs into her when she isn’t in her radiance and furious she won’t sleep with him again says ‘ If I was good enough for you once, I’m good enough for you twice. Who do you think you are? Tony will tell you what you are. You’re a tutti-frutti, a nut.’ Alongside everyone else, Ellen doesn’t seem that nutty.

The fate of Ellen is hilariously predictable, and told with one eyebrow raised, the fate of many creative women. I shall not spoil it, but I hope you laugh along with me.

For a short while during the year I was ten, I thought only people I did not know died.

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid ( 141 pages, Picador) is a novella told in vignettes, one of my favourite novella and novel formats. Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns is another example of an excellent vignette novella. Instead of formulaic ‘yarn spinning’ they present a series of moments, emotional states and relationships of a character that are compulsive to read, and in both these, told in the first person . Annie John takes place on the island of Antigua in the Caribbean, Annie is a precocious school girl and only child. The novella follows Annie from her school girl days until her eventual leave for England, to study as a nurse. She hides marbles under the house, never returns library books and is at the top of her class. She is devoted to school mate Gwen, then an unkempt girl with red hair she calls The Red Girl.During a fever dream illness, she washes a bunch of family photos believing they smell and gets in trouble at school for writing ‘ The Great Man Can No Longer Just Get Up and Go” under a textbook illustration of Columbus in chains. In the first chapter, she lists every death she has heard of, and her first personal death, a humpbacked fellow school girl.

‘ On hearing that she was dead, I wished I had tapped the hump to see if it was hollow. I also remembered that her hair was parted into four plaits and that the parts were crooked. “She must have combed her hair herself,” I said. At last, though, someone I knew was dead.’

She later learns of an uncle’s death: ‘ When he died, a large worm bored its way out of his leg and rested on his shinbone. Then it, too, died.’

! I’ve never encountered a writer who uses commas as well as she does.

At the beginning she adores her mother and is devastated when her mother doesn’t want to make dresses from the same cloth for them anymore, one that Annie has chosen with ‘ a yellow background, with figures of men, dressed in a long- ago fashion, seated at pianos they were playing, and all around them musical notes flying off into the air.’

Increasingly though, she finds herself drifting away from her mother and her obsessive friendships.

‘One afternoon, I took another way home, a way that brought me through Market street. Market street was where all the stores were, and I passed by slowly, staring into the shop windows, though I wasn’t at all interested in the merchandise on display. What I was really looking at was my own reflection in the glass, though it was a while before I knew that. I saw myself just hanging there amoung bolts of cloth, amoung Sunday hats and shoes, amoung men’s and women’s undergarments, amoung pots and pans, amoung brooms and household soap, amoung notebooks and pens and ink, amoung medicines for curing headache and medicines for curing colds. I saw myself amoung all these things, but I didn’t know that it was I, for I had got so strange.’

This was such a perfect read. Next, I want to read Lucy by Kincaid, a novella about being an au pair girl.

When we drove to the place where I learned to swim on Saturday mornings, I used to get him to tell me the story. I loved it because the whole thing unnerved him so much. There was always a note of jangly trepidation in his voice as he came to the end and said, ‘You never find out whether she’s mad or not. Maybe it’s all in her head.’

It was contagious. The same rush of goosebumps could come up through a row of inky marks on a page into my dad who could pass them onto me. Dark magic, haunting in its purest form. Maybe it was an odd thing, to be a kid freaking out over The Turn of the Screw, but at the same time, it’s also weirdly apt, after all, it’s a story about childhood, innocence and its undoing, the deep disturbances that adult knowledge can make inside a fragile mind. I think I was the perfect age.

Here’s a picture of Henry James with his dad when he’s roughly the same age as I was then. Look at his face! He’s like an evil little Wes Anderson protagonist. My dad doesn’t and never did look like a mutton-chopped overweight history professor. Picture a non-Oxbridge Hugh Laurie with hair the same colour as a badger’s coat. I like the willowy hand on the shoulder. He (and me) were probably the same age as Miles, the boy in The Turn of the Screw, expelled from school for reasons which are never fully explained.

At its most straightforward, it’s the story relayed through several parties of a jittery (‘fluttered’ is the Henry James word) Victorian governess tasked with schooling two precocious orphan children on the handsome estate of Bly while the master of the house, their uncle, is away. Charmed by her wards and left alone with the kindhearted housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, all seems idyllic at first. But intimations of something malevolent hover at the edges of the long summer afternoons. She sees Mr. Quint, the caretaker, stalking on the top of a tower. ‘He’s like nobody’, she tells Mrs. Grose, hot with panic:

“‘And what became of him?’

She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified.

‘He went too,’ she brought out at last.

‘Went where?’

Her expression, at this, became extraordinary. ‘God knows where! He died.’

‘Died?’ I almost shrieked.

She seemed fairly to square herself, plant herself more firmly to utter the wonder of it. ‘Yes. Mr. Quint is dead.’”

It was at this point, years later, when I was a teenager, alone inside the story for the first time, that I yelped and threw the book across the room, yelped, to quote its final page, ‘like a dog thrown over an abyss.’ Even though I knew exactly what was coming, it still got me.

You think you’ve got Mr. Quint but all you can snatch is a handful of cold air. Certain words accrue a certain dark suggestive weight. ‘Between’ seems to hint at a sinister intimacy which admits no one else and must, given that very sinister nature, remain undiscussed. To be ‘held’ here, without giving too much away, is not a terribly good thing and you will be held until the last page and long afterwards. Look at the beginning: ‘The story held us round the fire, sufficiently breathless….’ ‘Sufficiently breathless’! What a strange thing to say. And we’re not halfway through that sentence, a masterpiece of classic Jamesian cat-and-mouse choreography, in which he somehow builds a haunted house around us, nods with a meta-mischievous grin to the frame of the tale itself before falling, with a hideousness that is all the worse for being so matter-of-fact, on the horror at the heart of the story, which— well, that would be telling.

And the special thrill and horror of The Turn of the Screw is that it isn’t telling. The house doesn’t explode, no ooze comes through the walls and Mr. Quint doesn’t offer the governess a decomposing hand and ask her to dance in the garden. The whole story remains in the shadows. Perhaps the story is the shadows. Miles was expelled because he ‘told the other boys’ certain things but what they were is, I’m afraid, unspeakable.

Henry James’ qualities (to use one of his decorous terms) are well-known. Yes, he was an owlish and mysterious creature of allusion and indirection. You know the exquisite fussiness of his diction, those labyrinthine breadcrumb trail of his sentences which lead not to gingerbread houses but to dark and many-chambered mansions, the awkward syntax, the attentiveness to the psychological interiors of his characters.

The Turn of the Screw (which he deemed with lordly hauteur be ‘a potboiler’) is the psychotic hall of mirrors in which all these same qualities become instruments of something demonic and wildly beguiling, a ghost story which is also a detective story in which the detective is also the suspect; a primal narrative about how the desire to know more, to find out those unspeakable things can lead to your undoing and also, paradoxically, to somehow knowing less and less, a maze within a maze, shivers upon shivers, a situation which can have you weeping like Meryl Streep’s nun at the end of the movie Doubt, which is like The Turn of the Screw but with more schoolboys and no (obvious) ghouls: ‘I have such doubts! I have such doubts!’

Sometimes I can imagine Nabokov writing it since he wrote stories like ‘Signs and Symbols’ with its ‘darkly gesticulating trees’ or ‘The Vane Sisters’ with its ending which is a wicked twist on the concept of a twist, an undercurrent, and his general fascination with the narrator as a unreliable trickster, but it’d have to be a Nabokov without the campy, velvet-gloved I-am-the-Riddler vibe, which would be, duh, no Nabokov at all.

The Innocents, the perfect movie adaptation of the story from 1961, somehow matches the feat of the book as Deborah Kerr grows ever-more unhinged and more assured in her conviction that the ghosts are indeed real and the children are little devils seething with strange talents, inexorably drawing Miles into a wholly other and equally fearsome darkness with her.

The script amps up the creepy psychosexual tensions between the governess and her charge, broaching some of the territory that lurks within the book. (You could take a Jamesian turn and call it What Miles Knew.) The script was by Truman Capote (assisted by John Mortimer), which is a whole kind of maze to get into... All I’ll say is that Southern Gothic takes on a new kind of meaning, too: the hallucinatory swamp heat drifting from New Orleans into the lush Sussex setting, intensified by all those corsets and candelabra and creeping vegetation. It also inspired Kate Bush to write ‘The Infant Kiss’, the unsettling love song on Never For Ever, the album where all the Arthur Rackham ghouls and goblins coming out from under Kate’s skirts on the cover. My dad had the LP, until I stole it off him.

I’m a total sucker for hysterical lush Gothic melodrama and all sorts of haunted-ness, obviously. There was a time I watched The Age of Innocence over and over for four days until my friend called me and told me to stop. I also ended up in a freaky compulsive situation around Halloween last year where I couldn’t stop watching that 1980s version of The Woman in Black with the doctor from Breaking the Waves in it. But there’s a chill specific to The Turn of the Screw which you can’t get anywhere else, something at the window which is different to all the other monsters. I can still feel the same dark curiosity prickling inside me when I think about it now.

I can still remember feeling that the book seemed to read me as I was reading it. I’d woken up some malevolent intelligence by cracking it open which was, in fact, in the room with me that night, stroking carefully the hairs on the back of my neck. Not just that but that I was somehow suddenly in cahoots with it, there was something between us. I was being drawn into or succumbing to the same conspiracy, finding more and more evidence while also being rendered more unstable. We talk about getting into a book but what if a book gets into you?

The bewitched book, too, is a classic horror trope, right up there with the call coming from inside the house, but that power seems held inside The Turn of the Screw like nothing else. It was the real thing. I asked my dad once why he thought that habit of buying those gothic Penguins came over him and he said, ‘Well, they’re stories that you think you know but you don’t…’ which is kind of the perfect description of what’s afoot and askew in the book. Or should that be ascrew?

By way of a parting gift, here’s Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins singing a capella but weirdly distorted. (I was going to say something about DJ Screw and demonic possession but…) I always felt like there’s some kind of relationship between the Cocteaus and The Turn of the Screw since they are both gothic and ghostly but in a strange language that we know but don’t know what to call, only, this is, perhaps, a dreamier, more romantic version. I made it when I was a teenager, I think, around Christmas and preoccupied with them both, but I can’t say for sure, and the song, too, I don’t know its name but I like feeling it’s something I’ve just overheard.

Charlie Fox is a writer who lives in London. His debut novel, Drool, will be published by Rough Trade Books in September.

Short sentences. Paragraphs averaging two sentences long. Michael Bracewell’s The Smiths has the feel of a pop single, say ‘Hand in Glove’, which Bracewell first heard on the radio in 1983. It was love at first listen.

These opening seconds announced a life-changing visitation out of absolutely nowhere. Mysterious, portentous, thrilling, yet profoundly charming. A sudden gale, blood temperature, roaring down an empty street on a summer night.

Forty-three years later, the experience of listening to The Smiths inspired this curious little novella.

And it is little: a mere 17,000 words, short even for a novella. The book’s designers have tightened the line length to ensure it achieves a respectable 110 pages. But it is frustrating to read as my eyes lost their mooring in the broad margins.

Once I got used to the typesetting, the prose is superb — arch, pithy and resonant. It compels the reader to go back to the album and experience the songs with refreshed ears. And while Bracewell’s intoxicated descriptions inevitably pale next to the wounded urgency of the Smiths’ first four albums (The Smiths, Hatful of Hollow, Meat is Murder, and The Queen is Dead), I was grateful for the nudge.

At a time when Morrissey’s reputation sits somewhere between Engelbert Humperdinck and Enoch Powell, writing about The Smiths is a risk. To avoid such issues, Bracewell creates a fantasy autofiction in which he leads the actress Carole Bouquet (That Obscure Object of Desire, For Your Eyes Only) through the London of his twenties. It was a time when Bracewell was stuck working in a menial civil service job:

There was no grade of clerical officer lower than the grade I occupied, and my attitude to the job was that of an overweight ghost assigned to haunt a car park.

The Smiths were his saviour, a glimpse of a world of intelligence and glamour. The litany of icons who inhabit Morrissey’s outsider pantheon —Jean Cocteau, Oscar Wilde, Pat Phoenix, Billy Fury, Candy Darling, Shelagh Delaney — are still strangely unassimilable by the mainstream. Even as queer art becomes hegemonic, such figures, like Morrissey himself, resist commodification.

Bracewell identifies Morrissey as a regional Georgian poet transposed to ‘hinterland estates, dank subways, bank holiday fairgrounds and soot-blackened tombstones, engineering brick and wet precincts.’ How bracing! It is difficult not to be nostalgic for what has been lost, however grim it was at the time.

But this is not a melancholy book. By the end, Bracewell is recalling ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ and asking, “How could something so funny be so sad?” And just like The Smiths’ music, this book is both.

The Smiths: A Novella

by Michael Bracewell

128 pp., £14.99, June 2026, White Rabbit Books, ISBN 978 1 399 63860 9.

https://store.whiterabbitbooks.co.uk/products/the-smiths

‘Either restore me to my treasure

Or let me at least die.’

Hackenfeller’s Ape (128 pages, republished by Faber Editions) first published in 1953 begins with a professor named Darrelhyde contemplating Mozart while waiting for two apes, Percy and Edwina, to mate in the London zoo. The apes are a species named after the Dutch man, Hackenfeller who ‘discovered them’ and they resemble Bonobos. A man named Kendrick comes by and tells Darrelhyde that Percy is going to be put into a rocket and sent into space ‘Percy will see the stars.’ Darrelhyde is desperate to save him, protesting to his sister:

If men get giddy, or whatever you do get, thy know it’s because they’re travelling in space. If they feel themselves dropping unconscious, they know it’s because of a lack of pressure, or oxygen or whatever it is. But the monkey doesn’t know what it’s all about.

Projecting animals into space, journeys from which they most often didn’t return, is perhaps one of the most macabre things humanity has done. Brophy must have read about Albert II, a monkey sent into space in 1948. Several years after Hackenfeller’s Ape was published, a chimpanzee named Ham was sent into space. (The photo of him in his astronaut’s outfit, strapped in what looks like a baby’s car seat before launch is incredibly distressing.) This novella is both philosophical and uncomfortable but never slips into preaching, sentimentality or ranting. Darrelhyde visits a ‘LEAGUE FOR THE PREVENTION OF UNKIND PRACTICE TO ANIMALS’ but instead of helping him save Percy, they show him a bunch of photos of animals being tortured and ask if he would like to ‘become a member of their league’ which means they will regularly send him such photos. Darrelhyde asks:

‘How would my joining help that?’

‘By bringing the abuses to public noice.’

‘How?’

‘By the wider dissemination,’ the colonel said, ‘of pictures like these.’

I think one of the great, and important reasons, beyond good sentences and good narratives, to read fiction from the past is to discover that things we see as a contemporary malaise (sharing violent photos on social media as political protest) already existed, though perhaps not to the extreme quantity they do today. I had the same feeling when reading Nancy Mitford’s debut novel, Highland Fling and there being a scene where a group of youths on a train are playing music on a portable gramophone.

Darrelhyde decides to break into the zoo and kidnap Percy. There is a whole subgenre of British works of fiction about zoo break ins: Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban, Several Perceptions by Angela Carter. Brophy was also an activist for many social causes (it is in part, thanks to her authors get a Public Lending Right cheque each year. I call it my Brigid Brophy money.) which made me worry her work would be too polemic, but it isn’t. It’s funny, discomfiting, and this novella will defamiliarise you, at least for a few hours, from the complacency of being human.

It’s not the consciousness of Man that distinguishes him,’ Darrelhyde protested; ‘it’s his imagination. If you can imagine what it feels like to be an animal, and you must kill it, then you kill it humanely.’ He added: ‘If you can imagine what it feels like to be a middle-aged Countess, then you write an opera.’

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After three cups of tea, I’ve decided to start a second substack, just for reviewing novellas, which by my definition will be fiction books under 150 pages. Call them short novels if you want! Why? Many publishers won’t publish them. The Women’s Prize doesn’t accept books under 30,000 words, it’s kind of considered a dirty word and well, I think it is a perfect form, a world you can dip into in one afternoon and emerge changed. Brevity doesn’t signify meaninglessness. The reviews here, in the spirit of novellas, will also be short.

Many literary classics are actually novellas: Animal Farm, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Driver’s Seat. Today I read The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg ( translated by Frances Frenaye and published by Daunt books) . The narrator is an incredibly careless, lazy girl, Delia ,who has an affair with the local doctor’s son, Giulio, but as its told in first person, you are half forced to get on board with her ways. Delia’s cousin Nini (who she grew up with after he was orphaned ) is in love with her but having an affair with an older widowed woman, Antonietta who owns a stationery shop. Nini moves in with Antonietta to escape the poverty of their home life with no intention of marrying her, while Giulio is resistant to marry Delia . There is a reoccurring motif of a gramophone playing the same song over and over again in their childhood home, they only own one record, and it is there to remind us that the characters, and us, only have one life to play. It’s a novella about how short life is and how life can change in an instant with us barely registering it, but in Ginzburg’s hands these aren’t platitudes but fresh, shocking truths.

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