Kieran.Stories

A lot of my reading in March happened on the bus. I’m on a prescription of four buses, daily. Each journey is about twenty minutes. There’s a definite crick in my neck. Fingers crossed, I am just about young enough to put up with it, although someone at work today guessed I was in my thirties. What’s in an age, anyway? I have about a year of my twenties left. My sister said a while ago that I wasn’t young anymore, I was just ‘a man’. She’s always right.

I want to write a post about bus reading at some point. It has changed the way I process books, especially novels. The motion of the ocean, and all that. I finished Great Expectations on the bus at the start of March, and that was a very strange experience. I cried twice. Call me a dweeb! Dweeb me up, Scotty. The two moments were: Estella admonishing Miss Havisham by the inglenook, and Wemmick’s wedding.

I picked a lot of books up this month, and I put a lot down. I did not finish, for example, No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, or The History of Magic by Chris Gosden. But I finished some good stuff. I also read an excellent piece by Andrew O’ Hagan in The London Review of Books on the Royal Family, linked here. April is going to be a bit crackers, life-wise, so I want to be more selective in my reading, and try to read more closely, too. I promise I’m a laugh. Anyway: March.

Night Train by Martin Amis (1997)

I haven’t stopped thinking about Night Train. The more I think about it, the more I admire it as a whole. It is remarkably of a piece, if that makes sense. It is also much stranger than I expected. I read it soon after Great Expectations. Sometimes I think you take the goodwill you built up from a great book into the next book you read. Maybe. But Amis does have that Dickens knack for key phrases and names. (Dickens did good names, don’t know if you knew that!) Take ‘I am a police.’ as a first line: genius. But the real genius is how ‘a police’ (‘I am a police.’ ‘He was a police, like me.’ etc.) is turned over throughout the book to communicate something about sadness, or loneliness, which are the two central themes. This is a book about suicide, told as a semi-pastiche (an almost do-up) of a hard-boiled cop story. It stays its course, that’s the most impressive part of it. It doesn’t chicken out. This was the moment I knew I loved this book, at the end of the first part ‘Blowback’: ‘You wouldn’t see her. You’d see the wall behind her head. Then the first detonation, and its awful flower. Then a beat, then a moan and a shudder. Then the second shot. Then a beat, a gulp, a sigh. Then the third. You wouldn’t see her.’

First Novel by Nicholas Royle (1994)

I have been a Royleist (Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen!) for a few years now. He is someone I admire a great deal, and I have been lucky enough to exchange a few emails with Nicholas about writing. He’s a lovely emailer and postcard sender. I’ve read quite a few of his short stories but this was the first novel. It’s fantastic. It shares something with the last novel I read this month, As If by Isabel Waidner. This was a major bus book: 100% bus. When I tried to read it in the flat, I experienced a weird reverse motion sickness. A mind-bending book about writing and the process of agonising over writing and writers. It’s also incredibly dense, packed with crossing-overs and doubles, and it probably requires another reading. I look forward to meeting it again, stationary.

Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerdal (2024)

This collection is so clear and immediate. I had a textural understanding of this world, from the second story on. I especially liked the use of Instagram in some of the stories. When used well, placing a social media into a story adds another layer of realism, for me, and more than that, another sense of interiority. There’s a strong connective tissue – plot-wise – between the stories, but this is sort of dropped in the last third. I was hoping for a stronger resolution. That’s a me problem, probably. I hadn’t heard of Dahlia de la Cerdal before picking this up. I am keen to read more work by her. Another example of judging a book by its cover: fantastic cover, brilliant collection of stories (not for the squeamish, though).

Intervals of Darkness by Ray Newman (2024)

I think the final story in this collection, ‘Industrial Byproducts’, is the best story I have read in a long, long time. Like Nicholas Royle, Ray Newman is someone I’ve come to admire over the last couple of years. His collection Municipal Gothic is also a favourite, and I am very much looking forward to his new book, Thin Places in Hard Concrete. He’s also a great blogger – and champion of the blog as a medium. ‘Industrial Byproducts’ was another piece of storytelling that made me cry on the bus. (Three strikes, you’re out.) I found it moving in a way that I cannot properly describe. I know it has something to do with time. And then the layering of strangeness. The nullifying of the horror. Or the horror of being nullified, maybe, and then brought back to life by small acts of love – or simply by the process of being alive. That makes no sense, really. Get the book, read the story – it’s the last one in the collection, so you’ll have to make it to the end, but you will thank me for it.

The Fortean Times Book of Strange Deaths ed. Steve Moore (2010)

Each paragraph a grim, ironic short story prompt. I think this page gives you an idea of tone. Totally tasteless. Also irresistible.

As If by Imogen Waidner (2026)

I loved this book by Imogen Waidner and look forward to reading it again. It also has one of those perfect last lines, which I obviously won’t spoil. I bought this book, along with Discord by Jeremy Cooper, at Sam Read Booksellers in Grasmere, one of my favourite places in the whole entire world. I started the book in the sort of lobby/sofa/dining area of our hotel, while a couple behind us played cards. I finished it at home on the Sunday, in the late afternoon. Like First Novel by Nicholas Royle, it is a story about doubles, about getting yourself in a right profound but also ridiculous mess. Absurdly clever, technically brilliant, I took something from basically every line of this novel, and I am sure I will be stealing from it on some level for years.

Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (1946)

I am still reading Titus Groan. I think I’ll save my thoughts for a longer post, as I want to read Gormenghast and Titus Alone fairly soon. But as I said on Bluesky, maybe Gormenghast was the friends we made along the way. I will say one thing, Titus Groan has more in common with The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro than I expected (and I read that at almost exactly this time last year – weird!) and it features some of the oddest sentences I’ve ever read: ‘But both the Doctor and his sister found that the ladies Cora and Clarice had not been paying the slightest of attention but had been staring at Steerpike more in the manner of a wall staring at a man than a man staring at a wall.’