Screwtop Thompson by Magnus Mills (25 Books in 25 Days #9)

I’d identified a few very short books for when my days are super busy – and Screwtop Thompson (2010) by Magnus Mills was on that list. I had plans at lunch and after work, so these 110pp (with very big font) were just right to squeeze in around the edges – though I hadn’t remembered that they were short stories. Indeed, I didn’t realise this until I got to the end of the first one, and the second on seemed so different. (Incidentally, this collection was published in 2010, but is largely made up of stories previously published in other collections – another thing I didn’t realise.)

This is the fourth book I’ve read by Mills, I think, and I really appreciate his strange style of storytelling. The same tone of the full-length novels is here – and the same curious slant on the world. My favourite story in the collection is ‘The Comforter’ – an architect meets an archdeacon outside a cathedral, and they go in to look at laborious plans that the archdeacon doesn’t really understand. The archdeacon clearly finds it all very dull – and learns that he was agreed to come to these meetings everyday, forever. Is it a parallel for purgatory? Is something sinister going on, or is it not? It’s so lightly, cleverly handled.

In other stories, something mundane takes on significance just because it’s focused on – a sheet of plastic caught on a railway fence, for instance. Elsewhere, a hotel guest spends Christmas somewhere where he always seems to just miss the other guests. The title story is about a toy that arrives at Christmas with no head. There are a few duds in the collection, where the story doesn’t quite land, or (conversely) goes a little too far – but I’ll concentrate on the successes.

Each story is a different world, but they are somehow also the same world. And that’s because the narrator – while not always the same person – performs the same role. Each story is in the first person, and the ‘I’ of each one reacts the same way to the strangenesses he encounters. He (let’s assume he) is always surprised and a little unsettled, but doesn’t question anything too much. The surreal worlds in which this narrator finds himself do not offer any answers – and the narrator seems to expect it from the outset. He may be confused, but he is accepting. The exception, actually, is ‘The Comforter’ – where the narrator seems to be in on whatever mystery the reader doesn’t understand.

And the reader takes on this role, whether or not the narrator is in the know. None of the stories have neat conclusions, and none have twist endings. We are left as unsure as when we began – often disoriented, with a sense that, if we knew just that little bit more, we would be facing a true horror. What analogy is ‘The Comforter’ setting up?  But, as he just shies away from this, Mills has got a reputation as a comic writer. I find his stories much closer to horror than to comedy – the deadpan way in which they’re delivered is chilling, but it’s a very fine line between this sort of chill and laughter.

The book is slight, the sentences are deceivingly simple, and it’s so brilliantly handled that Mills makes this much more than the sum of its parts.