Reality, and Other Stories by John Lanchester Review

Reality, and Other Stories collects eight horror-themed short stories by John Lanchester, most of which are kinda meh.

Cold Call was my favourite. It’s about a lawyer/wife/mother of two who hates her dreary father-in-law for calling her at all hours to ask her dumb questions like where his remote is while she’s busy with her life. Like all the stories here, it’s got that cliched horror twist ending except this ending is actually a bit chilling. More than that though, even if it didn’t lean towards horror at the end, it’d still be a great story in itself - Lanchester is able to brilliantly engross you into the life of this person and I would’ve enjoyed the story if it had just been about that, without the horror twist.

While none of the other seven stories are as good, there’s things to like about several. I liked the snarky conversation of the academics in the coffee shop in We Happy Few, sneering at everyday phrases, their students, and popular current ideas like simulation theory.

Charity is about a retired English teacher working part-time at a local charity shop and plays a bit on the Needful Things-type shop when he inadvertently sells a cursed selfie stick to a former pupil and discovers its terrifying past. It’s such a strange idea to focus on this object (anachronistic too, it turns out) but it’s kinda fun as well.

Signal is a fairly traditional haunted house story where a man takes his family to his rich friend’s mansion in the country for the holidays but gets annoyed at a tall man who seems to follow his kids everywhere but isn’t seen by any of the adults. You can guess the twist ending a mile off but it’s pretty engaging for the most part.

Then we’re into the dregs - these stories haven’t got much going for them at all. The Kit is about a farm family waiting to order a replacement machine for one that recently broke down - but wait til you find out what that machine is with that twist ending! Reality is about a Big Brother-type reality show full of vapid characters and a trite, almost comically absurd, ending.

Coffin Liquor is about an academic who goes to a conference in Romania and goes mad listening to... haunted audiobooks?! This one’s almost like a parody of horror stories. There’s the setting, with shades of Vlad the Impaler (the inspiration for Dracula), the old lady at the entrance of a graveyard muttering warnings, and the Lovecraftian format of the story - diary entries - to show the narrator going slowly mad. It’s just - audiobooks, really??

Which of These Would You Like? was the only story I straight up hated all the way through. It’s a Kafka-esque tale involving a prisoner who’s locked up for no reason, guards, brochures, and the titular question being asked over and over. No idea what that one was about. “Consumerism = bad”?

Lanchester’s not a horror writer, which you can see in the stories that are mostly about ordinary middle-class people going about their everyday lives, though that’s partly what interested me in checking out this collection - to see what a literary writer could do with the genre. And, while the stories were by and large ok, they felt a little formulaic, a little repetitive in their structure, with Lanchester relying too heavily on the twist ending each time, giving them all a contrived and predictable air.

Despite the hackneyed twist ending trope (which was really only effective once in Cold Call), John Lanchester’s Reality, and Other Stories is a decent, if unmemorable, collection that fans of Twilight Zone-esque stories might enjoy.