Little Black Book of Stories
A. S. Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories consists of five long short stories--nearly novellas--that all examine, in some fashion, how death can radically disrupt and reroute mundane experience. Three of the five stories--"The Thing in the Forest," "The Stone Woman," and "The Pink Ribbon"--could be classified as magic realism, since death in these stories comes accompanied by sudden irruptions of the fantastic into everyday life. "The Thing in the Forest" and "The Stone Woman" are also meta-folklore, in the sense that the characters find their own lives running in paths laid down by popular national traditions. The other two stories, "Body Art" and "Raw Material," remain more firmly within the bounds of classical realism, but they still figure death (and, in the case of "Body Art," life) as simultaneously meaningful and sometimes violently inexplicable. Of the five stories, only "The Stone Woman" actually has an ending; the other four deliberately refuse to come to any sort of closure, whether by omitting an outcome ("The Thing in the Forest," "The Pink Ribbon"), leaving the characters in a moment of indecision ("Body Art"), or providing new--but unexplained--knowledge at the last second ("Raw Material"). We are thus left with narratives that are themselves "disrupted," in a formal echo of the events within the plot.
The stories likely to cause readers the most discomfort are "Body Art" and "The Pink Ribbon," precisely because they treat hot-button topics in literary fashion. That is, they aren't arguing a point, but imagining how characters under stress might respond to volatile, life-changing circumstances. (On which topic, coincidentally, vide Frank Rich.) In "Body Art," a young woman, who has already had one abortion, is convinced by the father of her child that she should carry it to term. "The Pink Ribbon," in an inversion of the earlier story, features an aging man whose wife has long since become senile; a vision of his earlier wife, somewhat ominously named "Dido," nudges him closer and closer to euthanasia. Both stories raise uncomfortable questions about love and selfishness, and both stories refuse to offer anything in the way of consoling answers. The baby in "Body Art" at first seems to redeem its protagonists, but it also divides and even paralyzes them; Dido claims to speak for James' almost wholly inarticulate wife, but whose desires are actually being voiced here?
Incidentally, one of the various instantiations of the Book-of-the-Month Club marketed these stories along with their Halloween offerings. What an advertising glitch! I can imagine a reader ordering this collection, thinking that she was going to get a book of straightforward horror stories, and instead finding herself faced with sometimes deliberately provocative (and, often, deliberately frustrating) tales. There is horror here, but it's neither Clive Barker nor Stephen King.