When I saw the books listed for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize one that I was most eager to read was Kirsty Logan’s new collection of stories “Things We Say in the Dark”. Logan is a writer who has produced a number of fictional books which creatively engage with traditions in horror writing and fairy tales to innovatively say something which is both current and personal. These new stories continue in this vein focusing specifically on themes to do with the home, family and birth. Many invoke imaginatively creepy imagery involving ghosts, haunted houses, witches, seances and animalism. Certain stories are dynamic retellings of folklore or classic stories such as ‘Hansel and Gretel’ or ‘Snow White’. In doing so, Logan gives an intriguing new perspective on gender, sexuality, relationships, parentage and violence against women and children. It’s deeply thoughtful how she engages with all these themes, but, most importantly, the collection as a whole revels in the deep pleasure of storytelling itself and how our nightmares function as a deeper form of self-communication. It celebrates the drive for riveting new kinds of tales which confront our worst fears as well as querying why these fears are an essential part of us.

The book functions as a series of self-contained stories, but there is also an overarching narrative where many stories are proceeded by an italicised account by a writer who is creating these tales in an isolated Icelandic location. While each story works just as well in isolation, I enjoy how this gives an added layer to the book for someone who reads them all sequentially. At first the author of these short reflective pieces seems to be Logan herself, but then it becomes clear it’s another creation and the dilemma of this (untrustworthy) fictional author is as eerie as the plight of many of the stories’ characters.

This adds to this collections’ overall propensity for creating stories within stories. Frequently characters are telling each other stories or telling stories to themselves of hidden pasts, powerful memories or fantastic dreams. And often personal obsessions or deepest darkest fears are revealed through how these stories are told and retold. At one point the “author” wonders at the philosophical meaning of all this: “We tell ourselves stories, we stoke our fears, we keep them burning. For what? What do we expect to find there inside?” Whatever catharsis or release is found from all this storytelling it’s clearly a trait of human nature and one the author wholeheartedly believes in as does the reader who boldly ventures to read on knowing some horror might be waiting.

Logan is careful to point out in the final story in this collection ‘Watch the Wall, My Darling, While the Gentlemen Go By’ that these tales aren’t merely flights of fancy but also deal with real world issues. This story’s narrator who is abducted and repeatedly raped thinks “Any minute now the story will be over, the credits will roll, he’ll say it was all a joke, run along home now. But the story isn’t over, because it isn’t a story”. Rather than being lost in the labyrinth of the imagination this is the stark reality of violence and it doesn’t symbolise anything; it’s the cruelty of misogyny and an abuse of power. Although she has a great reputation for reinventing fairy tales, Logan has an exceptional ability for portraying such difficult truths as she did so masterfully in her short story ‘Sleeping Beauty’ which appeared in Logan’s previous collection “The Rental Heart”.

However, I also admire the sheer creativity, playfulness and lowkey sense of humour contained in many of these tales. Some of my favourites include ‘Stranger Blood is Sweeter’ about a female Fight Club, ‘Girls are Always Hungry When all the Men are Bite-Size’ about a sceptic who sinisterly seeks to prove that a psychic girl’s seances are a hoax, 'The Only Time I Think of You is All the Time' about the mysterious pull/compulsion of love and ‘The City is Full of Opportunities and Full of Dogs’ about a librarian whose self-consciousness about working in a building made of glass results in a disarmingly existential conclusion. Other stories are more conceptual in their form but no less emotionally impactful such as ‘The World’s More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand’ which is a very short “nice” story which contains extensive footnotes detailing the terror which underlies simple descriptions or nouns. Also ‘Sleep Long, Sleep Tight, it is Best to Wake Up Late’ is written in the form of a questionnaire about sleep patterns and nightmares which raises disturbing uncertainties about the nature of reality and dreams.

All the tales in this excellent collection exhibit a wonderfully layered sense of storytelling. Often what seems disorientating or simply bizarre at first takes on more meaning and resonance as the story continues. While some stories may be too brief to create a truly lasting impact most give enough of a glimpse through the keyhole to reveal multiple dimensions and form a wider picture within the reader’s imagination. This takes a great deal of craft and talent. I thoroughly enjoyed losing myself in the darkness these stories unleash and discovering what Logan chooses to illuminate.

When trying to show how most of our lives are lived on the surface while all sorts of wild desires and fantasies remain hidden inside us, traditional fiction usually only shows tiny hints of this multi-layered reality in the thoughts of characters and their dramatic actions. In fairy tales this sublimated fear and lust explodes like a geyser. Although the more traditional kinds of these tales are usually sugared for children, Kirsty Logan has written stories which are decidedly for adults due to their frankness of feeling and the complexity of their ideas.

Some stories in this short, powerful book play upon tales we’re already familiar with giving a different perspective or reconfiguring their limited morality. In ‘Matryoshka’ when the “villain” sister ends up alone while the maid she ardently desires ultimately gets to wear the pretty shoes and win the prince it feels like the most devastating kind of romantic tragedy. When the narrator of ‘Witch’ stumbles upon the notorious feared woman who lives in a hut in the woods she discovers that her ostracism from society is of her own making and her alternative lifestyle is far preferable from living with the mainstream. In ‘All the Better to Eat You With’ which is a very short tale told all in dialogue the meaning stretches out to encompass more universal philosophical ideas about the survival struggle of all species which are divided between hunters and the hunted. Characters speaking collectively in the story ‘Underskirts’ emphatically declare themselves as outside of traditional time-honoured stories “We were not the stepmothers from fairy tales” as they sell their daughters into a salacious wealthy household out of financial necessity. The title character of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is cast in a present day starkly realistic setting. In this story the unfolding narrative of a girl who suffered sexual assault after being drugged at a party is ingeniously told backwards so that the hard realism of the event strikes the reader like a hammer. It also meaningfully shows the psychology of a young woman who is trying to forget the event rather than go through the difficulty of reporting it. Far from frivolous, these twists on familiar fantasies are serious stuff.

These imaginative stories are also very playful, funny and sexy. Some are set in grand, old-world settings like a country estate where the lady of the house is known to take in select local country girls for indulgent happenings. Still others take place in the recognizable gritty reality of the present where couples are separated through the necessity of keeping self-sustaining work or struggle with the difficulty of pregnancy. Take for instance, this line from ‘A Skull of Saints’: “People are more than DNA, she knows, but if she could feel their child from her insides, know him with her own flesh the way that Hope does, it would be better. It would make sense. He would feel more like her own; he would be more than just an idea.” This story explores what the real significance of empathy and familial relationships in the way people relate to and think about each other. Yet these stories cleverly bend what’s real and stretch into the fantastic so that children grow antlers or tiger tails in ‘Una and Coll are not Friends.’ The story is told in their voices which sound like any adolescent you might overhear on the street. But the physical imposition of animal appendages makes a powerful statement about the meaning of diversity and divisions which can occur within minority groups. In the story ‘Origami’ a woman waits for her husband who is ceaselessly delayed by work and spends her time making a man out of folded paper. With this oddball detail it makes a powerful comment on the sense of complex isolation one can feel within a committed relationship: “She wasn’t lonely, she was victorious.”

Most of these stories squeeze at the prickly heart of love to make fresh revelatory statements about the meaning of relationships. The title story includes a woman who must rent a heart to begin new romances. In another story a woman takes a companion of a coin operated boy. These aren’t just conceptual ideas in the story, but have a physical impact upon the characters. As is vital in the best absurdist fiction, these weird details are treated in the narratives as completely natural so the meaning of their inclusion adds a forceful complicated layer to the progression of the unfurling story. The diversity of love is demonstrated in different stories involving romance that is lesbian, gay, straight and in-between. Female sexuality in particular is assiduously explored over a range of stories. The story ‘Momma Grows a Diamond’ is one of the most beautifully crafted stories about a girl’s coming of age that I’ve ever read. Girls are initially given the names of flowers, but as they blossom into adulthood they take on the names of jewels. Logan writes at one point: “Aren’t you tired of being a flower, Violet? Momma says to me one morning from the depths of her bed. Flowers crush so easy, baby, but nothing breaks a jewel.” This description of a necessary toughening of character in women is a meaningful and different way to see how personalities change with adulthood out of a need to deal with a new kind of social environment. There is also a particular kind of masculine aggression ingeniously represented in the story ‘The Broken West.” I’ve heard it said before that when two men look each other in the eyes they only ever think one of two things ‘I want to fuck you’ or ‘I want to kill you.’ This idea is demonstrated in the line “Daniel can’t tell if he’s been fighting or fucking, and it doesn’t really matter. Faces look different close up, and the only way to get that close to a stranger is to kiss them or choke them.” These stories cleverly play with gender to show how it sometimes determines or heedlessly defies the ways in which sex plays out or how love manifests.

An Altered Book: Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen - by artist Susan Hoerth

Logan also displays a diverse range of narrative techniques throughout so that some stories are told in short bursts of revolving first person narration while others like ‘Tiger Palace’ has a commanding narrator who leads you manipulatively through the tale and makes you question the meaning of “stories” themselves. Some tales are whimsical and retain elusive meanings. Others are slotted more firmly in particular kinds of genre, but draw into them innovative subject matter. In the haunting, melancholy story ‘Feeding’ a man prepares a nursery while his female partner becomes increasingly obsessed with tending to her garden at night. The creepy tone and continuous image of a trowel hitting dirt makes this story as eerily tense as any psychologically-rich horror story. In a completely different style the story ‘The Man From the Circus’ uses a girl’s newfound profession as a trapeze artist as a significant metaphor for taking a necessary chance in life by plunging dangerously into the unknown world.

As you can tell from my enthusiastic attempt to untangle the meaning of these stories, despite their relative brevity they contain a wealth of ideas. Kirsty Logan is very clever in the way she uses a range of writer’s tools to create the most effect style of storytelling to fit the diverse subject matters she covers. Having been a teenage lover of absurdist drama, I'm thrilled by the way she warps reality in her prose to stimulate the imagination. She crafts disarming images that are imbued with unusual meaning. “The Rental Heart and Other Stories” is a fantastically refreshing read and leaves you thinking about things in a new way. These stories have picked up awards and been included on prize lists both individually and as a collection itself which is a testament to their good quality.

Watch a video of Kirsty Logan discussing the nature of fairytales here: http://vimeo.com/104486851