Time for something a bit different, I thought this month. I have to admit that I tend to steer pretty clear of anything which claims to be ‘sinister, thrilling and amusing’, and call me old-fashioned, but I generally avoid covers featuring stockings and stiletto heels. So Duncker’s Seven Tales, which she explains were written in response to the kind of late night horror films she used to watch on French TV, were a genuine leap into the unknown for me.

On the whole though, they’re pretty good. Two of the stories have echoes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and two are apocalyptic fables. The first two, ‘Stalker’ and ‘Sophia Walters Shaw’ set what seems to be the tone: rape fantasies, dressing up and disguise, mysterious men bent on strange perversions. But the collection develops as it progresses. In ‘Small Arms’ the narrator recounts meeting a war-scarred Vietnam veteran in Germany, only to find herself the only survivor in an apparently random shooting, years later, in a French restaurant. The lone gunman appears to be the same man. ‘My Emphasis’ is Duncker’s proof that ‘domestic violence can be hilarious’: a story of a female playwright working in France, who accidentally misleads her noisy neighbours into thinking she’s being abused by a male actor (actually her friend reciting King Lear on a videotape).

Probably my favourite tale was ‘The Strike’, a stripped down story rooted in the ordinary and believable, which gradually develops into a convincing nightmare scenario. A literary translator moves to her holiday cottage in a tiny French hamlet to start work, just as a fuel strike breaks out at the borders. Over the coming weeks, the strike becomes more widespread, until she loses not just diesel but electricity, daily bread deliveries, the telephone line, and, eventually, all contact with the outside world. When her only remaining neighbours in the village mysteriously disappear, the narrator finds herself the only living human being for miles around. Shades of ‘The Twilight Zone’…

So in the end, the stories I enjoyed most were the ones which least met the descriptions of sinister erotic tales based on slasher movies. In a way, the title doesn’t do the collection justice. It’s well worth a read.
 

Susan Tranter

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