Reality and Other Stories by John Lanchester

​Reality, subjective and increasingly surreal as is, gets a literary going over by a first rate talent with a dangerously dark imagination.
Oh how I loved this book, lemme count the ways…
1. Originality.
2. Terrific writing.
3. Atmosphere.
4. Clever plotting.
5. The social commentary.
I can go on, really, but it’s more fun to just write about it. Didn’t know what to expect with this one, never read the author, but the Black Mirroresque scenarios with horrific tinges were too intriguing to resist. And sure enough, this collection had me from the get go.
The main thing here, me thinks, is that Lanchester is a literary author, so he approaches these stories from that angle and they end up as these very well written thinking man’s nightmares about the modern world’s increasing reliance of technology and gadgetry the development of which is steadily outpacing social progress. In fact, an argument might be made that socially people are regressing, in some way potentially proportionately to the rates at which the technology is evolving. The phones get smarter and the people get dumber. That’s a scary thing in and of itself, but Lanchester takes it further, with Matrix like scenarios and haunted selfie sticks, ghosts attached to their mobile phones and families who assemble their own…well, let’s not give away too much, because the surprises in this collection are just too good to even hint at. You just have to read it.
Black Mirror, especially at its earlier best, set the bar really high for socially relevant speculative scenarios. Now all sorts of things get compared to it to grab at audiences and very few actually live up to it, but this one actually did, all the way. It went darker too, all the way to the classic scary tales of the bygone era, it has the language and the formality that would delight the fans of M.R. James and the like without the ponderous slowness that’s typically associated with those. The stories in this collection are very modern thematically and timeless stylistically. There is an undeniable elegance to the writing. And it’s so excellently clever too.
In fact, We Happy Few might very well be the best short story I’ve read all year and one of all time greats in general. It’s just…awesome.
There’s something weird about the way my brain processes short fiction and my reviews of short story collections and anthologies usually reflect it…the individual stories tend to get deleted, usually there are just general impressions of the overall quality. But not with this book, this one was way too memorable for that. Which is as high of a praise as I can provide for it, really, on top of the awesome and excellent and clever.
So yeah, a great read. I enjoyed it tremendously. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.