This month Rebecca of Bookish Beck is hosting Short Story September. There are lots of short story collections I would like to read but I knew I would probably only have time for one this month, so I chose one that I would be almost guaranteed to enjoy. I loved Celia Fremlin’s 1970 short story collection Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark, which I read a few years ago, and By Horror Haunted, originally published in 1974, sounded very similar.

The title is slightly misleading, I think, as most of the stories can only very loosely be described as horror. Some are quite eerie and unsettling, one or two include ghosts, but most are concerned with the ‘horrors’ of everyday life. One story deals with a fear of flying, for example, and another features a man struggling to come to terms with blindness – both of which Fremlin describes convincingly and realistically. There are fifteen stories in the book and most are short enough to read in just a few minutes; although I would have liked some of them to have been developed further, they are all satisfying and each one has a clever twist at the end – my favourite kind of short story!

Of all the stories, the only one that did really scare me was The Savage Heart, in which a zoologist decides to keep a lion cub as a pet and raise it along with his little girl, Rosalie. This causes a sensation, with newspaper reporters descending on the house to take photos of Rosalie and Leo playing together. As the lion grows bigger and stronger, however, Rosalie starts to feel more and more uneasy around him. I read this story with a growing sense of dread, as I’m sure you can imagine!

The first story, Her Number on It, was another that stood out. A middle-aged woman finds that she can’t stop stealing dresses from a London department store, much to her husband’s embarrassment, as he’s the one who has to keep speaking to the manager and promising she won’t do it again. But what he doesn’t know is that something even stranger is happening to his wife – she has discovered a tube station that acts as a portal to a different time. I also enjoyed The Intruder, in which a young woman listens to noises upstairs in the night, convinced that there’s a burglar in the house. This is one of those stories with such a surprising twist it makes you want to go straight back to the beginning to read it again!

Fremlin writes from a variety of different perspectives, ranging from a ninety-year-old woman who, in Ephemerida, compares herself to the mayfly which lives for just one day, to the teenage girl in Barry Findlater, who tries to keep her mother happy by inventing a boyfriend – with disastrous results. Most of the stories, though, deal with people struggling with marital tensions or the challenges of parenthood. I loved The Sunday Outing, where a husband decides to pretend he was in a train accident to give himself some time away from his wife, and An Unsuspected Talent, which follows a wife who, frustrated with her husband’s lack of ambition, takes matters into her own hands – literally.

If I had to pick a favourite story it would definitely be Don’t Tell Cissie. Cissie is one of those people for whom if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. If anyone is likely to get lost and miss the bus, to fall in a pond and catch pneumonia, or drop a kettle full of boiling water and scald herself, it’s Cissie. As her friend, Lois, observes:

She was like that at school, and now, when we’re all coming up towards retirement, she’s like it still. You know the kind of person I mean? Friendly, goodhearted, and desperately anxious to be in on everything, and yet with this mysterious knack of ruining things – of bringing every project grinding to a halt, simply by being there.

So when Lois and another friend, Rosemary, decide to visit Rosemary’s new weekend cottage in the marshes, which is said to be haunted, it seems sensible to leave Cissie behind. Cissie, of course, has other ideas and isn’t about to miss out on the fun! I really enjoyed this one. It has the sort of humour I loved in Fremlin’s Uncle Paul and the ending is perfect.

Although I thought Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark was slightly stronger overall, this is another great collection and reminded me how much I love Celia Fremlin’s writing. I’ve only read two of her longer novels so far (Uncle Paul and The Long Shadow) so I still have a lot to look forward to!