While successful songwriting partnerships abound, literary fiction created by two or more authors is rare, and short stories produced by two hands are unicorns. Step forward plucky micro-press Scratch Books, which has set out to rectify this situation. Duets is a volume of co-written short stories by some of the genre’s best current practitioners. The results are startling, occasionally baffling, but never less than thrilling.
The collection opens strongly with Eley Williams and Nell Stevens’s Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily, in which a woman moves into a new flat only to find “half-realised hieroglyphics” behind the wallpaper. There is more strange evidence of a previous owner: “An eyelash curler, rusting, like a historic torture device in the dungeon of the basement bathroom.” Studded with unsettling, associative imagery, the story introduces a second narrator who is gradually revealed as the ghost of the previous occupant. It’s a rich idea, seamlessly executed. By the end, one wishes it were longer – there’s enough here for a gripping novel.
