I’m a huge fan of short stories and this is one of the best collections I’ve read recently. One the whole, the stories here are fairly bleak but all conjure such a vivid picture of life in Northern Ireland and all are beautifully rendered, I could have read ten more. Highly recommended and thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

"When Linda went into the amusement place she saw that the ghost train was still there. A straggly little queue waited to be not very scared. She put her money in the machine to get a metal cascade of tokens and then she tried a couple of the Penny Falls machines, losing and winning and losing again. There were bells ringing, electronic squelches from the machines, disco music echoing in the big hall. She thought of Mike and Rae in the Wellness Centre at the Secrets Bonita Beach Krystal Cancun."

Wendy Erskine’s debut short story collection Sweet Home was shortlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciouness Prize, perhaps the UK and Ireland’s finest literary award, a prize for which this year (2022) Erskine is a judge.

My review of Sweet Home commented that the collection was perhaps a little more conventional than I might associate with the RofC Prize but that “Erskine's stories are typically around 20 pages long, and what is most impressive is how, in that limited amount of words, she manages to create genuinely engaging characters, in whose story the reader becomes emotionally invested. Her modus operandi is typically to provide her characters with a backstory, usually a past trauma, which only gradually emerges in the story and explains their current behaviour.”

Dance Move, her 2nd collection, builds on the strengths of the first with 11 stories in 224 pages. Short story collections can be of mixed quality but here every story works, my personal favourite Memento Mori, wonderfully sketched and the ending a literal punch in the face, as well as including a side-character called Wendy, a short-story writer (at her book launch her friends admit to relative indifference: “Although they had all bought the book, dutifully, they agreed that they didn’t read short stories, or even like them all that much.”)

Recommended

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

Wendy Erskine's debut, Sweet Home, is one of my favourite short story collections ever, so I was thrilled to find out that she had another one coming out in 2022. Dance Move has all the trademark Erskine things that made Sweet Home so memorable: the stripped back, direct writing style, the incisive narratives that meander even as they cut to the heart of the matter. But something about this collection just didn't click with me. Most of its stories left me either confused or underwhelmed. Either way, my main reaction was mostly just, okay...?, and that is not the reaction you want to have after finishing a short story. As to why I felt this way, I genuinely have no idea. The writing was good, and the narratives weren't poorly constructed or anything, but as a whole package, something about these stories didn't work for me.

My favourite story was easily "Mrs Dallesandro"; it was the one I found the most memorable, and that one that really stuck with me as I was going through the collection. The other stories, not so much: I remember the broadstrokes of some of them, and the others I just completely forgot about (and it's only been a month since I finished this collection).

Am I disappointed to be giving this collection a 3-star rating? Absolutely. I really thought Dance Move was going to be a sure winner, especially since I loved Sweet Home so much. But alas, twas not meant to be.

Thanks so much to Picador for providing me with an eARC of this via Netgalley!

Wendy Erskine’s first book of short stories, Sweet Home, was of such a standard that this book, Dance Move, carries great expectations. And it fulfils them with room to spare.

She has a marvellous gift for keeping the reader unsure of just when they are at the kernel of each story. It’s difficult to illustrate this without giving too much away but, in Mrs Dallesandro, the story might be about a wedding anniversary triggering tension, but no. Or a tolerated affair on the part of husband Bobby going too far, but no. Or a covert beauty treatment bringing her into danger, but no. In fact the “money shot” (approximately) is a memory that is utterly surprising and reveals an extra dimension of her true self.

Likewise, in Mathematices,, but with the subtly sinister creeping in, as it frequently does, Roberta, an easily-led, brain-damaged girl who is virtually a slave of a criminal gang, discovers another world along the lines of Silas Marner.

There is also plenty of the comedy-drama that marked out Sweet Home. Max and Gloria, my favourite story, is an hilariously understated put-down of a woke academic in the area of film studies via his encounter with a worker from an old folks’ home. Again, though, there is another story.

Erskine has a great knowledge of music, too, and it’s put to good use.

First-time readers of Erskine are in for an exceptional treat. Returning readers will find what they expect, but with an added confidence in not alway playing for laughs.

A wonderful collection of stories that transports, resonates, and shocks. Seem to be in general about the day to day lives of people, but these are still striking and thought provoking.

Wendy Erskine’s excellent debut short-story collection “Sweet Home” was shortlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize (I had read it earlier – in late 2018).

Coming three years later to this, her second collection I was struck by how much the review I wrote of “Sweet Home” could equally serve for this equally strong collection.

In my review I tried to describe what I saw as her signature technique as “what is unspoken or at best gradually acknowledged, to create in the reader an empathetic reaction to the character’s behavior when viewed in the context of their past (a past, often hinging in a single event, which leads to a feeling of exclusion or loss).” and further went on to say that one of the characters (when discussing a fictionally famously obscure pop star’s – Gil Courtney’s - music) inadvertently gave a perfect review of what the author herself achieves:

“It just, what it does is, it just – penetrates to the heart of what it means to be lonely, or in love or to feel a failure … a total affirmation of what it is to be alive …. There’s warmth there and there’s strangeness there”

In this collection (like the first all set in Northern Ireland) in addition I felt there was a sense of life lived elsewhere – another place, another time or by other people or other generations.

“Mathematics” – a girl who struggled at school and who now works as a cleaner for various short term rental properties, finds a small girl abandoned in one property and temporarily befriends her – the girls maths homework reminding her of her own difficulties as a child.

“Mrs Dallesandro” – is about a trip the wife of a well known Italian-origin solicitor takes to get ready for a party, remembering an encounter she had as a teenager with a boy with bad burns

“Golem” – is the story of a couple going to the birthday party of the wife’s sister (the latter has a child and a richer husband) – and we see the thoughts, worries and fantasies of the main characters.

“His Mother” is a deeply moving story of the mother of a missing-teenager (later discovered dead) and her obsessive quest to remove the “missing person” posters that still remain.

“Dance Move” features a married woman whose brother was left paralysed in an accident (and who knows on her parent’s death she will inherit his care) – as she struggles with the developing physicality and nascent sexuality of her teenage daughter.

“Gloria and Max” is a short piece about an English Professor of Film who travels to a planning event for a film festival with a carer from a chain of care homes (whose residents are going to be the main audience) and a disconcerting incident that occurs on their journey.

“Bildungsroman” is a story about a man who forms a life long bond with a woman (a famliy friend) who stays with for a few days while on a work placement scheme – the bond around something she has been asked to store in her house.

“Cell” was perhaps the oddest story and my least favourite – of a girl from a middle class family who decides to travel to London to study and there falls in with an exploitative couple posing as leftist revolutionaries and a bond she later starts to form with her niece.

“Nostalgie” links in some ways to Gil Courtney of “Sweet Home”, but is excellent in its own right – a little known pop star is asked to attend a party specifically to play the B-side “Nostalgie de la Boue” (attraction to what is depraved or degrading”) of his top 30 hit – except that the invite is from a non disbanded paramilitary battalion for whom the song became something of an accidental anthem.

“Momento Mori” was perhaps my highlight – a woman mourning the death of her own girlfriend and long time companion, has to deal with her garden wall being something of a pilgrimage site due to the brutal death of a young teenager nearby.

“Secrets Bonita Beach Krystal Cancun” (the only story previously published – in an anthology) is about two friends who meet for a takeway each Friday and one of their reflections when the other (a paramedic) goes on holiday to Mexico with a man she has met.

Recommended to all “Sweet Home” fans – and to those who have not yet encountered Wendy Erskine’s work – buy them both.