Eastmouth and Other Stories – Alison Moore

I first discovered Alison Moore thanks to The Lighthouse published by Salt and an unsettling book that whetted my appetite for more of her work. I subsequently read and loved both Missing and Death and the Seaside, and was looking forward to her short story collection which is just as excellent as her novels.

Alison Moore’s Eastmouth and Other Stories is a superbly written, moody, atmospheric, and psychologically astute short story collection that explores themes of displacement, entrapment, isolation, and the eerie undercurrents of everyday life. These are stories where the mundane blends with the sinister often unsettling the reader.

This book comprises 21 stories previously published in a slew of literary magazines and other publications now collected in this volume by Salt Publishing with a couple of stories that are original to this collection. As usual, I don’t plan to write on each story, but will rather focus on the few that stood out that can convey an overall flavour of the collection.

We begin with the titular story “Eastmouth”, an unnerving tale of control and entrapment set in a seaside town throbbing with an oppressive and claustrophobic feel. We meet Sonia, our protagonist, who is visiting her boyfriend Peter Webster’s hometown for the holidays. Sonia has applied for a summer job up north for which she has recently interviewed, setting her sights later on visiting Las Vegas. An independent woman, Sonia feels like she does not belong to that seaside town, and feels out of place even in Peter’s home although his parents make her feel welcome but in a disconcertingly controlling way. Peter is happy and at ease in his house, his conservative outlook aligns with his parents’, and under their intrusive collective influence, Sonia finds herself trapped, surrounded, with never a moment alone, her individuality threatened.

In “May Day”, we meet Gareth who has come to Paris for the weekend to visit and spend time with his young daughter Rebecca. Gareth is divorced, and Rebecca no longer lives with him but with his ex-wife Caroline and Lionel, a sophisticated, condescending man with whom Caroline is in a relationship. The story begins with a family dinner held at Lionel’s place to which Gareth is invited, but in their cosy, intimate circle, Gareth is acutely aware of being an outsider. To make matters worse, his promise to take Rebecca to the catacombs falls apart when he realises the place is closed for visitors on May Day, a fact that Gareth failed to check on before. When his alternate suggestion of visiting the underground sewers that have a longer history is met with much scorn, Gareth’s sense of failure, inadequacy, and loneliness only deepens.

“Fidelity” charts the gradual unravelling of a marriage, a story that flits seamlessly between the past and the present. We meet Gina, recently widowed, her husband Martin having died of a sudden illness. Immersed in completing a battery of chores and practicalities characteristic of the immediate period following death and loss, Gina still finds time to have a drink after work with Liam, a man Gina is attracted to even before Martin’s death. A typical case of infidelity conveyed through her reminisces of their marriage before Martin’s death, Gina recalls many days working late hours and secretly meeting Liam, although there’s a sense that Martin isn’t entirely clueless even if Gina withstands his questions. Following Martin’s death, Gina is forced to confront the truth of her marriage, and her negligence which may have played a role in her husband’s death.

“The Harvestmen” is about the heady whiff of new experiences, a brief glimpse of a budding promise that goes awry. Eliot is a young man who has just moved into a flat in a new block in a seaside town hoping to make a fresh start (“The seaside, with all its trappings, is new and exciting to him. He’s spent his life so far on a farm in the north. He had been desperate to get away from home”). In a bar called The Hook, he meets Abbey, and their attraction is mutual, although Abbey is already going out with Big Pete, a menacing and controlling man who threatens Eliot for daring to lay his eyes on her. But Eliot is in no mood to obey…

His grandmother always believed that travelling south was easier than travelling north because south was ‘downhill’ on the map, as if anyone trying to go north without concentrating risked rolling all the way back down; as if, in fact, gravity could make anyone tumble down at any moment.

Literally, a chilling tale of ghosts and alienation, “Winter Closing” takes the reader to an old house in the depths of winter, a seemingly haunted house having a historical significance since we are told it belonged to a deceased, obscure writer called Mary. In the opening pages, we meet a young woman called Sandra at the ticket desk on Christmas Eve, collecting change and handing out tickets to a group of old ladies while shivering in the immense cold. Their tour guide is Derek who has been doing this job for a while but from whom the locals keep a distance.

The shopkeeper is cool towards Derek. She tells the other customers, ‘He works at Mary’s house,’ and they put their money down on the counter so that they can leave. Perhaps the locals imagine that Derek brings something of the house with him, carrying it in his wake down the hill and into the shop. Perhaps they think he ought to stay put inside the house, inside the grounds, or even better just stay at home and leave the house to go to ruin.

As Derek begins giving his tour, a picture emerges of Mary, of her distaste for this freezing, drafty house where she felt confined and ill-treated, of a lonely young woman rejected by her peers. And yet, Mary appears to have stayed on in the house till the very end with rumours that her ghost now haunts it.  Meanwhile, in the present, as the icy winds start seeping into their bones, Sandra and Derek close up the house and leave for the Christmas weekend, but Derek returns to collect something he has forgotten only to find himself locked in. A solitary man with no one to look for him, Derek’s desperation mounts as he tries to extricate himself from a hopeless situation, banking on Mary’s oeuvre to bail him out with disastrous consequences.

“Seabound” is a story of young love, grief, memories, resistance to change, and the relationship between mothers and daughters. Set in a clifftop house surrounded by the clamouring echoes of the sea, May has spent her entire life here right from her childhood to her old age. We learn of her one-sided love for Dylan who indulges her but whose love for the sea is greater as he chooses a wandering life as a sailor over a settled life with May in what he considers a dead-end town. While Dylan is away at sea, May gives birth to their daughter Daisy. Dylan visits off and on, his long absences increasing the rift between father and daughter. When Dylan retires, May is at the same clifftop house, patiently waiting for him, a place for him to finally hang up his boots. Dylan dies and Daisy’s entreaties to May to move in with her fall on deaf ears; May has no wish to abandon a house she has lived all her life, and which is filled to the brim with treasured memories. But May’s nights are restless troubled by dreams of a man made of water who comes to her house at night…

The dreams got worse. She dreamt there was a man made of water, who came to her house in the night. She heard his wet feet in the hallway, and on the stairs as he climbed to her room. He came to her bedside. Really, he was just the shape of a man, an idea of a man, a disruption in the darkness, but she knew he was there. Sometimes she woke from these strange dreams to find her nightie and her bedding damp and smelling of salt.

“The Sketch” is an unsettling story of withered dreams, early motherhood, and patriarchal control. Ailsa and her husband Peter have just shifted from a comfortable house to a tiny flat, a result of a blow to Peter’s career and a change that depresses Ailsa. A new mother, Ailsa worries about her daughter Bella growing up in a house without a garden and a playroom, but her concerns are disregarded by Peter who annoyingly keeps stressing the need to downsize and throw out unnecessary stuff. Included in this is Ailsa’s old art portfolio, a reminder of a career ambition nipped in the bud when her father could no longer afford her education, although Ailsa has continued to dabble in art since then, but sporadically.  The story opens with Ailsa noticing a frightening sketch in this portfolio of a strange troll or spite, the graphite of the sketch leaking onto her fingers and leaving grey smudges on the paper. A portfolio she hasn’t touched for twenty years, Ailsa recognises her paintings but not this particular unnerving sketch that she is quite sure she hasn’t drawn. However, the discovery of this portfolio unleashes a desire to take up painting again, a wish that is snubbed by Peter who soon disposes of the portfolio much against her wishes. But when Ailsa begins to notice these grey streaks appearing in Bella’s room, her paranoia increases…

In another wonderfully nightmarish, menacing tale called “Broad Moor”, we meet Drew who is on her way to a resort spa for a restorative stay with her friends to indulge in healing massages, hot tubs, and saunas. A full-time carer for her ailing sister with no family to support them, Drew is encouraged to take a break and recharge her batteries and a rejuvenating spa holiday seems just like the thing to help her. Directions on the spa’s website specifically mention taking the second turn-off to Mere, and not the first turn-off to Mere via Broad. But after driving for a few miles, Drew begins to worry about not having enough petrol for the journey back and wonders whether there might be a petrol station nearby. Not a soul around, Drew finally chances upon a strange woman who immediately directs her to take the first turn-off. Soon Drew is on a road that twists and turns through the bleak, remote moors, sometimes veering close to the edge of the sea, at other times moving back inwards, a road that seems to go on endlessly with no sign of a petrol station or even the final destination, until Drew encounters that strange woman once again…

When the road turned inland again, she lost the foreign-language station. She fiddled with the tuner, but mainly there was only static, punctuated here and there by snatches of talk and old songs. Another dirt road went off to the side, but again there was no signpost. She had to trust the road: she had a poor sense of direction; she had got lost walking on moors before, and on Kinder Scout had gone so far wrong that she’d had to be helped by a stranger.

The disconcerting “Voice of the People” dwells on environmental protests and the disastrous consequences of man-made disasters, while in “The Spite House”, an insomniac woman almost destroys the family home she has inherited in a story where the lines between dreams and reality are blurred.

Grey and dreary seaside towns, cold, deserted houses, and desolate moors feature as recurring motifs in the stories lending an atmospheric quality to these tales. The vast expanse of the sea and moors deceptively conveys freedom when in reality it only exacerbates the characters’ isolation and feelings of claustrophobia. A sense of unease pervades the collection; Moore’s characters find themselves adrift and displaced, some at a crossroads in their life, beset by growing emptiness as they try to adapt to new circumstances following relationship breakdowns, death, other debilitating losses, or even a change in fortune; upheavals that offer a brief glimpse of their psychological motivations, fears, insecurities, desires, and other emotions.

This is a wonderful collection of stories exploring a slew of themes such as domestic discord, loneliness, broken and fragile relationships, infidelity, control, and primal maternal fears that highlight the vulnerability of its characters caught in sticky situations; stories that traverse emotional and psychological landscapes and depict the strangeness beneath the surface of ordinary experiences. Moore’s writing style is impressive not only for its clarity and economy but also in the way she builds suspense and tension transforming the mundane into something unsettling and sinister very quietly and subtly.  I loved this collection and Moore is firmly one of my favourite authors.