This neutral horror is perhaps most brilliantly explored in ‘The Hedges’, in which a wealthy couple take their two-year old child to a holiday resort. Or in the two-page ‘Where Do You Live? When You Need Me’, which takes place one hot New York summer in the 1980s, a season “when little parts of little bodies turned up in KFC buckets in dumpsters in the city…weeks of record heat and brown air”. In ‘Species of Special Concern’, for example, an unanticipated TSA search takes a couple by surprise – “They hadn’t expected a pat-down at security, and tried to explain what was inside Nancy that made the machines beep”. It’s a deeply unsettling technique, one aided and abetted by her skill in creating a sense of bodily horror to rival Cronenberg. Schutt writes with a detached prose style, keeping her subjects at arm’s length, making use of this distance to create a sense of the uncanny. “Christine Schutt’s stories make me think of ripeness turned to rot, and the Santa Ana wind” A horse trek through mountainous terrain sees a woman plagued with uncertainty a young actress goes to the stage lot while her older husband has a cardiac arrest in the swimming pool a widow sinks into a slumber of anger and fear and drink. The stories, which range greatly in length, from several dozen pages through to a couple of paragraphs, are concerned with lonely, maladjusted individuals, struggling to make their way through life. Despite the fact that Schutt’s tales zip all over the American landscape, they remind me, at their heart, of the emptiness commonly associated with cities like Los Angeles, of ripeness curdled into rot, of the unsettling power of the Santa Ana wind. These words by Didion are what come to mind when reading the pieces contained within Pure Hollywood, the latest collection of short stories by American writer Christine Schutt. In her seminal essay ‘Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream’, Joan Didion, whose acuity in portraying the hollowness of the everyday is deeply unsettling, writes of a California buffeted by the Santa Ana wind, which “comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.” It’s a land where “every voice seems a scream”, caught in “the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.” California, despite its associations in popular culture with dreaming and love and soul, can be an inhospitable place the beauty of the sunshine that gives the state its nickname is tempered by its power – to dessicate, oppress, and crack open, like asphalt rutted open by an eternal summer.

Pure hollywood and other stories