Labyrinthine tales: We All Hear Stories in the Dark, by Robert Shearman, reviewed

When the estimable Andy Miller, the host of the Backlisted podcast, recommended a new collection of short stories on Twitter, he said just enough about it to pique my interest. Online booksellers didn’t seem to have heard of it and I had to buy it directly from the publisher. I’m very glad I did. Robert Shearman’s We All Hear Stories in the Dark, running to three volumes and 1,750 pages, is the most original and impressive new fiction I’ve read this year.

You have to find your own way through it. It takes its form from an outdated but fondly remembered series of paperbacks for children, the Adventures of You, invented by the American author Edward Packard. You reached the end of a chapter and were presented with choices for further reading: either slay the dragon and go to p.44, or walk away and go to p.78.

In Shearman’s collection, you finish a short story and are presented with a number of choices, in quite a disingenuously naive style: ‘For other nice stories about love, turn to…’ You follow a sequence, and at a certain point find yourself locked in to a conclusion. When the book ejects you, you may have read only ten stories out of the 101, or (with cunning) a lot more. It is ingenious and diabolical; you soon feel as if you are pitting your wits against the book’s designs on you.

There is no contents page and no means of searching the physical text (there is no e-book). Once you have moved on from a story it is quite hard to find it again anywhere but in your memory. This is undeniably frustrating; but frustration, delay, the promise and withholding of anticipated pleasure are at the heart of reading.