Music

He writes about hurried meals in mediocre restaurants and dangerous driving on urban dual carriageways. He is a miserabilist kept away from unbecoming preciousness by early exposure to the Pan Books of Horror. He knows a lot about the making of low-budget films and the pubs where people listen to bands who might have been promising once, and about bad relationships that include mildly unusual preferences. From all of these, he makes something unexpected, a sense of what it is to be human and fallible and to be in constant mild emotional pain.

Nicholas Royle is so accomplished a novelist of the uncanny and messed-up that it was never going to be necessarily the case that his short stories would be as good as they are. Sometimes, the short stories of novelists feel like broken biscuits – fragments of ideas and plots that did not quite work – just as the novels of short story writers can rabbit on for pages without incidents metamorphosing into that solid thing we call a plot. Royle, though, has a pronounced sense of what he writes about – blokey men getting themselves into rather more trouble even than they deserve. And the length is right every time.

He writes well about other cities – his Amsterdam is one in which psychic vampires will get you – but he is first and foremost a writer with a sense of London, the London most of us live in, of late-night tube journeys that seem routinely menacing. His appeal to the senses is not always sensually pleasant – you can smell the rain on the wind in his stories, or feel on your skin the grease of bad café food. The stories are best read one at a time (because they are disturbing). At the same time, they cohere beautifully: they share a tone, a way of seeing.