While successful songwriting partnerships abound, literary fiction created by two or more authors is rare, and short stories produced by two hands are unicorns. Step forward plucky micro-press Scratch Books, which has set out to rectify this situation. Duets is a volume of co-written short stories by some of the genre’s best current practitioners. The results are startling, occasionally baffling, but never less than thrilling.
The collection opens strongly with Eley Williams and Nell Stevens’s Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily, in which a woman moves into a new flat only to find “half-realised hieroglyphics” behind the wallpaper. There is more strange evidence of a previous owner: “An eyelash curler, rusting, like a historic torture device in the dungeon of the basement bathroom.” Studded with unsettling, associative imagery, the story introduces a second narrator who is gradually revealed as the ghost of the previous occupant. It’s a rich idea, seamlessly executed. By the end, one wishes it were longer – there’s enough here for a gripping novel.
In many stories, the prose of two writers is juxtaposed in sections rather than blended together, a principle Lennon and McCartney used to good effect. Luckily, there’s remarkably little grinding of gears between different styles. The endnotes include revealing commentaries by the collaborators on their methodologies and inspirations, and it’s significant that Jarred McGinnis and Ben Pester both invoke the musical technique of “call and response” as a narrative device. McGinnis and Zoe Gilbert’s Keep Your Miracles to Yourself is gloriously bonkers and imaginative, and contains the immortal sentence: “There’s no good way to show your wife a mad woman in a power suit from Next has turned you into a human submarine.”
Elsewhere, Gurnaik Johal and Jon McGregor’s Junction 11 takes the reader on two fragmentary road trips, typographically set in parallel columns. Jo Lloyd and Adrian Duncan use a 1976 short film as a jumping-off point to explore a young woman caught fleetingly on camera, magnifying her inner life, something film could only hint at: “trudging through one practical office job after another … she wondered if Prince Charles ever questioned his choices.” Roelof Bakker and David Rose’s Morphic Resonance is full of ellipses that mirror dementia’s fractured recall. It’s unclear whether the story’s central event, a youthful kiss at the top of the Kew Gardens pagoda, ever happened at all. So close are some collaborations that Anna Wood and Ruby Cowling’s riddling Borgesian story switches their surnames under its title. Excitingly, most of the pieces here push the form to extremes. While it’s sometimes questionable who is holding the narrative voice at any given time, this is perhaps apt, as we don’t know who’s holding the authorial pen either.
The finest story is Leila Aboulela and Lucy Durneen’s The Grief Hour, in which a woman called Ester looks for healing and connection on a snowbound Nasa research trip to the Arctic Circle; an “International Settlement Project”, searching the skies for “space habitats of the future”. Its sections toggle between the first and third person, revealing multiple facets of Ester’s consciousness. The first-person voice is angrier, politically engaged. The second contrapuntal voice is more lyrical, coolly contemplative: “Ester touched the dark window pane with her cheek, closed her eyes, felt the moon like a savage pull at the water of her body.” It’s hard to know which author to praise for this peerless sentence, or if indeed they finessed it together.
The final story is Pester and Tim MacGabhann’s Apricots, a horrific yet bracingly entertaining tale set in a vividly evoked Mexico City, with its “palm trees bobbing their heads in the powdery lilac dusk”. The plot is familiar, and deliberately so, Pester playfully describing it as “Heat for the salted caramel generation”.
If all writing is a performance – speaking or singing on to the page – then the book’s musical title is apt. McGregor describes listening to duets by Sonny and Cher and Dusty Springfield and Pet Shop Boys as he and Johal wrote. This is a unique and brave collection of stories, all of which zing with unexpectedness and a delight in literary collaboration.
• Jude Cook’s novel Jacob’s Advice is published by Unbound. Duets by various authors is published by Scratch (£11.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
