I'm not sure whether it's Rebecca Gransden's work ethic that I should be jealous of or her innate talent. Maybe both. My lack of certainty stems from the impossibility of distinguishing craftsman - craftswoman - ship from natural flair in the beautifully elegant prose of these short stories. They are polished - if indeed they are polished - to the point of transparency, by which I mean that there is no sign left of the extensive effort that any mere mortal would have to expend in order to produce sentences of such fluidity and apparent effortlessness. The text just flows, the tone always perfect and the mot always juste, there of necessity, derived from the context rather than chosen for effect.

I hesitate to draw the obvious comparisons - to Raymond Carver or Maupassant - because while there is so much attention to detail, Gransden's writing is also highly impressionistic, creating an atmospherics of liminality. The fall of the light, the minutiae of a gesture, the inflection of a word, the focus on the apparently insignificant, all combine to conjure a world, to imply it, to refer to it tangentially, while nonetheless allowing us to see it clearly. It is a world both uncanny and immediately recognizable; its strangeness allows Gransden to evoke the unspeakable, that which lies on the margins, in our peripheral vision, giving it form and substance without ever pinning it under a spotlight like a specimen. By suggesting, and only suggesting, this elsewhere world, in which lives are just as fully lived as they are in our daylight land, she manages to tell us everything, not just about those lives, but also about the world they live outside.

I was first introduced to Rebecca when I read her novel Anemogram in exchange for an honest review, find that here: https://lifehasafunnywayofsneakinguponyou.wordpress.com/2016/09/12/anemogram-review/ and I also had the pleasure of interviewing her, https://lifehasafunnywayofsneakinguponyou.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/may-interview-rebecca-gransden/

Rebecca has such an unusual and beautiful way of writing of which I have never seen the like, the only author I can possibly compare her to is Peter S Beagle, which I have said before. Take the opening sentence of the first story in the collection that is Rusticles ‘Out of the blue and into the black neon night, along a street made of pulse shaking off its dreams.’ Rebecca writes stories that read like poetry. Simply incredible. She writes the way I dream I could write if only my pen would obey my mind, and she writes like she’s painting a picture. 

Rusticles is a gorgeous collection of short stories which continue the magic Rebecca created with Anemogram you can never really be sure what each story is about but only that it touches the fringes of your mind somewhere. Mostly I just sink into the pleasure of reading such phantasmagorical prose. 

I can honestly say that I never understood the term ‘weird and wonderful’ fully until I read Rebecca Gransden.