I'm a big fan of short stories, especially horror stories so was really excited to have the opportunity to read Reality, and Other Stories.
There were a few of the stories which fell a little flat for me but overall a great read. My favourite was Reality which felt particularly relevant in the current climate of shows such as Love Island. The stories were spooky but not overly creepy which I loved for a cosy night in on the sofa.

I liked this collection overall. There were a couple of stories I didn't love 100% but overall this was a solid collection. I can't say i found it scary but it definitely had an eerie vibe to it overall that worked well.

This was a very quick read, a collection of spooky short stories.

Not all of them hit the mark, my favourites had to be the very first one, Signal, which featured a family staying at a rich friends over the New Year and their children keep mentioning a tall man who helps them who nobody else sees.

I also really like the last story, Charity, which was randomly about a haunted selfie stick of all things but it was really good.

The stories in between where ok, they include a man listening to a haunted audio book and a menacing father in law annoying his daughter in law.

I expected it be scarier, but all in all its the type of book you could curl up with on a dark night for some gentle scares.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.

A chill collection of Black Mirror-esque, MR James-influenced short stories. The title one was my favourite. There are at least two haunted cellphones, and one haunted selfie stick. Didn't blow me away but it was a nice, untaxing evening read.

Thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for the ARC.

Just in time for Halloween, here's a collection of short stories that bend towards the horrific and the uncanny.

Most of the stories start with a detailed introduction of the story's main character, after which a 'strange' element is introduced, a lot of the times almost to the end of the story.

The stories are wellwritten, with a great sense of humour. What the stories aren't is frightening, uncomfortably uncanny or surprising. A lot of the times it feels like punches are being pulled - an element of horror is introduced and then barely explored. In case of most stories you can see the twist (if there is one) coming a mile away.

The one story I did really like, <i>Which of These Would You Like?</i>, works because it's quite insular, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere, where a mystery slowly unravels. The character study is interwoven with the weird.

Good characterisation is important for short fiction, but seems wasted when little time is given for the uncanny to have its effect on those characters.

I really enjoyed this short story collection. I'm finding that, these days, I'm mostly enjoying ghost stories that have an element of modern technology to them and this book definitely fits that bill. Of course with any collection some stories will appeal more than others and that was the case here but for me there were far more hits than misses.

Signal - A classic ghost story with a modern element. You could see the twist coming and I'm not sure anyone in real life behaves in the way these characters do - if they do please can I never meet them? - but it was an effective tale and set a good tone for the rest of the collection.

Coffin Liquor - The main character in this story was such a pompous git so he was great fun to read. This was part twist on a vampire story and part Audible haunting and a great read.

Which of these would you like? - Straight up didn't like this one, it felt like a filler and was too ambiguous to get much enjoyment out of.

We happy few - Another story with characters that aren't particularly likeable and I mean that as a good thing. This time it's a group of young university lecturers having an /r/iamverysmart type conversation about philosophy, language and generally how stupid everyone else is compared to them when it ends in a way none of them saw coming to great effect.

Reality - A twist on the likes of Love Island this was a curious, meandering sort of story that ended in a weird way. It was an entertaining read though so what else can you ask for?

Cold Call - This was my favourite tale, possibly because it hit so close to the bone. I think most families will have someone in their midst that will make elements of this story ring a bell which is what makes it most effective. For a ghost story it's the realest of them all.

The Kit - This one honestly left me a bit nonplussed. It was the story of a family overly dependent on tech which, y'know, is kind of a common theme in life these days. As a story it was a decent read but I don't think it said anything particularly fresh.

Charity - I enjoyed this final story a lot. Told through the eyes of a charity shop volunteer it explores the idea of donated objects having a past. In this case it's a very dark, very haunted past.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Faber and Faber for the chance to read and review.

I started this book by John Lanchester, author of "The Wall", expecting creepy or at least unsettling short stories. But even for a scaredy cat like me, they were neither. Nevertheless, these eight stories were interesting enough to keep me going. The first one, "Signal", is a classic haunted-house tale, nestled into a depiction of our neediness regarding technology, especially our mobile phones. I really enjoyed that one; it set the tone for the following stories and really put me in the mood. I didn't enjoy some of the following stories ("Which of these would you like?" -- I simply didn't get it, "We happy few", and "Reality"). My favorites, "Cold call" and "Charity" are tackling the difficult topic of dealing with the current loss of a loved one and the grief coming with that. I could empathize with the characters in these two stories the most.

But to take a break from recapping the stories--I enjoyed John Lanchester's writing style; how he grabs hold of your attention was really unique for me. Ironically, I did not check my phone once while reading these stories. Coming to which, the topics are well chosen and highly relevant in our everyday life: mobile phones, selfie sticks, androids--in general, human's dependency on technology.

Since I liked five out of eight stories, I would definitely recommend this book to readers who enjoy a good short story!

Having read and enjoyed John Lanchester’s Booker-longlisted novel The Wall last year, I was looking forward to reading this collection of short stories.

Lanchester’s straightforward writing style lends itself well to these creepy little tales. I particularly enjoyed the first story, Signal, where a holidaying family are scared by a tall, spooky man with a mobile phone - who is he and what does he want?. The stories are all pretty middle class and anglocentric, which was fine because I’m middle class and English, but it might be alienating for some readers.

A great book for the autumn, reading by the fire with a mug of something warm.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

Reality, and Other Stories collects eight horror-themed short stories by John Lanchester, most of which are kinda meh.

Cold Call was my favourite. It’s about a lawyer/wife/mother of two who hates her dreary father-in-law for calling her at all hours to ask her dumb questions like where his remote is while she’s busy with her life. Like all the stories here, it’s got that cliched horror twist ending except this ending is actually a bit chilling. More than that though, even if it didn’t lean towards horror at the end, it’d still be a great story in itself - Lanchester is able to brilliantly engross you into the life of this person and I would’ve enjoyed the story if it had just been about that, without the horror twist.

While none of the other seven stories are as good, there’s things to like about several. I liked the snarky conversation of the academics in the coffee shop in We Happy Few, sneering at everyday phrases, their students, and popular current ideas like simulation theory.

Charity is about a retired English teacher working part-time at a local charity shop and plays a bit on the Needful Things-type shop when he inadvertently sells a cursed selfie stick to a former pupil and discovers its terrifying past. It’s such a strange idea to focus on this object (anachronistic too, it turns out) but it’s kinda fun as well.

Signal is a fairly traditional haunted house story where a man takes his family to his rich friend’s mansion in the country for the holidays but gets annoyed at a tall man who seems to follow his kids everywhere but isn’t seen by any of the adults. You can guess the twist ending a mile off but it’s pretty engaging for the most part.

Then we’re into the dregs - these stories haven’t got much going for them at all. The Kit is about a farm family waiting to order a replacement machine for one that recently broke down - but wait til you find out what that machine is with that twist ending! Reality is about a Big Brother-type reality show full of vapid characters and a trite, almost comically absurd, ending.

Coffin Liquor is about an academic who goes to a conference in Romania and goes mad listening to... haunted audiobooks?! This one’s almost like a parody of horror stories. There’s the setting, with shades of Vlad the Impaler (the inspiration for Dracula), the old lady at the entrance of a graveyard muttering warnings, and the Lovecraftian format of the story - diary entries - to show the narrator going slowly mad. It’s just - audiobooks, really??

Which of These Would You Like? was the only story I straight up hated all the way through. It’s a Kafka-esque tale involving a prisoner who’s locked up for no reason, guards, brochures, and the titular question being asked over and over. No idea what that one was about. “Consumerism = bad”?

Lanchester’s not a horror writer, which you can see in the stories that are mostly about ordinary middle-class people going about their everyday lives, though that’s partly what interested me in checking out this collection - to see what a literary writer could do with the genre. And, while the stories were by and large ok, they felt a little formulaic, a little repetitive in their structure, with Lanchester relying too heavily on the twist ending each time, giving them all a contrived and predictable air.

Despite the hackneyed twist ending trope (which was really only effective once in Cold Call), John Lanchester’s Reality, and Other Stories is a decent, if unmemorable, collection that fans of Twilight Zone-esque stories might enjoy.

Well-written and thought-provoking; Lanchaster's collection of short stories is absolutely topical, ranging from weird and black mirror-esque to funny and scary.

Demon tech? Ghosts? Never was there a time more apt than now for multiple stories to take away the day to day stress of pandemic angst, a thoroughly enjoyable book full of weird and wonderful tales

Technology has become an essential part of everyday life, and as a result, our stories and folktales are likely to change as we move through the modern era. Phones, selfie sticks and computers are here to stay, for better and for worse.

And what if that worse is demonic technology, ghosts haunted by deaths caused by mobile phones or calls from the supernatural. This was an interesting collection, that is inventive and feels very current. I like the twist on the common ghost story and making it more modern. Not all ghosts have to be ladies dressed in long white gowns.

Reality, and Other Stories by John Lanchester is a selection of eerie, creepy and slightly scary short stories that have a modern twist. All are brilliantly written.

John Lanchester is a journalist and author of five novels, of which The Debt to Pleasure won the 1996 Whitbread Book Award in the First Novel category and his most recent – The Wall – was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.

Lanchester’s short story Signal opens Lanchester’s forthcoming collection on Faber & Faber, Reality and Other Stories. The story was originally published in The New Yorker in March 2017. In an interview he gave for the same issue, Lanchester described it as his first piece of short fiction, as well as the first ghost story he had ever attempted. Much as I enjoy the works of authors dedicated to the supernatural, I am always intrigued when a writer not typically associated with the genre has a go at it. In this case, Lanchester comes up with a tale where the ghostly element is not immediately apparent. A couple and their two children are invited to spend New Year’s Eve at a luxurious mansion in the English countryside. Their enjoyment of the festivities is marred by the presence of a tall man, always intent on his mobile phone, who also appears to take an unnatural interest in the children. When the truth about him is revealed, it is at once more benign and more chilling than what we are led to believe at the start.

The collection includes three other stories which transpose conventional tropes of supernatural fiction into contemporary contexts. In Coffin Liquor, the narrator is an academic invited to an Eastern European country to address a conference dealing with the unlikely intersection between economics and folklore. An incorrigible sceptic, he soon tires of the subject, and decides to skip the talks and do some solo sightseeing. His walk around the town leads him to a graveyard housing the remains of a much-hated feudal overlord, whose particularly cruel practices are the stuff of local legend. An old woman warns the narrator not to take these tales lightly – advice which he stupidly ignores. Any reader of the stories of M.R. James will know what comes next… but the inevitable haunting has a particularly unusual aspect to it. Similar playful riffs on the horror tradition can be found in Charity, about – of all things – a cursed selfie-stick and Cold Call, about a spooky contact from beyond the grave.

The remaining stories in the collection are not exactly works of supernatural fiction. Although difficult to classify, they are closer to “weird tales” in the mould of, say, J.B. Priestley. We Happy Few, a piece first published in Esquire, and The Kit, both have a playfully mordant twist at the end. In the title piece, Reality, the participants in a reality show wait in vain for the games to start. Initially, there are only subtle indications that something is not quite right, but by the end of the story, Lanchester manages to evoke a sense of claustrophobia and dread. Which of These Would You Like is, in my view, the most disturbing work of the lot, even more than the overtly “horror” stories. In its depiction of a prisoner placed on death-row for reasons of which he is not aware, it reflects the same themes as Reality, but is much darker in the despair it conveys.

Lanchester might claim to be a “novice” where short fiction is concerned, but this collection is a strong one which delivers thrills, twists and food for thought.

I’ve always wanted to read more of John Lanchester’s work. I’ve been slowly acquiring many of his novels — for example, Fragrant Harbour and The Wall — but keep forgetting that I have them on my Kindle. I was lucky enough to get a DRC of this short story collection, and decided to dive right in. Initially, I’d intended to read a story every so often, between novels, but I ended up reading all of them in just a couple of sittings. I really enjoyed this collection.

Reality, and Other Stories is a short collection of modern ghost stories. Each has a faintly creepy, speculative or supernatural element. The stories examine contemporary life and the perils of technology, how easily it can distract and unmoor us, and how it affects the way we interact with each other and form relationships.

In the eight stories included in the collection, many of Lanchester’s characters are somewhat bookish or professorial, but they are also distinct — he’s not recycling simple tropes or archetypes. Each character is quickly and expertly drawn, and even though we don’t spend much time with them we come to know them rather well, and in many instances sympathize and root for them. Some of the stories have obvious supernatural elements (“Charity”, “Coffin Liquor” and “The Kit”), while in others the strange/speculative elements are never fully articulated or detailed (“Which of These Would You Like?”, “We Happy Few”, “Cold Call” and “Reality”).

In “Signal”, a family visits a wealthy friend whose sprawling country mansion for a holiday event, only to find it populated by a huge cast of guests. The host is somewhat absent-minded, and the father tries to find out the identity of one guest in particular, one who is making him very uncomfortable.

In “Coffin Liquor”, a professor struggles to remain engaged at a conference, attempting to find solace in audiobooks — but something might be wrong with the technology…

A prisoner is forced to answer a series of strange questions over and over in “Which of These Would You Like?” It’s a quietly oppressive story, one in which the protagonist has no idea why he’s incarcerated.

A group of academic colleagues meet in a cafe to pontificate and quietly mock people around them, in “We Happy Few” — one of the less-obviously supernatural/SFF stories in the collection, but ending with something strange and unsettling happening off-screen at the end.

“Reality” takes a look at reality TV, a modern obsession and (in some people’s opinion) a cancer on society. Our protagonist Iona is a contestant on a new show, but one that seems to be taking a long time to start. We see her calculating almost every action, movement and conversation. But what is really happening, here? Is she the hero, the villain, or a pawn?

Difficult family relationships form the kernel of “Cold Call”, in which a wife is left to deal with a demanding and cold father-in-law, the kids, and a legal career. As the father-in-law’s condition deteriorates, a desire for a break and some self-care takes a tragic, unfortunate turn.

“The Kit” is a very cool story, one with a great switcheroo at the end. A father is trying to keep his farm working, as well as his sons together and cared for. Some important piece of “equipment” needs replacing, and a decision is made.

The final story in the collection, “Charity” was a great closer — not only does it include a cursed item, but one that offers a critique of our narcissistic modern times, and is perhaps an allegory for how social media can be so damaging.

I really enjoyed these stories. Each offers something a little different, an interesting twist on many classic ghost story and speculative fiction tropes. Lanchester is a great writer, and his prose pulled me through each story. If you’ve never tried his work, then this collection could serve as an excellent introduction — although, with the caveat that his novels are not speculative, but more contemporary.

Definitely recommended.

A strange man constantly staring at his phone. A new machine in the kitchen. A selfie stick that takes perfect pictures.

A really interesting selection of modern day ghost stories. A really great range, from disturbing to spooky to downright scary. A great read for dark autumn nights

I read Lancaster many years ago, so it was a pleasant surprise to see a new book sprout up in time for the haunting season. Not quite fully the Kafkaesque experience, but highly enjoyable. Humorous, dark and creepy, it's the perfect book for the autumnal season and most suitable for a modern audience. It's nice to see an author challenging the concept of spookiness in a modern context.

A brilliant book by one of our best living writers. A real departure from some of his recent works, but no less intriguing, readable and complex.

There's some really good stuff in here.
Funny,creepy,a little bit scary.
I'm not always a fan of short stories,but having read Lanchester before,I was hopeful.
Rightly so.
Nicely done.

This is a great collection of eerie stories with a modern and twist. The tales were great fun with just the right balance of horror and humour. Very enjoyable.