If you’re an avid reader of The New Yorker, a number of the short stories in Tessa Hadley’s recently-released Bad Dreams and Other Stories will be familiar to you. Personally, I can’t keep up with the stacks of New Yorker magazines that mock me around our house, so most of the stories were new to me.
Hadley’s stories are skillfully composed around a particular narrative tension. As if living in a bad dream, many of her characters face potential or inferred danger, with possibly shady characters in uncomfortable situations. A teenage girl in “An Abduction” is picked up by a car of boisterous drunk boys who want to take her for a ride. It seems only natural to think girl, that is just not a good idea. In “Under the Sign of the Moon,” an older woman with cancer, on the train to see her daughter, meets an overly friendly, albeit slightly off young man who won’t stop trying to engage her in conversation. Ugh, is he the pervert we suspect he might be? In “One Saturday Morning” a young girl, left at home to practice piano while her family goes grocery shopping, lets in a family friend, a man. They occupy the house together, moving quietly in separate rooms but deeply aware of each other, waiting for her family to return. Maybe I’ve been listening to too much My Favorite Murder, but something in that scenario sets off where’s he going to stash the body alarm bells. Within each story, however, is a measure of surprise; the possibility of danger doesn’t always signal a real threat, and Hadley’s characters luckily manage to walk away unscathed.
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