Byatt's "Little Black Book of Stories"

A. S. Byatt has published a few small collections of short stories, and I've quite enjoyed them. In general, she's much freer in these stories, sometimes writing realistic fiction, sometimes venturing into the realms of fairy tale or horror. This collection was also a wonderful mix, although harder to read than her others.

I don't have the energy right now to talk about the stories individually (maybe I'll come back to that at some future date), but as a whole they were disquieting. Each one seemed to leave a lot unsaid, and to hinge on small details. For instance, there's a story about a man whose wife is senile, and her ghost comes to him and asks him to euthanize her. At some point, the ghost mentions that she hates pink, and we remember that at the beginning of the story, he had put a pink ribbon on her. Does this suggest that he's taking some sort of small revenge on his wife now? For what?

Each story in the book feels like it suggests these sorts of questions about events outside of the frame of the story itself. There's a story about two girls who return to a place where they saw a monster in their childhood. One ventures back to see the monster again (and die, it's implied), the other returns home. But Byatt never tells us why each one made this decision. Normally, that would drive me crazy, but I felt that the explanation is in the story, but I just missed it, and if I were to re-read it, I'd see it. All of the stories had that same feeling, that there's much more going on than meets the eye.