The Unreliable Nature Writer

by Claire Carroll

The Unreliable Nature Writer is the eagerly-awaited debut collection of exhilarating, macabre and dreamy short stories from Claire Carroll.

Shortlisted for The White Review Prize and winner of the Short Fiction Wild Writing Prize, Carroll portrays an unsettlingly hot, vaguely familiar world of humans facing the strain of intimate and global anxieties – trying to live alongside new technologies, failing environments and unknowable natural crises.

Delightful to read and unsettling to imagine, these are haunting stories about love, loss, strangely-exposing housing applications and cows.

Genres: Short Stories, Collections

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2024

About the author

Claire Carroll lives in Somerset, UK, and writes experimental fiction about the intersection of nature, technology, and desire. She is also a PhD researcher at Bath Spa and Exeter Universities, where she explores how experimental writing – particularly short stories and prose-poetry – can reimagine how humans relate to the natural and non-human world.

Claire’s short stories and poetry have been published by journals including Gutter Magazine, perverse, Lunate Journal, The Oxonian Review, and Short Fiction Journal. In 2021, her short story My Brain is Boiling with Ideas was shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize, and her short story Cephalopod was the recipient of the Essex University & Short Fiction Journal Wild Writing Prize. Both pieces are taken from The Unreliable Nature Writer, Claire’s collection of linked short stories that examines the interconnection of climate anxiety, surviving late capitalism and dealing with personal loss.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

– You know, I was thinking about what you were saying earlier, that stuff about being an Unreliable Nature Writer—

Were you.

– I was just thinking you needn’t be so hard on yourself— here, do you want some wine?—just because you’re not a scientist, it doesn’t mean you can’t write about nature.

A lot of double negatives there.

– Yeah, alright, but you know what I’m getting at.

I never said I can’t write about nature.

– Didn’t you? I thought—

I just said I was unreliable.

– Oh, right.

I can’t be trusted. I’m not dependable—

The Unreliable Nature Writer is a story collection by Claire Carroll, published by short story specialists Scratch Books (see below) the first single-authored collection they have published.

There are 22 stories in c260 pages, with both some interesting variety of styles and common themes, particularly the interface between humans and nature. Many are, or seem to be as this is not a collection for world-building, set in a near-future of accelerating ecological disaster, but with an offbeat twist.

My own tasting notes for the work included notes of Eley Williams with hints of Ben Pester, and Carroll’s work feels in dialogue with the current cohort of highly talented British short story writers to which she belongs, including those two as well as Irenosen Okojie, Anna Wood, Ruby Cowling and Camilla Grudova, who she notes as contemporary influences alongside George Saunders and Lauren Groff. Most of these feature in a personal anthology she contributed to Jonathan Gibbs’ substack

But Carroll’s work has a strongly distinctive flavour of its own.

The title story “The Unreliable Nature Writer” is interspersed through the collection, split into five parts:
The Unreliable Nature Writer Waits Outside The Church With The Other Guests
The Unreliable Nature Writer Sits Down For The Wedding Breakfast
The Unreliable Nature Writer Stands At The Bar Before The First Dance
The Unreliable Nature Writer Stands Outside To Smoke A Cigarette, While Everyone Else Is Inside Dancing
The Unreliable Nature Writer’s Taxi Pulls Up Outside, And She Walks Over To It And Opens The Door

The story is told as a dialogue between two wedding guests - the eponymous 'Unreliable Nature Writer', as she introduces herself, and a man, there with his wife and daughters, who are bridesmaids, who she bemuses with her conversation, following a logic all of its own, coming close to talking him to pack it all in and flee to the Scottish Highlands (which is what another character does in a different story).

I have a personal tendency to err on the side of labelling short story collections as novels where they have recurrent themes or characters. And given the Unreliable Nature Writer features several times, as well as other recurrent themes and links, one interpretation would be that the other stores are her unreliable writing. The author does however view this as a story collection though and indeed reports with amusement: “I did get a very funny rejection from a (rather large) publisher when my agent was sending out my short story collection, who declared quite angrily, in an email that ‘this novel is completely incoherent’.”
(From an interview at Lunate)

Recurrent themes including microplastics, too-strong sunlight, whales, and large cruise ships anchored offshore: The ships are still there. There are nine now, that’s two more since last week. They remain very still; huge and dark and quiet, like dead whales. (and another story features the seven ships from 'last week', although in a shifted world)

At times rather humorous there are also serious ecological points - this a story about a paddling pool:

The plastic will take thousands of years to decompose, and before that scraps of it will wash through the soil, mixing with the grains of dirt and sand, until they find their way out to sea. You might, years later, starving, dragging yourself along the beach in the unbearable heat, you might discover a fish, partially dried out on the orange sand. Peeling away at its skin, you might find microscopic parts of your paddling pool inside. But there’s no way you’ll ever be able to tell if it’s the same one, so don’t worry about that now.

And some do seem to link more directly: as mentioned the (different) character who really does flee to the Highlands; and the story Come and Pick Me Up, where the narrator is urgently summoned by a friend to do exactly that, which just might feature the (very different) protagonists of either of the surrounding stories (one the exasperated interlocutor of the Unreliable Nature Writer).

And a particular stand alone highlight was 'Re: Wreck Event', a story told by one half of an ex-couple, the woman, about the day her partner moved out, where his passage was impeded by some dead birds that had mysteriously appeared. She has sent him the account of the event, and what we're reading is his annotated version, disputing almost everything she remembers and her interpretation of the events in a succession of Footnotes, this when a van driver appears on the scene and joins their conversation:

18. I find it risible that you would remember his words and actions with such clarity yet ‘forget’ mine so readily.
19. You were laughing and joking, smoking his cigarettes, whispering in his ear. It was extremely awkward.

Wonderfully offbeat!

The publisher

We are Scratch Books.

We are named after a strange sensation - the feeling of stroking the soft fur of a cat, to discover later as you walk away, that it scratched you.

Which, for us, is what a short story is like...

At Scratch Books, we are dedicated to the art of short stories.

Our first books - the Reverse Engineering series - bring together the best modern short stories with a discussion by each writer on their instincts, processes and ideas behind it.

In summer 2024, we've published The Unreliable Nature Writer by Claire Carroll and, in October, we'll be launching Duets by Eley Williams, Nell Stevens, Jon McGregor, Gurnaik Johal and many others!

[endrju · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ostranenie and environmentalism - what is there not to like?

[Nicole McGovern · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wonder if I would have enjoyed this more if I had read it rather than listened on audio book. It came across clunky and was hard to focus on, but some of the short stories were intriguing.

[Joshua Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

CC is a genius and I love her writing

[Malcolm Dixon · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this fine collection, a succession of odd, impulsive characters / narrators turn to the natural world for the connection they can’t reach with others, but frequently find that, too, is tainted, spoiled. Beauty is meaningless, remarks one, unreliably (the text is frequently beautiful/meaningful).
Solipsism is rarely so wryly portrayed, nor so vividly coloured by insight, wit and humour. Recommended.

[Grainne Wrigley · Rating 2 out of 5]

More like a collection of poetry than short stories. It was well written, but described strange abstract scenarios that were uncomfortable and often disgusting. It made it very hard to engage with the stories and get to the deeper message. I fought very hard to finish and it was a deeply unpleasant experience.

[Ankita Shukla · Rating 3 out of 5]

You may judge the book by its cover for this one. It is certainly unreliable, testing your attention and understanding with each character and narration which is highly bizarre and no correlation between stories.
The book combines nature in the most oddly satisfying or unsatisfying ways. It’s not an easy read, especially if you’re not used to experimental or unconventional writing.

[sam kr · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25/5

refreshingly and interestingly written with fun exploration of different ways of writing short stories.

[Jason McCracken · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. 23%. Not for me.

[Kennedy Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and at times convoluted this book needed a bio and a hook but once started can only be put down once you finish the short story

[S.J. Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb book of climate-adjacent short stories, told with wit and humour.