City Jitters

by Christopher Fowler, Joe Burleson (Cover Artist)

This is a collection of ten chilling tales of modern malevolence, each rooted in the everyday experiences of contemporary city life. The city consists only of car parks, nightclubs, taxis, bright pavements, laughing people, ringing telephones - but in its very ordinariness there lurks its greatest terror. Behind the most ordinary urban landscape lies a place where reality stops and nightmare begins.

5 • Left Hand Drive
19 • Any Minute Now
33 • Change for the Sky Master
52 • Perry in Seraglio
73 • Tigertooth
90 • Vanishing Acts
114 • Her Finest Hour
138 • The Cleansing
166 • What Is Wrong with This Picture?
185 • Loaded Blanks
207 • Epilogue

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fantasy

208 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published May 1, 1986

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Christopher Fowler was an English writer known for his Bryant & May mystery series, featuring two Golden Age-style detectives navigating modern London. Over his career, he authored fifty novels and short story collections, along with screenplays, video games, graphic novels, and audio plays. His psychological thriller Little Boy Found was published under the pseudonym L.K. Fox.
Fowler's accolades include multiple British Fantasy Awards, the Last Laugh Award, the CWA Dagger in the Library, and the inaugural Green Carnation Award. He was inducted into the Detection Club in 2021. Beyond crime fiction, his works ranged from horror (Hell Train, Nyctophobia) to memoir (Paperboy, Film Freak). His column Invisible Ink explored forgotten authors, later compiled into The Book of Forgotten Authors.
Fowler lived between London and Barcelona with his husband, Peter Chapman.

Reviews

[Soho_Black · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Fowler is most frequently described as an urban horror writer and that description was never more apt than in “City Jitters”, his first collection of short stories. They are all set in a city and they are all based on quite normal circumstances in which things don’t progress quite the way you might expect. And definitely not the way you would want, if this were you.

“Left Hand Drive” is the story of a man desperately hunting for the exit of a multi-storey car park; “Any Minute Now” is a woman experiencing an unsettling late night taxi ride; “Change For the Sky Master” is a dangerous obsession with an arcade game, neatly combined with the teachers’ assessment of the subject’s art homework. “Perry in Seraglio” is an aging hipster’s story of a new nightclub; “Tigertooth” is a tale of a man with a slightly dodgy second job coming home to find his house has been burgled and tracking down the suspect thanks to a dropped wallet.

“Vanishing Acts” is a tale of two country boys hitting the delights of Soho for the first time; “Her Finest Hour” is an old lady who is seen as ripe for robbery by a couple of chancers; “The Cleansing” is a businessman finding out how hard it can be to gain contacts. “What is Wrong With This Picture?” is a married couple watching some late night television; “Loaded Blanks” is how people react to the stresses of life when they become extreme. Linking all these together are the “Citylink” stories, about a man getting lost trying to find a hotel in a strange city he is neither familiar with nor dressed for.

Many of the basic set ups for these stories are immediately familiar. Most of us have been in a multi-storey car park, or a taxi, or a nightclub or watched television late at night. Arcades aren’t as common as they used to be, but that story can easily be used to represent Playstation and the news tells us stories of old ladies conned out of their belongings or life savings. But very few of us get to see such stories from the same angles as Christopher Fowler does. There are a number of twists that remind me of Stephen King and a few that would be familiar to Clive Barker’s work.

What makes Fowler the best at what he does is the way he makes the mundane extremely unsettling. Not since I read James Herbert’s “Lair” and discovered that his location for the huge rat’s nest was between my regular Tube station and the office have I found myself so aware of what is going on around me just in case. For me, “Left Hand Drive” is the story that most unsettled me, but so much here is familiar that it gives you pause when you find yourself in a similar situation.

This isn’t Fowler’s best collection of short stories, but as his first, it is a very strong debut. It’s not Fowler’s best writing, but much of it is strikingly familiar and that’s where the horror comes from. Fowler’s writing improved from this point, but his storytelling was already on point right from day one.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an early Fowler collection of short stories. It is the first of three collections and, perhaps wrongly, reminds me of an EC (Educational Comics) magazine. Instead of a Crypt Keeper or Old Witch, the figure that tries the stand-alone stories together is a British tourist in shorts and T-shirt wandering through a cold New York holiday season and getting shaken down by the locals.
There are a number of good stories and some quite good description. Now, it's off to book two.