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Whirlwind Romance
“Twelve years ago he had met Fern and the things had arrived, nameless then, crooning and sniggering as they swarmed around her, scrabbling at the catches of what was real.”
The walls of our world are thin, and in places they start to break down.
A new love affair awakens a host of malignant things on the fringes of a young man’s vision.
An academic uncovers an ancient song with the power to change reality.
A violent computer game turns into an obsession, bleeding into the waking world.
This debut collection from Sam Thompson (Communion Town, longlisted for the Booker Prize) explores the cracks in the fabric of our existence, the hinterlands where the mundane meets the strange.
Drawing upon writers like Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti, Whirlwind Romance creates a landscape all its own – a place where a single moment can be the catalyst to turn the very nature of reality upside down.
Breathtaking, poetic, and yet shot through with an unsettling darkness, it confirms Thompson’s place as a major talent.
The walls of our world are thin, and in places they start to break down.
A new love affair awakens a host of malignant things on the fringes of a young man’s vision.
An academic uncovers an ancient song with the power to change reality.
A violent computer game turns into an obsession, bleeding into the waking world.
This debut collection from Sam Thompson (Communion Town, longlisted for the Booker Prize) explores the cracks in the fabric of our existence, the hinterlands where the mundane meets the strange.
Drawing upon writers like Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti, Whirlwind Romance creates a landscape all its own – a place where a single moment can be the catalyst to turn the very nature of reality upside down.
Breathtaking, poetic, and yet shot through with an unsettling darkness, it confirms Thompson’s place as a major talent.
320 pages, Paperback
First published April 21, 2022
61 people want to read
About the author
Sam Thompson
8 books19 followersSam Thompson was born in London in 1978.
His first book Communion Town, which is about a kaleidoscopic city, was published in 2012 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His second book Jott is about friendship, madness and modernism. It came out in 2018.
He’s written for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and other periodicals, and has taught English lit and creative writing at Oxford University, Oxford Brookes and Queen’s University Belfast.
He lives in Belfast.
His first book Communion Town, which is about a kaleidoscopic city, was published in 2012 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His second book Jott is about friendship, madness and modernism. It came out in 2018.
He’s written for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and other periodicals, and has taught English lit and creative writing at Oxford University, Oxford Brookes and Queen’s University Belfast.
He lives in Belfast.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 2, 2022
(4.5) I have been waiting a long time for more short stories from Sam Thompson. His 2012 debut, the novel-in-stories Communion Town, is not just one of my favourite books but also one of those rare books that changed the way I read and what I wanted from fiction. Whirlwind Romance is worth the wait; it’s simultaneously varied and cohesive, a collection that varies in style while always retaining the core essence that gives Thompson’s work its identity.
If you want to get a feel for that identity, and the themes that run through Whirlwind Romance, ‘The Red Song’ is the place to start. Charged with uncanny energy, this is the tale of an academic who journeys to a strange land – the country of Hesperus, where a revolution has recently taken place – to research the work of a poet. She is drawn into a haunting ritual, the exact details of which remain obscure, rendering the final page sinister as hell.
‘Seafront Gothic’ is as perfect for its title as it could possibly be, and feels like a glorious mash-up of Robert Aickman and Joel Lane. A man visits his brother at a peculiar hotel; he sleeps under mouldy sheets and dines (with dusty cutlery) on ‘two strips of grey fat, two carbonised triangles and a clump of pale matter’. Yet there is something more real and painful behind these macabre embellishments, a story of loss and family bonds.
It’s hard to pick a favourite from the book... but ‘The Heights of Sleep’ is probably it. The narrator is obsessed with the work of a fictitious writer, J.S. Gaunt, and spends his life trying to decode and/or emulate it. I had already read and loved this story – it was in Best British Short Stories 2019 – and revisiting it only seemed to increase its potency. Thompson is fantastic at picking out the right details to make Gaunt’s novels sound utterly enthralling, so that you, the reader of this story, ache to read them yourself. The story also closes on a note of ambiguity that might be hopeful, or frightening, or some sort of confession, depending on how you look at it, which in itself is a genius way of referencing the ‘hidden figure’ the narrator senses in Gaunt’s writing.
‘Pilgrim: Hinterlands’ is another story of obsession, this time about an addictive videogame. ‘The Other Side of the Shadows’ is a noirish detective story akin to Communion Town’s ‘Gallathea’. Elsewhere there is a beguiling vampire tale in ‘The Monstrosity in Love’; a scattering of mysterious flash fiction pieces, like ‘The Walker’ and ‘You Must Leave All Your Belongings Behind’; and startling stabs of realism such as the opening story, ‘Where You Are’, in which a parent attempts to comfort a distressed child.
Thompson has a unique imagination and a particular affinity for imagined places and art. The expressive place names in Communion Town are part of what makes it so indelible, and here the names – of people, places, things – are similarly powerful. The landscapes and cityscapes in Whirlwind Romance are often distinct, yet they fit together as though all are part of some vast, arcane map. I find it hard to resist the idea that the locations from both this book and Communion Town all exist in the same world.
First lines are evocative and persuasive: ‘I remember spring rain dripping from the balconies’; ‘You must go down to the canal at six in the evening’. Invented works – the poetry in ‘The Red Song’; the games in ‘Pilgrim: Hinterlands’ and ‘Cassettepunk’; Gaunt’s oeuvre in ‘The Heights of Sleep’ – pulse with life in spite of the way they are sometimes only vaguely sketched.
Arguably the centrepiece of the book is ‘One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide Queen’, which combines a gripping fantasy adventure with the sort of thoughtful writing not typical to the genre. A poker-playing wanderer teams up with a woman who reminds him of a former lover, and is persuaded to journey to a realm from which he was banished long ago. Looming over it all is the distant menace of something (a place? entity? both?) known as the Ghost. This story feels like the nucleus of the book perhaps partly because it’s the longest, and placed close to the end, but surely also because it seems to incorporate many motifs, images and undercurrents discernible in the other stories. Following the characters on their quest, I found it difficult not to think of the gameplay described in ‘Pilgrim: Hinterlands’ or picture the streets of Hesperus from ‘The Red Song’.
In ‘The Heights of Sleep’, the narrator tries to identify what he finds so compelling about J.S. Gaunt’s fiction. His writing contains ‘a hidden pattern, some secret I needed to understand’; it’s full of recurring details that hint at an unseen bigger picture; it is ‘like a great fractal falling into itself forever on every scale at once’. These might well be descriptions of Sam Thompson’s own work, and Whirlwind Romance expands the city of Communion Town to a whole wide world of strange and tempting streets, songs, faces and games.
TinyLetter | Linktree
If you want to get a feel for that identity, and the themes that run through Whirlwind Romance, ‘The Red Song’ is the place to start. Charged with uncanny energy, this is the tale of an academic who journeys to a strange land – the country of Hesperus, where a revolution has recently taken place – to research the work of a poet. She is drawn into a haunting ritual, the exact details of which remain obscure, rendering the final page sinister as hell.
‘Seafront Gothic’ is as perfect for its title as it could possibly be, and feels like a glorious mash-up of Robert Aickman and Joel Lane. A man visits his brother at a peculiar hotel; he sleeps under mouldy sheets and dines (with dusty cutlery) on ‘two strips of grey fat, two carbonised triangles and a clump of pale matter’. Yet there is something more real and painful behind these macabre embellishments, a story of loss and family bonds.
It’s hard to pick a favourite from the book... but ‘The Heights of Sleep’ is probably it. The narrator is obsessed with the work of a fictitious writer, J.S. Gaunt, and spends his life trying to decode and/or emulate it. I had already read and loved this story – it was in Best British Short Stories 2019 – and revisiting it only seemed to increase its potency. Thompson is fantastic at picking out the right details to make Gaunt’s novels sound utterly enthralling, so that you, the reader of this story, ache to read them yourself. The story also closes on a note of ambiguity that might be hopeful, or frightening, or some sort of confession, depending on how you look at it, which in itself is a genius way of referencing the ‘hidden figure’ the narrator senses in Gaunt’s writing.
‘Pilgrim: Hinterlands’ is another story of obsession, this time about an addictive videogame. ‘The Other Side of the Shadows’ is a noirish detective story akin to Communion Town’s ‘Gallathea’. Elsewhere there is a beguiling vampire tale in ‘The Monstrosity in Love’; a scattering of mysterious flash fiction pieces, like ‘The Walker’ and ‘You Must Leave All Your Belongings Behind’; and startling stabs of realism such as the opening story, ‘Where You Are’, in which a parent attempts to comfort a distressed child.
Thompson has a unique imagination and a particular affinity for imagined places and art. The expressive place names in Communion Town are part of what makes it so indelible, and here the names – of people, places, things – are similarly powerful. The landscapes and cityscapes in Whirlwind Romance are often distinct, yet they fit together as though all are part of some vast, arcane map. I find it hard to resist the idea that the locations from both this book and Communion Town all exist in the same world.
First lines are evocative and persuasive: ‘I remember spring rain dripping from the balconies’; ‘You must go down to the canal at six in the evening’. Invented works – the poetry in ‘The Red Song’; the games in ‘Pilgrim: Hinterlands’ and ‘Cassettepunk’; Gaunt’s oeuvre in ‘The Heights of Sleep’ – pulse with life in spite of the way they are sometimes only vaguely sketched.
Arguably the centrepiece of the book is ‘One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide Queen’, which combines a gripping fantasy adventure with the sort of thoughtful writing not typical to the genre. A poker-playing wanderer teams up with a woman who reminds him of a former lover, and is persuaded to journey to a realm from which he was banished long ago. Looming over it all is the distant menace of something (a place? entity? both?) known as the Ghost. This story feels like the nucleus of the book perhaps partly because it’s the longest, and placed close to the end, but surely also because it seems to incorporate many motifs, images and undercurrents discernible in the other stories. Following the characters on their quest, I found it difficult not to think of the gameplay described in ‘Pilgrim: Hinterlands’ or picture the streets of Hesperus from ‘The Red Song’.
In ‘The Heights of Sleep’, the narrator tries to identify what he finds so compelling about J.S. Gaunt’s fiction. His writing contains ‘a hidden pattern, some secret I needed to understand’; it’s full of recurring details that hint at an unseen bigger picture; it is ‘like a great fractal falling into itself forever on every scale at once’. These might well be descriptions of Sam Thompson’s own work, and Whirlwind Romance expands the city of Communion Town to a whole wide world of strange and tempting streets, songs, faces and games.
TinyLetter | Linktree
January 15, 2025
It was great to find that Sam Thompson had published again, as I loved his Booker longlisted Communion Town.
This short story collection has the same weird, elegant feel, most notably in the Red Song, an eerie tale of the country of Hesperus and its traditions, One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide Queen, a revenge tale in a Western dystopian city, and the Other Side of the Shadows, the metaphysical detective story the author does so well. We see the twist coming, but so does the detective, and it makes no difference...
Some of the shorter stories, although beautifully written, I felt could have been fleshed out into something more satisfying, but unlike most short story collections, there's no filler here.
This short story collection has the same weird, elegant feel, most notably in the Red Song, an eerie tale of the country of Hesperus and its traditions, One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide Queen, a revenge tale in a Western dystopian city, and the Other Side of the Shadows, the metaphysical detective story the author does so well. We see the twist coming, but so does the detective, and it makes no difference...
Some of the shorter stories, although beautifully written, I felt could have been fleshed out into something more satisfying, but unlike most short story collections, there's no filler here.
November 14, 2022
A hauntingly and brilliantly unsettling piece of weird fantasy and horror fiction that I could not predict the outcomes for the story and was bowled over by the quality of the writing.
Full review - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/bl...
Full review - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/bl...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews