Aiden O'Reilly Encounters with books

Darran Anderson's contribution Marah visits border locations through history. “There is no patron saint of borders,” he tells us, while taking on the role of guardian spirit of the Idea of borders, rescuing scenes from oblivion and storing them up. Some scenes are described without meagre specification – I was running to google a lot – but that's part of the fascination of the piece. Try this one:

Sykes runs his finger across the map they are studying and proposes a line from the 'e' in Acre to the last 'k' in Kirkuk

Agave Americana is Jonathan Creasy's personal essay about his time in Marfa, meeting other poets, and a discombobulating encounter with Border Patrol. It's a great free-ranging read.

Lots of great stuff in Gorse/Fruze/Whins, including an excellent Orfhlaith Foyle story. Very much an in-the-moment observational writer, where the reader is wondering where the emotional energy is coming from and who is going to do something to upset everyone. She has unusual perspectives – perhaps because she was brought up in Africa, by missionary parents. So I think there is this element in her stories of closely observing people's behaviour, being sympathetic to them, yet without being part of their culture or belief system.

Colm O'Shea has a tense story with an obsessively tightening energy to it. Is the narrator a real spy or is this an extended metaphor for his – close to paranoid – outlook on the world? It's like nothing else I've read recently and reminds me of reading Beckett for the first time and intuiting that this is a writer who can do things to your head.

Lots of stuff in this book from the brain-tweaking to the enjoyable. Being a Stalker fan (the Soviet sci-fi film), I suspected what Another Roadside Picnic might be about – though I have only seen the film and not read the novel.

With I Bloom, the poem/prose/graphic illustration by Katie Holten we are back with no-apologies no-compromises experimental writing, including a phylogenetic(?) tree of bacteria. Likewise with the Scheffler & Fowler poems. I love it, this is what I want, poems that are not chicken soup but are scalpels of a mad surgeon.

And I'm still only half way through.

“You stand where logic has given up, and perhaps hope too. Perhaps this is what you see when you peer behind the veil.”

“Come 1992, the provisional IRA detonated a device below the A406 flyover. B&Q, damaged, was demolished, and replaced by another Staples; pens and pencils, not mattresses …”

“Panicking, you head into Currys, drops of sweat beading your brow, whispering to yourself: M1. A406. North Circular.”

You just have to read it. I can't explain it. So I've just given extracts rather than try. But wow, what an amazing piece.

The longest story – a novella actually – is Judderman written by D.A. Northwood. Characters in the subsequent stories in the book refer to this novella, originally published in 1972. The original publisher, The Eden Book Society, apparently operated through almost the whole of the 20th century, selling their books to a private list of subscribers.

This meta-mind-play had me googling D.A. Northwood, the implausible Arthur Machen, and the Eden Book Society to check what's real and what's not. The collection doesn't really gain much from such cross references and fictional writers and bands, but nor does it lose anything either.

For all the magnificence of the longest story, with its fibrous texture of journal extracts and quest for the missing, it's the madman's fever of The Scorched Music of the Emperor Worm that first held me in thrall. The juxtaposition of prosaic London places with the imagery of a monster worm is beyond all rational analysis. There's a compelling rhythm to the prose:

“I once thought I heard the scorched music at a decadent and hedonistic party held in an old warehouse somewhere beyond North Acton; but when I pressed who I thought was the DJ, he claimed to have no knowledge of the emperor worm, despite the T-shirt he wore clearly depicting a squirming limbless beast: a wyrm, serpent or hagfish, perhaps.”

It's a dizzy concoction of the sublime and the ridiculous.

In My Queen the dominant motif of a hidden London is reified in the network of tunnels and sewers that coil beneath the metropolis. Tosher tells us that by day he is part of the rat race, and by night he wades with the rats through the city's bowels. He and his fellow explorers take photos of the exquisite brickwork, collect coins and trinkets, and check their routes against antique maps.

It's one of the more straight-forward stories in the collection, the troglodytic obsessions of the main character are balanced by a sub-plot of his new relationship, which, contrary to all expectations, does not seem to be destined to fail. “She adds streets and brooks and parks to the places he names and suggests parts of the city that she could show him. Dollis Brook Viaduct, the Crouch End Spriggan, … “

It's a highlight of the book – one of three or four highlights.

That most of the stories orbit rather tightly around the theme of London Incognita didn't bother me, but I can understand it might test the patience of some when the collection goes over 300 pages. My way of reading a short story collection is to leave a couple of stories to be read a few months later. For example the piece A Constellation of Wondrous Places reads like a reprise of several others, and it also name-drops characters from other stories, stitching them together.

What never was: A woman gets mesmerised by other people's old frayed family snapshots, wherever she comes across them. This hint of obsessiveness and the walks across London tie it into the collection, but otherwise it's distinct from the others in not featuring any artists or nightmare underworlds. The story sticks in my memory and I don't know why.

We Pass Under: In the big city, you can lose your self and become one of the damned. The path of descent – by drugs, poverty, dehumanisation, domestic abuse, or suicide – is a secondary matter. There is a sort of purgatory where all the Lost meet up and yearn. Our narrator reminisces about her previous life as a counter girl in a retail outlet at Brent Cross. She remembers going to the Suffragettes museum, arguing online, drinking with workmates, walking through the snow. And now she wonders why she is in this place.

This book spills over with beautiful arresting images, a pained awareness of lost histories and lost talent, a great love of all who pursue an art obsessively – especially those who don't ever think of it as art. Placenames recited like incantations and eidetic scenes of random car parks, retail parks, canal towpaths and construction sites. This is London – Budden's London of course, but there is no god's eye perspective of London in itself. Budden's vision will draw you in and bring you back again and again, and surely be read in a hundred year's time (a sentiment that would matter to some of the characters in the book).

There's something wrong with the UK literary world that such a body of work – this one and the previous collection Hollow Shores – doesn't get a review in a major newspaper. If he was Irish it'd be a different matter.