A lot of very strange stories, a few quite good. There was one, “To and Fro” which I found incomprehensible. His prose is often quite beautiful.

3.5 stars. A collection of seven engaging, some odd, short stories, (134 pages). I particularly liked ‘Psychopolis’ and ‘Pornography’. In ‘Psychopolis’, a British traveller is becoming bored with living, travelling across America. He attends an unusual dinner party where the dialogue is very well written. There is an interesting conversation about religion from the female perspective.

In ‘Pornography’ a two timing young man finds himself in a spot of bother when his two woman friends join forces against him.

‘Dead as they come’ is an odd memorable story where a very wealthy man who has been married three times, takes a fancy to a fashion mannequin.

This book was first published in 1978.

Psychotic , explosive and sensual


writing style : 5 stars. Provoking and lyrical.


Short stories:



1. Pornography: 4.5 stars.

Its about a man working in a porn shop owned by his brother and his juggling love affairs with two women which ultimately ends in terrifying circumstances. This particular story is erotic, sexual stuffs and has what-will-happens-in-the-end kind of feeling.


2. Reflection of a kept Ape: 4 stars.


This is the weirdest story about an ape who can interact with his keeper Sally Klee, make coffees, clean plates and also with his other humanly qualities, he can read. What I like about this is that the story is narrated by the perspective of the ape himself. Weird, unique and introspective.


3. Two fragments: March 199-: 4 stars.

I don’t know how to tell you what its about. I think its post apocalyptic where there is no electricity or cars or no signals and the condition of humans are miserable. Its has the air of mystery around it but you doesn’t completely know what had happened. To me it feels like incompletely complete


4. Dead as they come: 5 stars

This is my favorite story in this collection. Its about a millionaire who buys a perfect mistress and soon he is enveloped in jealousy and despair. I know it doesn’t sound that interesting but trust me its much more than that. I can't tell you anything else because it will spoil the story for you. Its a perfect psychological story of love and obsession.


5. In between the sheets: 2 stars.

Let me be honest. I didn’t like this story on the sole reason because it deals with the incestuous feeling between a father and his teenage daughter. I don’t like this topic. It make me puke. It make me sick.


6. To and fro: DNFed

I didn’t read this story so I can’t rate it. My reason is simple, I read two pages and didn’t get a single thing and the good thing about short stories is that you can skip stories if you are not enjoying or not understanding it.


7. Psychopolis: 5 stars.

A brilliant story about an English man staying in Los Angeles for vacation, his problems with loneliness and not finding a purpose or a place to belong. Its interesting to read about his life there, his friend especially Terence and some criticism on Christianity.

Overall, its a fantastic collection of short stories better than the one I read few weeks ago - First Person And Other Short Stories by Ali Smith.

Are we living in 1978 all over again? These two quotes are from the last short story:

* 'Is it really true that England is in a state of total collapse?' (p.106)
*'God, Guts, Guns made America great' (p. 124)

Reading the newspaper in 2023 full of Donald Trump's repeat run for Presidency, and the swathes of food-backs across the UK, it feels like McEwan could be writing today.

Except in other ways it doesn't, as 'In Between the Sheets' feels more anarchic than art can realistically imagine being in the 21stC. I read an article today on contemporary punk and one yesterday on small publishing houses. Both are managing to defy conventions, but only in the tiny circumscribed spaces allowed to exist between cultivated conformity. McEwan feels like he inhabits a cultural Pleistocene, when books like music could claim to exist in their own times on their own terms. McEwan in 'Pornography' reminiscent of a literary Marc Almond; like Soft Cell McEwan could pose provocatively as New Wave with at least a limited claim to some novelty. Today's literary Anthropocene perhaps doesn't allow wildness to flourish in the same way; the wilds are stage managed behind plexiglass, with audiences knowledgeable of far more pigeonholes to tamely place it.

The stories themselves are not all great, but mainly kept me entertained. Unlike some others, I don't think it's hugely different to 'First Loves, Last Rites', nor do I think either holds a candle to McEwan's best novels (from 'The Cement Garden' through to his own much sanitised and commercialised peak).

What books can capture is the essence of their time. It's this I found most interesting, whether in the peepshow griminess of pre-gentrification Soho or the hauntingly similar-but-different laments on the state of the nation.

I only read the titular story in this collection, In Between the Sheets.

Very well written, of course. An odd sort of story, grazing taboos without dipping into trashiness.

The only thing I think I can add to the conversation is the lack of discussion of the dwarf character, Charmian. A lot of the focus is on the father, and what he's thinking and going through mentally. It seems he's awakening to the fact that he might be attracted in some way to his own daughter, or younger people in general (something which may have caused his divorce). This taboo is, of course, a big part of this story. But, because of this, I think it's easy to ignore the big blinking red lights of Charmian.

Charmian is, very likely, an adult woman. For my money, she's worse than the father, because she's already interacting with the daughter.

The hints are there in abundance. She talks with clean, flat, well-worded sentences. She has already read a book of his, on evolution (something I doubt a 14-year-old would do). She guides the daughter through the process of riding in a taxi. She is small, but has the weight of an adult. She is described as having a double chin and a wispy gray mustache. She is described as having the wisdom of an old woman. It's all there. Due to either confusion, prejudice, or willful ignorance, it seems that neither the father nor mother have connected the dots—their daughter's tiny school friend is actually an older girlfriend.

This sheds different light on the story than just "father having bad budding thoughts towards daughter." The daughter is now this innocent thing that is being attacked on all sides. She is between two people who are trying to get her between the sheets.

There's more nuance in here than that, though, whether intended or otherwise. It's definitely worth a couple reads and a bit of thoughtful analysis, but not worth more than three stars.

I must have bought this slim volume of short stories over forty years ago a couple of years after it came out but only now have got round to reading it. I had been sorting out a long bookshelf of mixed books of travel, Christianity, Japanese anime fiction and liberal political policies - with the odd book of fiction and stories - a rather odd mixture. I think having now read these very 1970's, rather "risky" short stories they were not totally out of place!. Fiction is a wonderful thing in that makes you think probably in my view more so than factual books. It has to be good storytelling and this is a bit mixed but it still generates memories and a good amount of thought. If anything it only gets three stars as the endings are a bit weak but I enjoyed at least five out of the seven stories even if some escaped the bedroom fairly early! What I continually enjoy about this author is his ability to set the story in a scene of time and place whether in a novel or in a short story. So if you remember that this life however extraordinary set in the 1970's and you don't have too many hang ups about sex and relationships you should be ok with this early writing from a brilliant author.

*2.5. Another impressive foray by McEwan into the realm of short story anthologies. This extends a lot of the themes McEwan established in his first publication, First Love Last Rites, and carries the same tone of morbidity and grotesque. There are some interesting, and disturbing, little stories in this collection, although overall I found it less remarkable and memorable than his first short story collection. Whilst I really admire McEwan’s clean, concise prose and the way that he manipulates his style to conform to the perspective he adopts, I find that I do not love these books or, sometimes, enjoy my time reading them.

In this short story collection, McEwan explores human relationships, the grotesque and the sensual lurking in the corners of our minds. Each of the stories engage the reader with a simple yet arresting prose that forces the reader to grapple with often unpleasant ideas and themes.

Each of the "freaks and monsters" that populate McEwan's England have a unsettling story to tell.
"Two Fragments" is perhaps one of the strongest ones in this collection, following a father struggling to take care of his daughter in a post-apocalyptic London; much is left unexplained which allows McEwan's characters to take centre stage and enable the reader to fully immerse themselves in their desperate struggles to survive. "In Between the Sheets" - the title story - sees a divorced father overcome with suspicion about his daughter's relationship with a friend; "Dead as They Come" follows a wealthy businessman's torrid love affair with a shop mannequin. These two are further character studies and both stand out because of their subject matter, but also because McEwan places the reader inside the narrators' minds - their feelings, thoughts, insecurities, and passions are acutely and uncomfortably laid bare for the reader. In the remaining story that I enjoyed most, "Psychopolis" - a tale of ennui as a traveller from the UK experiences L.A. - "a city without a centre, without citizens, a city that existed only in the mind" - McEwan captures the moods and feelings of his characters well.

The remaining stories are challenging and uncomfortable but in a way that rewards the reader with a deeper understanding of McEwan's writing and the characters themselves. "Confessions of a Kept Ape" is particularly odd - an exploration of the pressures of writing and a bizarre portrayal of a relationship supposedly based on bestiality.

These stories do make for depressed reader but their realism and at the same time their dreamlike quality stand out. The collection of stories here transform the ordinary into the fantastical and grotesque but at the same time are careful treatments of marginalised characters. They provide a detailed image of McEwan as one of the best writers in modern Britain.

"He stirred his coffee and watched the waitress who leaned against a counter in a trance, and who now drew a long silver thread from her nose. The thread snapped and settled on the end of her forefinger, a colorless pearl."

It is perhaps not surprising that having finished reading Ian McEwan's near-masterpiece  On Chesil Beach   just a week ago, I have found his collection of short stories In Between the Sheets a bit of a disappointment. It is one of the author's early works (1978) and the pieces read almost as if the author wrote them to practice his literary skills.

There is no common motif or theme in this collection of seven stories. The only commonality seems to be the author's curiosity as to how far can he go with narrative creativity. The first piece, Pornography seems to be the most "normal" of the seven. It is a cautionary tale for men about the dangers of double timing: cheating may be punished. The conclusion is totally hilarious and very painful to read, especially for men, I would imagine.

The second story, Reflections of a Kept Ape is one of my two favorites. Written from the point of view of a non-human, it is offbeat, fresh, and viciously funny as in the sentence (note the usage of the second verb)

"Our first 'time' [...] was a little dogged by misunderstanding largely due to my assumption that we were to proceed a posteriori"

I actively dislike the next piece, Two Fragments: March 199-, a story about a father and his daughter in post-apocalyptic London: not only am I bored with dystopian visions, but this one contains gratuitous "juicy bits" about pigeons' vaginas, dog's member, and chimpanzee excrement.

I find the fourth story, Dead as They Come the best. The narrator details the dynamics of his love affair: everything would be quite typical and probably boring save for one detail - the object of his affection is not animate. The next piece, after which the whole collection is titled is endearingly strange and quite disturbing. I would like it a lot if not for the author's adolescent obsession with effluvia: we read about wet dreams, vomiting, consumption of feces, anal boil, nocturnal emissions, double stream of urine, saliva glinting on a point of tooth, fecal core, and snot. Mr. McEwan was 30 at the time of writing this: this is the stuff of 17-year-old "men."

The penultimate story, To and Fro reads as a sort of chant, a monotonous drone. It is interesting but it is hard to say what it is about. Finally, Psychopolis, which coolly begins with a woman asking the narrator to chain her to the bed, quickly loses its grip on the reader and devolves into a parody of Southern California late 1970s parties. What the story does well is capture the psychotic character of Los Angeles. Using the voice of one of the characters the author utters a phrase that could be the motif of the entire collection:

"The idea, when it works, is to make your laughter stick in your throat."

Yes, the idea would be great, if it worked. Here, it works only some of the time.

Two-and-a-half stars.

“In between the sheets” is a book I picked up almost at the beginning of the year, so it only seems fitting that it has accompanied me until the very end of this same year. The final story talks about music in a way, so I will pick up on that and start by defining this review as a sonata, which reflects my reading tempo when getting through this collection of stories.

First movement: when I randomly found this book in March, I was in a state of bewilderment, confusion, utter dissociation, the fabric of existence ripping apart before my very eyes. I started reading the first story, “Pornography” in a dark room, in a pool of my own sweat after having spent the entire day forcing myself to sleep as an effective coping mechanism to numb out the insormountable pain. The story deepened my sickness and made the shadows on the walls grow bigger, it fuelled my anguish and at some point I thought I wanted to throw up, this is how shocking and disturbing the story I was reading was I couldn’t literally stomach it, nor was I strong enough to be able to do that. Dehydration and nervous fever probably played a part in that. The ending indeed made my stomach twist but was also somewhat satisfying. I abandoned the book.

Second movement: the bulk of my reading. It’s not like me to leave something unfinished so I pick the book up again. It’s hard to review a collection of short stories with some stories definitely better than others in my eyes, but “Dead as they come” stood out to me and is the reason why I gave this book and easy four stars. A man falls madly in love with a mannequin and shows the extent to which our self-destructive tendencies and obsession can go when we are consumed by love in its original, most primitive, intimate and raw form. Making up scenarios in your head fuelled by paranoia, which by definition is seeing things that could have never happened, having heartbreak consume you to the point of visible physical decay, feeling victim of not only these self-destructive forces, but also of completely antisocial tendencies given by the emotional pain that is so out of control and you are not able to counteract it, sensing the wallpaper in your brain is coming off along with your disintegrating will, your will to do anything, everything is secondary to the emotional pain, the emotional pain is a totalising experience, the only experience. I must say I was freaked out to read almost an exact representation of my grief (with even some things being the exact same between the male protagonist and me, speaking of physical decay) and the guilt that comes when you realise that you were wrong, but it’s too late. Reading about this and seeing it happening to another, albeit fictional, person, made me detach and look at the situation from an outsider perspective, which in turn made me realise how ridiculously I have behaved in the past and how stupid I was in throwing some accusations which simply didn’t make sense, just like it didn’t make sense for him to project certain accusations onto a mannequin which just couldn’t have done any of that because…it’s a mannequin, it couldn’t move, it couldn’t have done any of that.
It held up a mirror for me and forced me to look at my wrongdoing in the face and recognise all the many ways in which I, in fact, was not a victim but a perpetrator. Truly the most disturbing story in this collection, if you ask me. And yet, I emphatised with him, I know all too well the lengths we go to when we are moved by blind love (to rephrase Milton’s Paradise Lost: “The LOVE is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”).
The analogy between orgasm and death was also cleverly thought and brilliantly executed, and the title of the story speaks for itself in this regard.
A special mention also goes to “To and Fro”…I don’t know if my mind is dirtier than Ian McEwan’s but I got an idea on how to improve the already genius concept of this story, I mean we know what moves “to and fro”, and it’s a story about two people in bed…but why not taking it to the next level by also adding details on the position they are in, which looks like a certain zodiac sign and which screams “to and fro” to me, and looking at its symbol…?
After having read all the stories except for one, I put the book on hold once again.

Third movement: the last story saved up for December, “Psychopolis”, set in the land of appearances teaches us to be wary of what we can see, as we can never be truly certain of something despite what it seems or what is said about it. Something else that sat with me for a while, not only in terms of making me think about my disingenuous social media use and how I vowed to never have the same social media habits ever again in relation to love, but also in terms of taking what people say to me at face value. Los Angeles, a crying man with vomit stains on himself and bruises comes on a cabaret stage to talk about his recent experience of heartbreak. People laugh and laugh but stop when the man starts detailing the utter grief he was going through and providing more details of his despairing. People laugh at heartbreak, turn their backs on us when the desire for intimacy gets deeper, when the cry for help gets louder, when they realise it’s all real, it gets real. It’s funny then that for some reason I noticed that my copy of the book is now covered with stains that look exactly like bruises. Dark, purplish, bruise-like stains are all over the front cover, and I can’t explain how this happened. I carried my book in my bag after all but could this have happened over night? I guess it’s a nice symbol of what reading this book has been like for me. A journey into the human psyche like no one wants to talk about, deep down: macabre (indeed this book is a child of the “Ian Macabre” phase), gruesome, too carnal and vulgar even for my literary taste usually attuned to such things. It gives space to those prohibited and disturbing thoughts all of us have when we are in the depths of despair but are unable to voice in civilised society, no less they are thought of as a joke, an exaggeration, a skit worth of stand-up comedy…until…

Libro temprano sobre las variantes del sexo y del amor. El relato del millonario y la maniquí me pareció el más logrado.

These are weird stories, and they feel very forced. They have a few intriguing premises and a few interesting lines, but not much.

They're all on the themes of sex and loneliness, and all but one occur in London (the exception is a Londoner living temporarily in Los Angeles). In one story, a woman apparently has a monkey as a lover. In another, a man has a store mannequin as a lover. Why the author wrote two stories based on the same transgressive premise in the same collection is a little hard for me to understand; it would have been more interesting if the two people had met and shared their secrets with each other.

There's a story about a post-collapse London, which apparently lost most of the trappings of modern civilization (cars, central heating, etc.) and has become more or less a desert. It's not about sex nor anything else really, but just kind of gross and depressing. Its imagery of the Thames turning into a sunken meadow might stick with me for a while.

As the title of the book indicates, sex is the theme. People are nurtured by sex in many of the stories, an escape from dull lives or the driving force in active lives. They are callous about sex and, especially, its impact on others. This tends to turn out poorly for them. In one story, a man has two lovers, and they find out about each other and conspire against him. In the woman-chimp story, the tale is told by the chimp who is saddened by his loss of access to sex with the woman. In both the woman-chimp and man-mannequin stories, the people have become hermits to hide their transgressions. In a couple of the stories, men have women as sex partners, but the men claim that neither of them care about the other emotionally, and that it's basically a way to pass the time.

So, all in all, it's a dreary set of stories, and macabre at points. And that's okay -- macabre has been "in" since the days of Edgar Allan Poe, if not prior. But here they don't really have much zip. They sort of have some black humor, but not enough to make them really memorable. And they're not serious enough to make a deep point, either. So you sort of wonder why sex is allegedly driving these people in the first place. You'd think they would find something else to do.