2021 SF, fantasy and horror anthology, 30 very short stories.
A disclaimer first: MaryAnn is a friend whose film review
site I've been reading with enthusiasm
for over twenty years. I didn't pay directly for this book, but got it
as a benefit of being a supporter of her work in general. She knows
I'm going to give an honest review and, thank goodness, I really
enjoyed this collection.
These stories are described as "flash fiction", not a form I know
well, and they average a bit over a thousand words each; often that
means there's no real room for plot. Sometimes what we get is
scene-setting that suggests what the "real" story to follow might be;
sometimes it's a slice of life; sometimes it's a story that
deliberately never quite starts, with a feeling that if only things
had aligned a tiny bit differently it could all have been so much
better. And sometimes it is a miniature piece of conventional fiction
with beginning and middle and end.
I'm reminded of Yuriy Shakov's Russian Tarot of St Petersburg, for
which all the images were painted not on the usual canvas for
photoreduction but at their actual intended size. Conventional tools
of characterisation and plotting leave too wide a trail to be useful
here; one has to hint and make reference and suggest, using just a
word or two here or there in place of a paragraph of description.
Sometimes it fails and only the broad strokes come through, and we
veer too close to cliché; more often it works, and by the end one
knows who someone is as a person.
There's also not as much room as one might like to develop a
distinctive voice, but even the downbeat stories have a basic optimism
to them that I find welcome: yeah, maybe one day this thing will be so
much part of ancient history that it's not even understood any more.
Maybe we won't learn as much from that as we should, but still we'll
be around and learning. There's always a sense that there's more out
there than we can see though this tiny hole into the world, and
leaving the reader wanting more is certainly better than leaving them
wishing you'd had a more aggressive editor.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.