Short stories have long been one of my most favourite literary styles. They're like chicken nuggets made out of words. I always figured that if I started writing (unlikely at this point) I would write the little stories.
Beyond the obvious time saving advantages, short stories tend to condense large emotions or principles into manageable arcs. None of this Victor Hugo going on and on for pages about a semi-related thing; every sentence is carefully constructed to maximize the benefit to the plot or theme. Not that they can't have description or pacing. I just find that the short story format forces writers to ante up on the quality of every word choice.
So the books I've read in the past week-ish are a collection of short stories by Jack London (adventure writer, socialist, White Fang, you know the guy) and a collection called "Unnatural Creatures" which I thought was written by Neil Gaiman but was only collected and edited by him, although he does contribute one story. I might also reference short stories by other authors who've mastered the skill such as Rudyard Kipling, O. Henry, F. Scott Fitzgerald (aka. F. Scotty), and Earnest Hemingway.
I remember my dad reading me Jack London's stories from a very young age. The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and other "backcountry lit" is something I loved dearly as a child. In recent years it has become less enticing to me, perhaps because I've read and re-read London's work so many times and found nothing to match it in all the rest of the genre (no I will NOT read your Farley Mowat nonsense go away).
He has a unique ability to recreate the sacred scarcity of the North that interests me so intensely that I will be viciously disappointed when I see a piece of actual tundra. Many of his stories are partially about survival against the challenges of that environment, but they also speak to the will of the human soul to overcome. He is not dismissive of the explorers in his story who fall prey to starvation or greed or to actual four-legged predators, they are all heroes in their failure. He only mocks the ones who sit comfortable in their homes (in California, inevitably) and do not challenge or risk anything critical - life, limb, or love.
Two stories are coming to mind just now. The first is "Love of Life", available here in its full glory. A man, out of food and water in the wilderness, fights onward to find help and food. That's a pretty accurate summary. The descriptions of the man's hunger, thirst, pleasures, setbacks, and mood are what make this worth reading. I love the line just near the end about him squirming along like a monstrous worm. It makes the whole thing seem weirdly comic, and thus all this fight for life thing takes a new dimension as hilarious in its futility. Oh Jack, you genius!
The other story which caught me recently is Planchette (here ya go). It was published in segments in a magazine, so it's less of a short story and more of a novella/serial, but there's some interesting stuff to pull out of it. First, it's a love story and a ghost story, a bit of a departure from what London is known for. A young man, Chris, tells his lover, Lute, that he can't marry her and he can't tell her why. Things happen. I can't tell you what because it's a suspense story. That's one of its primary features. London had the advantage of the serial format to play with while creating the suspense and pacing in this story. One thing he does really well here is to set up events where the reader is certain things will go wrong, but then sidestepping the expected outcome nonetheless. So the reader gets the anticipatory dread and the shock-n-horror both together, while usually they are exclusive. The other thing which is interesting about this story is the way he writes the lovers' dialogue. Jack's own views about love and marriage were radical at the time, and I'd say they're still pretty far left of average. His first wife was chosen to bear ideal children, and with his second wife the marriage was not an exclusive arrangement. But the lovers in this story are dedicated only to each other and to a moral standard that was not Jack's own. So it shows a very real possibility that this story was written for the money, because he thought that's what people would like or relate to. It's kind of his caricature of the expected romantic arc. And it reads like a caricature, every word more predictable than the last. Genius has some limits, I guess. He could imagine a Northland full of the highest adventure and the most primal demons, but he couldn't imagine loving one woman for herself until death. Aren't we all similarly blind to our own boundaries?
The other collection which I mentioned was "Unnatural Creatures". I borrowed this from the library hoping it was one that I had browsed through in Chapters a few months ago. That collection had been only by Neil Gaiman and had contained a very funny short story about a son and a mother and I wanted to read it again. This one had an entirely unexpected set of pleasures waiting for me. Not only was there a delightful story by Gaiman, but there were writers I'd never heard of telling such beautiful and weird stories. Now I have some new authors to explore in future, which I look forward to.
This was a collection of fantasy stories. Most of you will know the bias I have against fantasy as a genre: many writers focus so heavily on complex plots that their actual writing technique suffers heavily. This problem is mitigated by the structure of a short story. All the excess plot is stripped away and you're left with a handful of characters and manageable stories with meanings that drip out without much wringing. Sometimes I think fantasy and sci-fi authors attempt so much that they get lost in their own meandering webs of context and text and subtext. I'm looking at you, Orson Scott Card and Frank Herbert. "Dune" was notorious for this. Maybe writers should rite lots of short stories before attempting novels, because it forces them to write excellent quality and refine their ideas.
I'll bring up a few highlights from this little joy-bringer. First, the story "Prismatica" by Samuel R. Delaney. A poor, quick-witted man named Amos goes on an adventure with a tricksy man and gains the greatest treasure in the world by keeping his wits about him. I like this one because it has the pacing and structure of a Grimm's fairy tale, but a more modern morality. There are three trials set before our hero, and on the second he is betrayed by fate and the last becomes more difficult for it. He overcomes with the help of a person he has befriended. It sets up happy/wise marriage as the ultimate reward, and opposed it with a villain who separates lovers. I don't agree with this really but it's very fairy tale, so in the story I love it. It also reminds me of the writer Gail Carson Levine, who specializes in reinventing fairy tales. The language is distinctly similar and I wonder whether these writers were at school together or something.
Another one I loved was "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees" by E. Lily Yu. Ok guys, I lucking fove bees. They're just so fuzz. The science and myth in this story unite so seamlessly that I really really want to adopt it as factual. I'm not sure really what the moral or message was in this one. Probably something along an anti-anarchist line. Or maybe like a loyalty to the lineage sort of thing. I need to think on it more. I loved the delicate language and the perfect blending of real science into a myth.
There were many other great bits. Excellent one-liners in some, good morality structure in others, the first story had such an excellent unnatural creature and a kind of John Wyndham sci-thriller thing going on and I'm still kind of swooning over its construction. Overall just a great overview of fantasy shorts in one place. Well done again, Mr. Gaiman. You're danged good at this.
Fantasy shorts. I'll take future band names for $600, Alex.
So, here are my recommendations for people wanting to read short stories. Definitely the Gaiman collection is a cool overview of the fantasy genre, and London will make you want to move to a long-extinct Klondike, but it depends what you're looking for in a story.
If you want pathos, read some R. Kipling. His short story "Muhammad Din" makes me tear up a little every time (heck yes public domain!) His novel "The Light that Failed" is one of the most severely depressing stories in all of the English language (childhood friends become lovers, grow apart, reunite, lose hope, die). Or even for some really dry humour you might check out Kipling's "His Wedded Wife" or "Three and - An Extra". I like these last two stories particularly because they make humour of things we don't like talking about - death, adultery, deception. Kipling dresses them up and lets his heroes triumph over them and it just feels so just, so right. Cozy.
F. Scotty has several collections of short stories which represent, I think, his best work (sorry you Great Gatsby fans, but you're wrong). This includes "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" which is a neater and triter story than the Brad Pitt movie would have you believe. Fitzy is pretty much flawless in his short stories because he can focus on one idea and develop it perfectly. Particular favourites of mine are "The Cut-Glass Bowl" about a woman who is unhappily married and "The Ice Palace" about a girl who dodges an unhappy marriage. Ultimately these are stories about the inner struggle between desires and obligations, which is why I love them so well. Also his story "The Four Fists" is as good an argument against vigilante justice as there will ever be, and it's conveniently hilarious.
Ok one more recommendation and then I'll let you carry on with life. O. Henry. This guy was a short story MACHINE and gave us some of the most well-known and widely read pieces in American literature. Although he has an awful weakness for happy endings, it's only because he really believed in them and I think that's sweet and therefore forgiveable. His story "The Gift of the Magi" is well known as a story about Christmas and sacrifice. "The Ransom of Red Chief" is about a kid who is kidnapped and then proves to be un-ransom-able. O. Henry might have had a formulaic approach to these stories but he tended to focus on feel-good romances and comedies which make him a very appealing treat after a hard day in the Tylenol mines. Heart candy. Not that I have faith in romance to make my life remarkable or transcendant. But it's a lovely thing to know another human finds in your company a specific and additional pleasure among all the sensations that life casts you into.
TL;DR: go read a short story.
Up next: Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
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