Category: Short Story Review

  • Short Story Review: “Why I didn’t Immediately Load the Car When My Husband Texted that the Fire Was Getting Closer” by Claudia Monpere

    (The flash piece “Why I didn’t Immediately Load the Car When My Husband Texted that the Fire Was Getting Closer” by Claudia Monpere, appeared in Milk Candy Review.)

    I like flash fiction; it is my preferred form of storytelling now. It’s a very malleable form as well. It can be a straight forward very short short story, it can boarder right up to poetry, a snapshot of stream of consciousness – whatever it needs to be to tell a story, or complete a thought, or action – flash fiction can do it.

    In Claudia Monpere’s “Why I didn’t Immediately Load the Car When My Husband Texted that the Fire Was Getting Closer,” we are presented with an impressively short flash piece (193 words) that consists of 10 sentences. The title also functions as an essential setup, as the body of the piece is answering that question. A device is employed with 9 of the sentences beginning with the word “Because,” except for the last one. Though this is not the most original device, Monpere uses it effectively to create a rhythm and a pace that builds to the concluding final sentence. Also, the third, sixth, and eighth sentences are about the impending fire, creating a dramatic effect, like a ticking clock, adding to the tension of this moment. “Why didn’t I…” is a good example of why the flash fiction form is so intriguing when it comes to telling stories and expressing feelings and thoughts.

    As a person who also had to load a car quickly as a wildfire approached my home, I deeply identified with this piece. When a natural disaster is an abstract, and just a mental exercise, you think you know how you’ll react, and prioritize what is important when that moment arrives. But when you open your front door and can smell the fire, see the sky changing color, and hear the fire trucks, you don’t know what to do at first, and I grasped for the things I thought were important, before I realized what was important. And maybe I am biased due to my personal experience, but Claudia Monpere captured an emotional truth in the middle of a disaster perfectly.

  • Goodnight Springton! There Will Be No Reviews!

    Yeah, I tried my best, but this week just had it out for me.

    There will be no reviews this week.

    Which is annoying as I had several pieces in the hopper that I just haven’t read yet.

    Such as:

    When She Falls by Louise McGuinness, from Milk Candy Review

    Mr. Mollusk by Didi Wood, from Okay Donkey

    An Excerpt from “Howling Women” (Shelby Hinte), from Rejection Letters

    BOZO by Souvankham Thammavongsa, from The New Yorker

    Hopefully, I will get them read, and feel free to check them out yourself.

    If it helps, here’s a picture of my dog back from the groomers, contemplating if free will is an illusion.

  • Short Story Review: “This is a Dog” by Joanna Theiss

    (The story “This is a Dog” by Joanna Theiss appeared in Milk Candy Review.)

    It is hard to pack an emotional pay off in under 1,000 words. Not impossible, just hard.

    Joanna Theiss does this rather masterfully in her flash piece “This is a Dog,” which is one of the best examples of a story paired down to the essential, the marrow of it, and at the same time, leaving enough gaps for the reader to fill in, thus allowing the story to come alive, and have an impact.

    The story is about a dog, if you couldn’t figure it out. And it’s about loving another, and the hope that you did right by them, maybe never knowing for sure.

    Theiss does use a story trick of starting each sentence with “This is…” I’ve seen this type of trick before, from armature writing groups to the pages of The New Yorker. Yet, I will say that Theiss does it correctly. The “This is…” creates a rhythm to the story, helping it charge ahead, and as the piece progresses, the “This is…” begins to take on different meanings from the narrator. Also, Theiss structures her story very well, dividing the piece in five sections, each with a specific narrative function, that not only builds to the climax, but lands perfectly at the conclusion. And that conclusion also nicely ties up the “This is…” motif, making the whole story feel that we have completed a journey with the narrator, who has been changed forever by the events.

  • Short Story Review: “Neighbors” by Zach Williams

    (The short story “Neighbors” by Zach Williams appeared in the March 25th, 2024 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Devin Oktar Yalkin

    A movie I love, just deeply admire, is Picnic on Hanging Rock by Peter Weir. For a movie that was a hit, and enormously influential, I have met very few people who have seen it. I won’t go into too much detail on it, but it’s a movie about the experience of being involved with a mystery. The characters in the film evolve and grow because of the mystery, and in a sense, the resolution of the mystery is not needed for the story. I can’t prove it, but Zach Williams might have seen this movie, and if he hasn’t, he should watch it, as I think he’d like it.

    “Neighbors” is the second story I have read by Williams, and it is 100% the opposite of “Wood Sorrel House,” yet both stories, just like Hanging Rock, revolve around mysteries that never get solved,  but aren’t really about the mysteries. “Neighbors” is about a man doing a favor and checks in on his elderly neighbor. And I am leaving it at that because I don’t want to ruin the fun of this story.

    Just like in “Wood Sorrel House,” “Neighbors” just got stuck in my head, and wouldn’t go away. The story kept poking at me, asking me to reflect on some of the experiences that I have had, how I reacted in the moment, and how I processed them after. I wish I could point to the one thing, phrase or moment in the story where I got captured by it, but that “thing” remains elusive, unable to be grasped. The closest I can come to is the narrator talking to his wife on the beach about his experience, as that moment felt very honest and true, but I also feel like I was swept up in this story at that point.

    If I had Zach Williams in front of me, and besides asking him if he’s seen Hanging Rock, I might ask him what this story was about, and I’m pretty sure he’d answer with asking me, what did I think the story was about? Except, I don’t think he’s being a smart aleck if he did that. Williams is a very capable writer, who is in control of his craft and is purposefully creating a story that lives in the gray arears that populate most people’s lives. So, if you’re asking what the story was about, then you’re focusing on the mystery, and not what the experience was.

  • Personal Review: Road House; Both of Them (1989, 2024)

    (It’s my way, or the highway.)

    So, I’m a huge MST3k fan, and as such, I join in that show’s admiration of the Patrick Swayze epic that is Road House from 1989. It is a movie that was made specifically for pre-teen and teenage boys, and I happened to be that in the late 80’s. I watched it many times over at a friend’s house, as his parents didn’t care what we did, and my mom would have grounded me for years if she knew her twelve year old angel was illicitly watching an R rated movie. It is not a good movie, but it is a good-bad movie.

    I can’t say the same thing for the new Road House, staring Jake Gyllenhaal, which I watched over the weekend. To put it bluntly, it’s a movie that wants very badly to be included in the joke – as if it could laugh along with us at how bad all of this is. What that creates is an uneven affair. At times, this is a movie that attempts to take these characters seriously. Then, at snap of the neck speed, the film turns around and wants us guffaw at how silly and over the top they are. I mean, the main villain, played by Billy Magnussen, was only missing a moustache to twirl in his overly melodramatic performance. As for Conner McGregor’s Knox, who must have drawn inspiration from Wile E. Coyote, his character survives accident after accident, and just keeps popping back up. I felt the worst for Gyllenhaal, who had nothing to work with other than the stock “trauma” trope, which is revealed half way through the movie, per usual for movies like this. This Dalton has no bouncer skills, no knowledge about the world of bars which would make him an expert. No, this Dalton is just a guy who is good at fighting. If you took the fighting away, there’s nothing interesting or unique about him. This a movie is just a vehicle for some fights.  

    This gets me back to the original Road House – and again, not a good movie, but a good-bad movie – which I watched last night. Swayze has an earnestness in the role of Dalton, which at times can be charming, and also very cheesy. But Swayze sticks with it, and never breaks or hints that he knows that a story about the world’s greatest bouncer, is just silly. The tai chi on the riverbank, the monster truck, Sam Elliot being Sam Elliot, Ben Gazzara chewing the hell out of the scenery, the flat characters; it’s all over the top, but it never spins out of control. I think Roger Ebert said it best in his review of the film, “Road House exists right on the edge between the ‘good-bad movie’ and the merely bad. I hesitate to recommend it, because so much depends on the ironic vision of the viewer. This is not a good movie. But viewed in the right frame of mind, it is not a boring one, either.”