Tag: Short Story Reviews

  • Personal Review: “Jesus’ Son” by Denis Johnson

    Up until a couple of months ago, I hadn’t ever heard of Denis Johnson. (And yes, the rock I live under is very comfortable.) I found out about him from a review of Ted Geltner’s biography of Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures. From that article, I was intrigued and put Johnson’s Jesus’ Son on my reading list.

    If I had pushed myself, I could have read the book in a day, but spreading it out over three seemed more appropriate. A couple of things jumped out at me, besides the fact that it was a quick read. First, this book of short stories just oozed 90’s literature, which is strange as most of the stories take place in the 70’s, while the stories themselves were written in the 80’s, and only published in 1992. I can’t fully say why it felt so 90’s, but it Gen-X despondent seemed to be lurking in corners. The second idea the book presented to me is that the drunk/addict poet or writer is rather cliché now. Maybe not as drunken muscled as Hemmingway, Kerouac, or Burkowski, but the stories in the volume ran in the same vein. Here, we are presented with pretty much the same first-person character from story to story, who is too poetic to be a regular run of the mill drunk. No, this is the tragic drunk writer whose writing is their only salvation – the thing that keeps them going.

    That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the book. No, I was struck at how simple, and effortless everything in the stories felt. It carried such weight but drifted on the air. The destruction of a character’s life never felt so beautiful and fragile. No, I get why Jesus’ Son is placed on best of short story collection lists, year after year. Johnson’s stories and writing style has clearly been influential. I was about half way through “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” when it dawned on me how many flash writers must consider Denis Johnson a primary source, with his books lovingly squirreled away on their shelves.

    The final thought that I had while reading this book was that these stories felt like they were fun to write. Some books can feel laborious – not to read that is – such as writing it took time, work, dedication, perseverance to deliver the story exactly the way the writer wanted to tell it. Jesus’ Son felt like it was a blast to write. Either making it all up, or using real life situations, or maybe combining it all together, the end result was a book that felt like it was just as entertaining to write as it was to read.

    Having said all of this, I must now return to my home under the rock. There, I will toss this book up on the shelf, with all the other collections of short stories that I own and wonder how did I miss out on Denis Johnson when he was alive?

  • Flash Fiction Review – “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney

    (The flash fiction story “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney was published on March 19th, 2026 at Milk Candy Review.)

    “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney is the type of flash piece that makes me love flash writers as they can be inventive and playful with this form, while at the same time making me ask, in a mischievous way, “What did I just read?”

    In “Two days after I dies” Justine Sweeny gives to us the character of a recently realized ghost. I love that this spirit is frantic and unhinged – tethered to this world, either unable or unwilling to leave it. Sweeny uses effectively simple techniques here; lack of capitalization, run-on sentences, and short words that make a choppy, staccato rhythm to the piece. What the writer creates is a spirit’s frenzied attempt to get all of these words out and tell us this self-perceived vitally important story. There is an anger to this ghost. A viciousness in her as she is annoyed that someone she doesn’t know well would dare post a personal reflection of her passing on social media. There is a hint at humor in the beginning, but as the fury builds, the tone begins to switch to an unhealthy bitterness which is out of proportion to the allegedly aggrieved crime. Take how the ghost lists all the offenses of this woman. Though the ghost sees the offenses as unforgivable transgressions, we start to feel a sense of jealousness in the comparison of their motherly actions. And when the twist arrives at the end, it lands with pity, and a disbelief that one, even in the afterlife, is so wrapped and warped in grievance, lacking the empathy to acknowledge that there is one person they cared about suffering in their mourning. But most haunting is how this ghost seems to lack even the slightest hint of remorse or regret that she is no longer with her children.

    Sweeney’s “Two days after I died” is a very short and compacted work, but it left me with wonderful questions to roll over in my head. Was the woman who posted on social media really affected to the degree that she claimed, or was it as the ghost suspected, a bit of online grief porn? Can one’s anger and bitterness make a person completely blind to their loved ones suffering? Can animosity and hostility follow us into the next world? Clearly, the theme was meant to apply to us in the here and now, but “Two days after I died” is a succinct rumination of the metaphysical possibility that a life lived unwell, will leave you emotionally untethered in spitefulness.

  • Short Story Review: “The Dreamdrive” by Weike Wang

    (The short story “The Dreamdrive” by Weike Wang appeared in the May 25th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Chris Harnan

    Reading “The Dreamdrive” was like watching my favorite basketball player miss an unobstructed layup.

    First, there was the tone of the piece, which was attempting to be lighter, easy, and humorous. The effect of this was that the story never achieved a depth. Everything was presented at arm’s length, making the story feel like nothing was at risk, or truly important. Also, in an attempt at humor, one character was described as “his then girlfriend,” implying her eventual fate. This cliched trick of description can work if it is partnered with irony, but in this setting, the attempt was to humorously build sympathy for our sad sack of a protagonist. Unfortunately, I did not see the reason why we needed to have this information presented in such a manner.

    Second, the revelation of the dream fell out of the sky and crashed like dishes on the floor. It was as if the narrator decided that the story needed to end now, and we were quickly given the relevance of what had been happening. But without any foreshadowing, or even a climatic build up, the revelation doesn’t achieve any resonance. Such as, now that the protagonist understands where his reoccurring dream is coming from, how does that help him move forward? It’s implied that he can sleep again, but is there nothing deeper here? How is the hero changed, other than being able to sleep? It felt to me that an emotional plot point was missing.

    Third, with the tone and lack of resonance in this story, it made the narrator sound condescending to the protagonist. The narrator treats the protagonist as a person to ridicule and kick around. Multiple times the hero is shown as a person no one takes seriously. And honestly, if the narrator doesn’t care about the protagonist, then why should the reader?

  • Short Story Review: “Standings” by Chang-rae Lee

    (The short story “Standings” by Chang-rae Lee appeared in the May 11th & 18th, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Adrian Tomine

    When I graduated high school, my uncle got me a subscription to The New Yorker. He was a very smart and well-read man, and he knew of my ambitions to have a writing career, and this graduation gift, which I emphatically received with much excitement, was his way of encouraging me. I say all of this because off and on over my adult life, I have continued to subscribe to The New Yorker, and for that reason I feel fully justified, due to my extensive financial investment in the publication, to complain to the Fiction Department, and formally request they stop publishing works of short fiction which are merely excerpts from novels. I speak of Chang-rae Lee’s “Standings”, which by the magazine’s own admission “… is drawn from “A Tender Age.”” Then adds Change-rae Lee “…is the author of the novel “A Tender Age.” (August, 2026)” Though this work is an excerpt, it was published in the short fiction section of the magazine, so I will be reviewing it as a short story.

    “Standings” is the type of story that suffers from the sins of being too smart for its own good, and wanting to do too much. The story is overly long, bringing in as many details as possible to give the reader the full feeling and experience of what it was like to grow up in this environment of 1976 adolescence. Not to make light of the subject matter, but this is a coming of age story of boys on the cusp of crossing into adulthood, and being unclear what to do with the rage and aggressiveness they are supposed to embrace as they try to figure out what manhood is. This is a pack of “lost boys” with no direct positive male influence, and left to their own devices, devolve into racism and violence. On the surface, this is a deep well to work with, and speaks to the potential of an engaging and enlightening story. But here, the story felt unfocused on what it truly wanted to tell, with many tangents of ideas flailing. As Milhouse would say, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?!”

    Another issue that I had here was that I never felt the protagonist was ever in any peril through the course of the story. I spoke of the aggression between the boys, but the tone flipped between a comical story of boys posturing toward each other knowing that nothing would happen, to a very serious they must kill or be killed. Instead of creating a logically narrative development, such as playing at being violent leading to violence as survival, the story seemed to flip a switch. What we are given is a bipolar feeling of it just “happens,” which left me thinking I had missed a step, or an unearned short cut was taken. By doing that, the intention of the action never felt believable. The protagonist does pull out a knife at school and tries to harm another student, yet his consequences are suspension, some therapy, a bit of social ostracization, but on the whole he was able to continue on as a well-adjusted adult. Meanwhile the other boy has trouble coming out of his home due to the trauma, and another boy turns out was schizophrenic all along. Other than that…

    This brings me to my last point, which is that I never felt an urgency in the writing. In my point above, I stated that the protagonist never felt in peril, and part of that has to do with the language used. The narrator/protagonist is clearly writing this story – this is a first-person narrative that would never be confused with a friend talking to us, or a person at a bar telling us this story. No, this is unquestionably a story being written, and as such, it sticks to the rules. (Hell, the knife was introduced in the second act, and was used in the third.) It felt like an undergrad working hard to get an A in a creative writing class. The narrative plays it safe and does everything right, but in so doing, it never takes a risk or displays an intensity. The thought that I had reading this was maybe you can be simplistic and minimal.

    “Standings” doesn’t work as a short story, but I also admit I don’t think it was ever meant to. For all I know, “A Tender Age” could be a great book, and given the breath and space that a novel can take, perhaps all of these pieces tie together and it plays like a fine-tuned song. But in the end, this just hammers home to me that not every story should be a short story.

  • Flash Fiction Review: “Rewind” by Cole Beauchamp

    (The flash fiction story “Rewind” by Cole Beauchamp appeared at Lost Balloon on January 7th, 2026.)

    The flash fiction that I love straddles a precarious knife’s edge. On one side is the prose, the other being the poetic, and if they counter balance correctly, a beautiful harmony is created. Reading Cole Beauchamp’s “Rewind” put me right on that the edge’s sweet spot; a tactile narrative countered with an eternal instant.

    The structure of “Rewind” is divided into three section, each beginning with the same first line, “I have something to tell you…” In the first section, a couple is descending down a mountain during a hike while the husband attempts to explain what is implied to be his infidelity, which the wife has no interest in hearing. The section ends with the wife accidently falling off the path, tumbling down, and all goes black, followed by one word: Rewind. The second section takes places in the past, this time the wife is making a special dinner attempting to make up to her husband for all the time that she’s been away. Just as in the first section, the second section concludes with the wife losing her footing and falling, again with all going black; Rewind. The final section takes places the night before their wedding, and them sneaking out to see each other, with the wife stating that they “can’t rewind any further.”

                The three moments selected in “Rewind” are snap shots of this marriage. The first being the only one that I believe takes place in a tactile moment. This marriage is over, even if the husband isn’t aware of it, for the wife knows that she has stopped loving him. When she falls and all goes black, that ushers in the next two section which I will argue take place in her memory, existing in her own eternal instant. The second section is close to a mirror image of the first section; same opening line, the disappoints, to apologies, and the falling. The first was his fault, and now we are being shown how she was an accomplice in the death of this relationship. But the second section acts as a bridge; though it is in the eternal, the language Beauchamp uses is still rooted in factual descriptions. When the third section arrives, the language softens, the poetic is embraced, and thematically, a melancholic tone is embraced which intertwines with the recollection of the past optimism this marriage had.

                No one goes into a marriage thinking that it will fail, and when things go wrong, that initial optimism can feel like it’s a million miles away in a different life. Cole Beauchamp’s “Rewind” played with this theme in a structure that I appreciated for its inventiveness, but most importantly, this was the type of flash fiction that embraced the unique qualities this form can have, which are prose and poetry wrapped tightly together.