Laughing at the Abyss

Gussied Up & Ready To Read!

The great thing about inching toward forty is that you start to know yourself.

For example, it’s starting to dawn on me that I’m a contrarian (not by any design on my part, but by happenstance).  While this fact has been revealed to me over and over this week, I want to focus on one particular way I’m outnumbered:  my current obsession with the short story.

Most readers (and writers) gravitate toward the novel length.  I’ve finished the first draft of a novel, and I do want to revise it and eventually write more novels — but I’m currently in the clutches of a nasty short fiction habit.  I say this both as a reader and a writer.  I feel like the short fiction equivalent of a coke dealer who’s hooked on the drug just as much as any of his customers.

Alas, if only short fiction were as popular as cocaine!

I’ve written about six or seven short stories this year (along with the first draft of the novel).  I have many, many short story ideas I just don’t have time to pursue.  I end up writing down these ideas for later.

On the reading front, I’m working my way through at least four or five different short fiction anthologies.  That’s how I read.  I lack the patience to work through anthologies a story at a time.  So instead, just about each night, I go to the bookshelf or Kindle, flip through the TOCs of several books and pick out one story to read.  I’ve been in that habit for about a month now, and wish I’d started reading this way years ago.

My anthology-hopping habits led me to consider how we market short fiction, and if there couldn’t be a way of doing it better.

One of the reasons I love the short story — especially the horror short story — is its emphasis on intensity.  I once heard a writing instructor discuss the trade offs of the novel and the short story.  The short story is engineered to deliver intensity.  The novel is engineered to deliver a lush, complex tapestry of world-building and character.  That’s not to say you can’t have an intense novel, or that short stories can’t suggest a lush, complex world– it’s just that each form is inherently skewed in one direction or the other.

It’s not unusual for those in the blogosphere to periodically wring their hands about the fate of the short story.  At its worst, this concern reeks of pity.  The short story is treated like a charming (if anachronistic) Appalachian craft that’s in danger of becoming lost with each passing generation.

I read short stories constantly.  I see the quality that’s emblazoned on each page.  The short story needs no one’s pity.  But, I think, it does need something.  Perhaps a new marketing strategy.

If you accept my premise that short fiction specializes in intensity, and if you accept another premise — that the best short stories contain an emotional core reflecting the author’s unique vision — then the way we sell and promote short stories makes little sense.  Take  anthologies — we gather twenty or thirty jagged jewels of varying sizes and styles into a single grab bag and then offer it up to the world.

Book reviewers will, at best, only remark on three or four of the stories in any anthology.  Because the visions are likely to be quite different, the reader will likely find only a handful that speak to her.   Now, I enjoy a diverse array of styles and have used anthologies to discover new writers I wouldn’t have known about otherwise, but in any one book of stories I’m likely to only find a few I really, really like.

The fact is that the vast majority of short stories will be set loose into the world unheralded and (worst of all) unreviewed.

Think about it — PW might single out one or two stories for comment in a given collection or anthology.  Locus devotes two columns to short fiction reviews with comments on specific stories (bless their hearts),  but it seems to me that  Locus  is primarily an industry magazine that the average reader isn’t likely to subscribe to.  A quick Google search reveals multiple short story review sites.  Some of them are devoted to SF stories exclusively.  Some of them alternate between reviewing stories, novels, and movies.  None of them (that I could find in my admittedly-brief quest) specialized in reviewing horror in the short fiction form.

I think this is a glaring omission.  I can’t remedy this completely, because I’m not a reviewer — I’m a writer.  But I feel like I can  make a positive contribution in the right direction.

So I’m initiating a new feature here at Laughing at the Abyss:  Mama Cushing’s Short Story Society.  About once a month (give or take), I’ll select a short horror story that’s been particularly influential to my writing life.  I’ll announce the selected story about a month ahead of time.   Each Story Society post will talk a bit about the story and why I found it influential to the development of my own writing.  Reader commentary will be encouraged.  I want this to be a sort of “book club” for the horror short story, to encourage more discussion about this sort of fiction.  I want to shine a spotlight on the best short fiction out there — the stuff that’s led me to grow and change as a writer in the last year.  Occasionally, I might venture outside of horror to discuss the darker end of literary fiction — but the focus will, by and large, stay on horror — as I think that’s where the discussion’s needed most.

So much for the preliminaries — now let’s get down to brass tacks.

The first Mama Cushing’s story is going to be Jack Ketchum’s “Gone”. (It’ll be October, so why not go with a Halloween-themed story?)  I plan to start the discussion on Tuesday, October 18th.  That gives you a little over a month to get ahold of it.  The story is available in at least two places:  Ketchum’s collection, Peaceable Kingdom, and the anthology October Dreams:  A Celebration of Halloween.  You can also read a detailed essay on “Gone” in Gary Braunbeck’s magnificent Stoker-winning non-fiction book, To Each Their Darkness .

So, Cushingistas — that’s your assignment.  Read “Gone” by October 18th and come here to discuss it!