Catching Up with Short Stories

When you run a successful bookblog, the review copies start to pile up, and lately I've been eying the stacks in the living room and foyer somewhat guiltily. As a partial and admittedly imperfect solution, I decided to get through some of the short story collections by reading just one or two stories. As I say, it's an imperfect solution, but I hope that by choosing the title stories and/or the longest stories, I'll be able to glean a reasonable sense of the authors which I can pass on to you.

I started with Owen King's We're All In This Together, which was at the forefront of my mind because his recent NYTBR coverage had killed off his worst fear--slightly. Because although they didn't get Anne Rice's son to review the book, Jon Zobenica still led off with "Owen King--it should just be said--is the son of Stephen." Although he then went on to suggest that the stories seem "inspired less by Dad than by Garrison Keillor on one of his political jags."

Which I totally didn't get at all, because in reading the collection's eponymous novella, I was immediately struck by how elements of Owen's voice resembled what was once tagged as Stephen's "Kmart realism." Not so much the use of brand names in this case, but the deep involvement of many of the characters in an immediately recognisable political culture (one of the main plot threads involves a dispute over the 2000 presidential election). Owen's characters are familiar to us in part because they share our concerns, or those of people we know, just as Stephen's characters do before the supernatural weirdness kicks in when he's writing at his best. (Let's not forget that "The Body" and "Apt Pupil," not to mention the novel Cujo, were grounded strictly in "reality.") There's no shame in a son following in his father's footsteps when it comes to creating believable characters with authentic personalities--although setting the story in Maine does somewhat underline the resemblance.

The title story in Javier Mariás' collection, When I Was Mortal, is a horror story, and a ghost story, but the two qualities don't line up the way you think they might. You see, here the horror happens to the ghost, as he's trapped in the existential nightmare of remembering everything about his life, including the bits he didn't really know the first time around. I found the prose style a bit too clever for my taste, like an intellectual twist on an EC Comics shocker, but some of our blogger friends quite like him.

Rod Liddle's "The Window," from Too Beautiful for You, was also a bit EC as it marched relentlessly to its grim ending, though more Shock Illustrated than Tales from the Crypt. It didn't help that I'd already seen this sort of "improper behavior" in too many stories before: imagine a cross between the Britchick-lit of, say, Lisa Jewell with the more nihilistic elements of old-school Brat Pack. A longer story, "Fucking Radu," just made Liddle's position in Bret Easton Ellis' shadow all the more obvious.

Tomorrow: three more collections, including the return of a "bad, bad writer."