Genre: Short
Story Collection
Description:
“The world is weird. Horror can be funny. You decide.
Great stories don’t always have to be long stories. Thrills and chills
are not beholden to word counts. A tale that leaves you wanting more is the
best kind of frustration.
Aliens, killers, and neighbors share their secrets, plots, and riddles
in this unique collection of short stories. From the apocalypse to apathy, humor
and horror go skipping hand-in-hand through the pages. If the fantastical can
be comical, then the ordinary can be downright terrifying.
Unsettling is the first in the ‘Pretty Short Stories’
series.
Author:
Stevan Serban’s bio on Amazon is pretty good at telling you some of
the qualities he doesn’t have. These all seem like the kind of cliched things some
authors would put in their bio, so I guess we can assume he’s trying to tell us
that he’s just a normal guy or at least not a typical author. He teamed up with
two of his kids to write this book (they get credit in the Amazon book listing,
even if they receive no mention on the cover).
Appraisal:
Have you ever read a book review that was longer than the book? I’m
not sure how many words this review will end up being, but knowing my propensity
to go on and on and on and … well, you get the idea, I think the odds of this
review having a word count that exceeds the 623 words in the book (not counting
front and back matter) is fairly good. It will be a new experience for both of
us. But I’ll bet you’re wondering how a book could possibly be that short. Good
question.
First, I should make it clear that we aren’t talking a children’s
picture book here, aimed at a new reader with the pictures telling most of the
story and the words being simple, straightforward, and there more to provide
practice to the new reader. (I’ve reviewed a few of those with my
granddaughter, but I don’t think the review has ever been more verbose than the
book. Or maybe I’m wrong. However, I’m sure my reviews have never exceeded the
word count of the book for a book aimed at adults or even the young adult or
teen audience.) So how does a collection of short stories, 36 of them if I
counted right, only amount to 623 words?
Well, if you grab a calculator, you’ll see that the way to do this is to
make the average story roughly 17.3 words each. I’ve heard of flash fiction
which is generally considered to be a story of 1,000 words or less, with
different names for stories that are even shorter. I’ve even read and reviewed multiple
books that were collections of drabbles, flash fiction stories of 100 words or
less. But can you really tell a story in seventeen words?
Well, obviously I can’t. Everyone I know is getting a glazed look in
their eyes and thinking to themselves that I can’t tell the most simple story
in less than about seventeen minutes of droning. That story would include taking
the tale off on several tangents that really have nothing to do with the main
story (kind of like what I’m doing here). It would include giving many more
details than the story really needs. (Yeah, I know. I’m doing that too. I can’t
help myself. Plus, I have a specific word count to reach and being succinct isn’t
going to get me there.)
But apparently other people can (Stevan Serban and his two kids, Aleksa
and Milica for three examples). In fact, there is a tale that Ernest Hemingway
was out at the bar with a group of friends one day and bet his friends that he
could make them cry with a short story that was only six words long. These
stories are almost three times that long. Whether the story told about
Hemmingway is true is doubtful. There are multiple versions of the story out
there, I believe some of them using different people as the alleged author, but
the one consistent in all of the retellings I’ve seen are the short story the hero
of the story came up with. Here it is for you to consider:
“For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”
Six words that pack a punch. Most stories, even novels that are tens
of thousands of words long, let the reader fill in some of the gaps and this
story certainly does that. At least it holds back on the details. But it sets
things up for the reader to let their imagination run wild. These seventeen
word stories aim to do the same thing and do a pretty decent job of setting
the imagination off. Each story consists of a short title (usually a single
word, but sometimes two or three words), followed by the text of the story
which is three fairly short sentences. (Do the math. Seventeen minus one word
for the title means five or six words per sentence. Not wordy at all.) Maybe I
should have tried this approach in writing my review. This long rambling screed
is already well over the length of the book. Maybe the book has something to
teach me about minimalism or something. For those who think this is tl;dr, the
alternative review is just below. (It’s only seventeen words, just like each of
the stories.)
“Different”
This book is different. Lots of short three sentence stories. Kicks
the imagination into high gear.
Buy now
from: Amazon US Amazon UK
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count: 600-700 words
No comments:
Post a Comment