A Good Week for Novellas

Y’all been hearing the same thing I have? That we’re kind of easing into a novella-friendly space? Like: http://io9.gizmodo.com/tor-com-explai... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/bus...? And more and more, I’m sure. As for what constitutes a novella, a short novel, a novelette, a long story . . . who knows. I mean: editors know. There’s word-count thresholds. Granted, they maybe vary from house to house, from mag to mag, but they’re more or less not all that different from one another. Trying to think back to the FIRST novella I ever read, but, man, that’s lost in the mists of elementary school, I’d guess. There’s The Heart of Darkness, of course. And I’ve always dug how the three ‘pieces’ of Stein’s Three Lives hang together, and don’t. And A Canticle for Liebowitz, that’s pretty much three novellas threaded together, yes? Same way Ender’s Game started as a novella, so did Canticle. All this aside? There’s some good, good stuff happening. Here’s three of them I burned through the last two or three days:      What’s cool with the LaValle is how, instead of trying to impact HPL’s racism head-on, which would probably only serve to stand it up more, he supplants the whole Cthulhu mythos, like. In ways I won’t spoil. But, let me just say: HPL in here? He’s a pest, a hanger-on. He didn’t start this world. He only popularized it. And—like I really need to say this, when talking LaValle—there’s some legit-creepy stuff here, and some lines so nice I kind of want them tattooed on my inner  . . . → → →

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