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Little Pockets of Alarm
Little Pockets of Alarm - Tales Short & Shorter , a collection of 27 innovative fictions, explores disruptions to the status quo in the lives of characters ranging from a short-order cook to a farming family to a marketing executive to a Romanov heir to Cinderella.
146 pages, Paperback
First published February 24, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
September 2, 2014
I really wanted there to be a rating system for each flash fiction story in this collection. When I liked a story, I REALLY liked it. And when I didn't, I REALLY didn't. It was a conundrum of a collection.
Flash fiction has the challenge of compressing a short story, complete with beginning, middle, and end, conflict and resolution, in a teeny space. The primary issue I see when writers begin to work with flash fiction is that they think they're writing stories, but they're really writing scenes. The story isn't finished. And that was the case here, in the stories I didn't like. They didn't go anywhere. There was no impact. They felt like beginnings, or again, maybe just a scene from the middle of a story.
Interestingly, when I found a story I didn't like, I returned to the beginning of the book to the list of credits. The stories I didn't like often hadn't been published before in a literary magazine.
But the stories I loved...ohmygosh. Some of these stories were absolute jewels. The characters shone, the dialogue rang true, the storyline was lovely and hard-hitting.
So while the stars say a 3, picture a 3.75. I couldn't quite give it a four because of the incomplete stories, but man - take those out and this would be stellar.
Flash fiction has the challenge of compressing a short story, complete with beginning, middle, and end, conflict and resolution, in a teeny space. The primary issue I see when writers begin to work with flash fiction is that they think they're writing stories, but they're really writing scenes. The story isn't finished. And that was the case here, in the stories I didn't like. They didn't go anywhere. There was no impact. They felt like beginnings, or again, maybe just a scene from the middle of a story.
Interestingly, when I found a story I didn't like, I returned to the beginning of the book to the list of credits. The stories I didn't like often hadn't been published before in a literary magazine.
But the stories I loved...ohmygosh. Some of these stories were absolute jewels. The characters shone, the dialogue rang true, the storyline was lovely and hard-hitting.
So while the stars say a 3, picture a 3.75. I couldn't quite give it a four because of the incomplete stories, but man - take those out and this would be stellar.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review