Short Stories
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“The Murder of Santa Claus” is a Locked-Room Christmas-Mystery (two great sub-genres for the price of one!). It can be found in a volume called Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales by P.D. James. It is a story told 40+ years after a Christmas Eve murder in an atmospheric Cotswold manor house. P.D. James uses Read more
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Yesterday I reviewed a “Paranormal Romance” based on Washington Irving’s classic short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” It is only natural, I suppose, that when I finished the unsatisfying reading of yesterday’s “Paranormal Romance” that I would immediately pick up and read Irving’s familiar tale again. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was as good Read more
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I came across Peter Temayne’s perfect Dracula short story “Dracula’s Chair” in a collection called Coffins: The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler. For a lover of Stoker’s Dracula, it is the perfect anthology. It contains stories by writers like Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and F. Paul Wilson. Tremayne’s short-story is about a writer who Read more
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In August of 1961, I was 16-months old, and lived just between Santa Cruz and Capitola, California. On August 18th of that year in the middle of the night there was an invasion of sooty shearwaters. Apparently confused by the dense fog the birds “invaded” the town, slamming into houses, cars, and stores. Windows were Read more
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“The Dead Children” is a short-story from Sabina Murray’s excellent collection of Gothic/Horror tales entitled Muckross Abbey and Other Stories. Murray really understands Gothic. The contemporary writer I would most compare her to Susan Hill. She is that good. At a quiet Vermont college Professor Judith is stopped by a woman she initially doesn’t recognize. Read more
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Ghost Stories of an Antiquary is a collection of Horror/Gothic stories first published in 1904 by British writer M.R. James. I have reviewed one other short story from the collection, “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book.” Here is a link to that review. James, who was a Medieval Scholar at Cambridge, began writing his “ghost stories” to share Read more
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“Rereading, not reading, is what counts,” ~ Jorge Luis Borges. “When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before,” ~ Cliff Fadiman. ““If a book isn’t worth reading over and over again, it isn’t worth reading at all.” ~ Read more
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Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on February 17, 2011. My long-time friend (for almost 40 years now) Mitchell Stocks forwarded this list: “Kurt Vonnegut’s Rules for Writing Short Stories.” I had never seen the list before. Since I know that Read more
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“There are some truths that we can only express to one another in stories. These insights need to be embodied in action, character, and circumstance. Otherwise the truths seem vague and unconvincing. To say “You can’t avoid your destiny despite your best efforts” is a dull platitude, but the tale of Oedipus, who mistakenly kills Read more
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The scope of the short story is inevitably restricted and this means it is most effective when it deals with a single incident or one dominant idea. It is the originality and strength of this idea which largely determines the success of the story. Although it is far less complex in structure than a novel, Read more
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