Half-Minute Horrors

edited by Susan Rich
HarperCollins 2009

Billed as a "collection of instant frights from the world's most astonishing authors and artists," Half-Minute Horrors lives up to its title by presenting super-short sudden fiction to middle grade readers who like a little creepiness. Just a little, not too much. A set-up, some sort of mystery, and an unsettling cliffhanger of an ending are the norm here, almost all of them short enough to read in the promised half a minute.

And when I say a little creepiness that doesn't mean they can't be somewhat disturbing. There are implications of cannibalism, creatures laying in wait to swallow you whole, disembodied hands that come calling while you sleep... but all stopped right at the moment of impact so that the reader can quickly turn the page if necessary. Because the engagement is so short there isn't enough time to plant too strong a mental picture to disturb. Yeah, if you think about some of these stories long enough they can really delve into truly terrifying territory, but the reader interested in horror is going to feel cheated if the author or the story pulls its punch too much or too quickly. Many of these stories plant their final, fatal twist in the last line for maximum impact so that even the seemingly odd story suddenly can turn on a dime.

There are also some illustrated stories - I hesitate to call them comics, but some do take that format - which perform the graphic equivilent of their narrative counterparts. Perhaps only "Worms" by Lane Smith, a visually retelling of the gory old rhyme "The worms go in, the worms go out..." goes the furthest with its graphic depiction of life pre- and post-humus. Still, all good creepy fun.

One of the things this book reminded me of was a series of books I had as a boy called "One Minute Mysteries" which would set the reader up with a drawing room situation and some details that would allow a reader to guess what had happened. Only I could never guess correctly and instead of enjoying the mystery I found the books frustrating because they made me feel stupid. I suppose the idea of a minute mystery was meant for boys like me who (at the time) were struggling with reading, but that book sent me the wrong direction. Perhaps the lack of character and emotion was the problem, but I never really got into the mystery genre as a result.

There's no similar problem here with Half-Minute Horrors because the stories clearly spell out the (pending) doom, leaving the reader to invest as much emotion as their own fears permit. The various authors are all top-notch – M.T. Anderson, Adam Rex, Sarah Weeks, Holly Black, Jack Gantos, Jon Scieszka, Avi, and Lauren Myracle to name but a scant few –and include some generally regarded as adult writers, like Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem, delivering on a wide variety of themes.

I realize this comes too late to incorporate into Halloween lesson plans, but I would hope that the audience for this kind of thing sees this as more of an evergreen title. I think for the reluctant reader the ability to whiz through dozens of stories at one sitting will make the book feel much shorter than its 130 pages, and for other readers the shortness of these stories can serve as a sort of palate cleanser between much larger books, a sampler platter of ghoulish delights.

Yuk, did I just write that last semi-blurb-worthy sentence?

Anyway, lots of gory fun.

The Devil's Storybook

by Natalie Babbitt
FSG 1974

Ten little short story gems concerning the Devil himself and his inability to corrupt good souls or fully control bad ones.

I stumbled onto this (as with many older titles these days) in an sales alcove at my local library. Discarded, withdrawn, and donated books are in constant rotation, and with prices between twenty-five cents and a dollar it's impossible to resist. I'm always so surprised when I stumble on a title I haven't come across before, or an author I recognize but not the book in question. Just another one of those reminders about how much is out there to discover, how there will always be hidden gems to be mined with careful eyes.

These stories fit a type of tale that I know there is a name for, but can't quite recall. In each, Old Scratch has decided to adopt a disguise to trick the unsuspecting into performing an act of evil, or has co-opted the innate evil of certain individuals for his own purposes. His ruses never work, and his plans always fail, which is as it should be.

But what a delight to see such a classic form of evil as the main character in a collection. On the one hand it seems novel to take a character who is usually an antagonist and make them the butt of every joke, but then the devil always gets his due just as if he had once again been outwitted in someone else's story.

Rarely do I find story collections so even that it's hard to pick a favorite, but the one that stays most with me is the last story "The Power of Speech." In it, the Devil has a fondness for goats, and one goat in particular, but the goat is wearing a bell and this is somehow like garlic to a vampire (who knew?). The goat's owner is no dummy and will not remove the bell, so the Devil grant the goat the power to speak. What a mistake that is! A more whiny, grumpy, cantankerous goat you'd never heard! Realizing what a pain this new talking goat is she decides to remove the bell and send him on to the Devil. Once in Hell, the goats incessant chatter drives the Devil crazy, and while he is able to grant the power of speech he cannot remove it. Finally he turns the live goat into a stuffed one and returns him to his previous owner.

Babbitt writes with the breezy charm and economy that mirrors classic folk tales (and who know, perhaps these are folk tales I'm unaware of) and there's something secretly delicious in wondering if Satan's really going to finally have something go his way. They read like a cross between something Carl Sandburg might have cooked up if he were reinterpreting some Grimm tales. The characters are vivid, well drawn in such little space, and the stories feel much more full then their page counts would have you believe.

When I finished this book I thought my 11 year old would like the stories. "Oh, yeah, I already read those. They're good. I think there's a second book of Devil stories as well." Turns out she's right, there is. I had the wind taken from my sails that I couldn't spring a new-old title on her, but at least I was correct in thinking she'd enjoy it.

Black Juice

by Margo Lanagan
HarperCollins 2004

Having been given a number of "warnings" about the intensity of Lanagan's most recent book, Tender Morsels, I decided to get a better sense of her writing through one of her short story collections first.

I wish someone had warned me about this collection as well.

Lanagan is an intense writer of dark, emotional, human fantasy worlds. There are echoes of older cultures and languages buried deep in these worlds, a sense not so much as coming from another planet but as if reading reports from undiscovered country. It is the type of fiction that reads like literary reportage from a past frontier transported through time. Like something forbidden, these stories are a black juice indeed.

The collection opens with "Singing Down My Sister," a strange description of a ritual that involves sending a woman out into the center of a lake of tar. Knowing Lanagan hails from Australia, and having grown up with the tar pits of LA, it wasn't too illogical a step for me to imagine a sort of hybrid Aboriginal culture that appeared to be redressing some sort of wrong through an old, odd cleansing process involving tar. But no, this is clearly something else as the event at hand is actually an execution, a slow death in front of an audience with a wake built in. Equally fascinating and disconcerting, the effect is how I would imagine it to be watching surgery being performed on myself while fully conscious.

Short story collections by their nature must start off strong and bold. They must open with a story full of promise for the rest of the collection yet not be so strong as to let the reader down along the way. Reading "Singing Down My Sister" it almost feels intimidating to continue with the rest of the book. If the rest of the book is anywhere near this intense it might be impossible to finish.

Fortunately, the book wasn't impossible to finish. Unfortunately the rest of the book was equally intense.

Each of the stories contained so completely build their worlds – unique and richly textured worlds at that – this it is possible for each story to sustain its own book. "Red Nose Day" delves into a dark world full of professional clowns and the hitmen who kill them, with more than a hint of allegory aimed at the Catholic church. "The House of Many" posits a clash of parallel worlds that fluidly includes a Middle Ages cult surrounded by a more contemporary society rich with cars and candy. Demonic angels that help children break free of oppressive adults. Queens who prefer the company of dancing gypsies to their own kingdoms. Lanagan plucks the familiar image and icon and from our consciousness and folds them deftly into something new, a magical literary origami.

I think the warning I would have wanted was more in the form of advice. I think these stories should be savored slowly, with a lot of space between them. Perhaps as ways of cleansing the palate between other books. One after another, the power in these stories makes reentry into the world difficult. Better to dip into these waters with some reserve.

Whether this has helped me to better enter the world of Tender Morsels has yet to be determined. As it stands, I feel richer for the diversion.

Tales from Outer Suburbia

written and illustrated
by Shaun Tan
Scholastic 2009

I've been wanting to write about this since before it came out. Life gets in the way, and books get shuffled further down piles, and suddenly a person finds themselves thinking "Wait, didn't I already review that?"

Following Tan previous books to these shores, The Arrival, I know there was a lot of anticipation over how Tan would follow-up his genre-bending stranger-in-a-strange land tale. Well the answer is that he did it by creating fifteen entirely new strange lands, or perhaps they're all an extension of the same strange land, but clearly this Outer Suburbia is proof that there are multiple world in his creative universe.

The problem with coming late to the review party is that it's difficult to find something to say that hasn't already been covered. Nonetheless, I'll give it a go and see what surfaces.

Tan's Outer Suburbia is a place where the unusual isn't. An over-sized water buffalo occupies and empty lot at the end of the street, silently dispensing advice with the point of his hoof. A pair of brothers set out to the edge of the map to see if, indeed, the world continued beyond what was on the page or if it dropped off into an abyss. In keeping up with the arms race the government places missiles in every citizen's backyard, for them to take care of, though over time they have become pizza ovens and tool sheds through disuse. It's a familiar world and alien at the same time, a place a little odd from the outside looking in. Then again, one culture's norms are another one's peculiarities, and so who are we to judge?

Sometimes this absurdity has its darker side. "The Undertow" appears to be another absurd story about the mysterious appearance of a dugong on a suburban lawn. As a rescue is underway the occupants of the house are too busy shouting at one another to notice the commotion outside at first. Only their son seems to know what the creature is, but no one can fathom how it got there. Once the dugong is rescued the neighborhood returns to normal. The parents in the house shouting and throwing things at one another fail to realize their sun has remained outside to lie on the lawn looking up at the starts, hoping his parents never realize he is outside yet waiting for their inevitable verbal abuse. Instead, the story ends with them coming out to silently carry their son back into the house.

I single out this story because, for me, this is the heart of this collection. Though I doubt this was Tan's intent, all these stories could be the fabrication of this one boy's imagination. His escape from his outer suburban nightmare is an inner retreat. True, many of these stories are too complicated to be part of the inner life of a boy who feels trapped in an abusive family situation, so then the story feels like an allegory of suburban angst, that displacement that allows people to accept the absurd as part of their daily lives. The stories we tell ourselves to remain calm and grounded, sometimes these are no less absurd than a foreign exchange student who looks to be extraterrestrial and is the size of a tea cup.

On a more practical level, Tan once again confuses me with his intended audience. This picture book has stories too long and too complex for most picture book readers, so I have to conclude that the book is intended for older readers who are not afraid to read a book with color illustrations on nearly every other page. In some ways this book is a throwback to another time, when the picture book was not limited to the beginning reader. I am thinking on my beloved copy of Dahl's The Magic Finger which was originally published in picture book format with illustrations but currently exists as a more conventional paperback intended for middle grade audiences. I always believed that the Dahl conversion was partly a concession to keep picture books "simple" and move the books with more story up as reading levels and abilities shrank. That is, the audience is being held back from more complex stories, and if Tan wasn't also the illustrator of this book I could totally see it sitting on the shelves with middle grade titles.

Unlike some illustrators whose picture books seem aimed at an adult audience, Tan's book is clearly meant to appeal to a younger reader. It is refreshing to see speculative fiction and fantasy done so well that it appears more literary, and Tan's visuals alternate between his unique pen and ink to a rich pastel and forced-perspective compositions that recount the work of artist Wayne Thibaud. It has the strange effect of quietly drawing attention to the quality and care of the presentation on all levels, and underscores just how weak and careless other picture books are in comparison.

Tales from Outer Suburbia reads like a modern The Twilight Zone for kids. That's a Rod Serling reference two days in a row, but what the heck. You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension - a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into...

Outer Suburbia

It's a gorgeous book, a haunting book, a playful book, the kind of book that invites repeat readings and delivers new insights as a reader gets older and becomes more experienced with the world.

The Curse of the Campfire Weenies

and Other Warped and Creepy Tales
by David Lubar
Tom Doherty / 2007

Why have I waited two years to review this book? I think it was because it got lost in one of the many piles of books, later to be hidden during moving. But part of me wonders if I didn't deliberately and subconsciously hide this book away. Because I was embarrassed? Because I was offended? Insulted? None of these.

It's because I was inspired. This was one of a handful of books I've read in the past couple of years that opened up a trap door in my brain that leads directly to the unfiltered twelve year old me. Long packaged away safely as a memory, as a slave to selective revelation, this book seems to know where the the cage is weakest and can be exploited. A few stories in and suddenly I'm back in my sleeping bag at Camp Slauson, BSA, up late at night making up ridiculous stories of monsters and unexplainable phenomena.

Lubar's Weenie series are full of the kind of campfire tall tales and horror stories you might expect if Rod Serling and Bob Hope could be reincarnated as a single being. They are damned odd, amusing, and full of twists that only the mother of a pretzel or a yogi could enjoy.

No, I take that back. They're exactly the kind of story a middle grade boy enjoys, and with a half dozen titles in the series there are dozens of them to jump into.

Tales like the boys who dare each other to grab for mud from the bottom of the "bottomless" lake, only to have one of them discover that the farther down you dive the closer you get to the surface... of another world, full of alien tentacled creatures. Then there's the story of the robot with limited memory who is perpetually faced with cleaning "his" room, being turned off and on only for that purpose, trapped forever in doing what he "knows" needs to be done. Or the story of the maniacal wood chipper with a one track mind once it's had a taste of human blood.

Many of these stories are under five pages long, some are barely two pages. Lubar knows his reader isn't interested in anything but "the good parts" and it makes for quick, enjoyable reading. Lubar might not be a household name the way some authors are, but I bet his books are better circulated and well-worn compared to some.

Altogether, One at a Time

by E. L. Konigsburg
illustrations by Gail E. Haley, Mercer Mayer, Gary Parker and Laurel Schindelman
Atheneum 1971

I would have hated this book as a kid. I would never have picked it up. I would have started the first story and felt alienated by the language of it, an almost disjointed voice. I would have jumped around and looked at the illustrations for the stories and would have walked away, never to give the book a second chance.

In this collection of four stories we see kids being kids, and not always nice ones. A boy invites an odd (read: dyslexic) kid to his sleepover party at his mother's urging and comes to hate that boy more because his best friend actually likes the kid; Another boy who spends his time with his grandmother when his parents are away shows his insensitivity when a cloud-covered meteor shower triggers sorrowful regret in his elder that he doesn't immediately comprehend; A girl in fat camp is shown how to achieve her inner beauty with the aide of a counselor who is in fact a ghost; A mother tells her daughter of what it was like being bused to school and how in dealing with the prejudice she encountered began to see herself as an artist.

I find Kongsburg voice to be very stilted in these stories even as an adult but like where they go and that I'm not always sure where she's headed. The clues were all there in the fat camp story and yet I missed that it was a ghost story until the very end. Actually I began to think there was something supernatural when she kept talking about this treasure trapped inside a blob of plastic -- I thought it might have been her heart -- but by the time things started to reveal themselves it was over. The thing is, as an adult I think these stories are great for opening up young reader's minds to question behavior and the morality of what is right and wrong. I an also see an adult trying to convince a skeptical kid to read these stories and watching them squirm just as I would have when I was in my middle school years.

This question of audience is coming up more and more for me lately. In a recent workshop we referred to there being a problem with gatekeepers, the adults in publishing who make the decisions and have to be appeased before the writing can even reach it's target audience. It came up because we were reviewing a story that contained what some felt were inappropriate images and ideas that others felt would have been happily accepted by kids. If the adult gatekeepers are pre-censoring stories because they are afraid of the possible backlash or wish to impose their own moral thinking onto a story, that's a bad thing for writers. In some ways what I liked about these Konigsburg stories was the exact moral ambiguity that I saw others actively attempt to shut down. We have come dangerously close to the edge totalitarianism when one side takes the moral high ground and the other side shrugs it off.

I may come back to these stories in a few days and see if my feelings still hold. At least I can say they make me want to reread them.

Interesting note on the cover shown here: This is the most recent edition available from Aladdin back in 1998. What's curious is that on my first edition copy the illustrations on the cover are the same except for that one on the bottom of the girl in the golden braids. On the original cover they use the mirror of that illustration that shows the story's protagonist, a black girl. Did the folks at the Aladdin imprint think it would smack of tokenism to keep the black protagonist on the cover, or were they trying not to scare off too many potential white customers? The collection is due to be reissued sometime this year as I understand it, here's hoping they're going back to the original cover.

One Beastly Beast: Two Aliens, Three Inventors, Four Fantastic Tales

by Garth Nix
HarperCollins 2007

In his introduction Nix introduces us to a lucky boy who loved to read all kinds of stories, especially ones with monsters and adventures and all sorts of fantastical things. He then explains that he was that boy, and that when he writes he likes to write the sort of things he'd like to read.

This book was written for that boy.

This collection brings together four shorter stories of children -- two boys and two girls -- who each have their own sort of fantastical adventures.

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That's as much as I wrote before I went on holiday, followed by some notes intended to help me remember the stories so I could flesh out the review later. In the interest of showing you the very thought process behind a review, a sort of armature for the way my brain works, and out of sheer laziness I've decided to leave my notes raw and unedited for all the world to see.

story 1. puns: rats, pirates (pie rats), pirate videos, worm holes, bread-seeking cheese

story 2. princess, bloody beast (her pet pig) eaten by robot monster created by aunt

story 3. orphaned inventor boy wards off pirates, wizard and alien adopters until his time traveling parents can retrieve him

story 4. girl with big brain, talks to sea serpent blinded by harbor lights, turning girls into penguins

If all that doesn't spark some sort of interest, well, then I guess I couldn't blame you. All I can say, as a reader and reviewer, if you know Garth Nix then you can trust he has a much better way with words than I do. These stories are entirely and thoroughly enjoyable, a perfect mix for antsy middle grade readers looking for something shorter.

Summer Reading, Part Four: Shorts

Warm weather, the dog days of summer, time to break out the shorts. Nothing more refreshing and cooler than lounging about, unencumbered, with plenty of free time to lounge and let the mind flicker an wander. The perfect time to snack on short stories and other collected short works.

I am opening this one to the floor because while I feel I could cover this topic myself I've found myself more and more wondering how others would answer the following question:

What collections of short stories, sudden fiction, or essay collections would you recommend to a summer reader as a nice, occasional pick-me-up?

I already feel that regular readers know that were it not for my discovery of Kurt Vonnegut's short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House when I was in my early teens I might not have been the reader I am today. But that wasn't my first brush with the single-author short story collection. No, that honor goes to Ray Bradbury's The Golden Apples of the Sun, a book I remember toting around with me in the fifth or sixth grade. I couldn't tell you where it came from or honestly say I remember the stories it contained (although many of the titles are deeply familiar in some way) and this book is among others on my NTR (Need to Re-read) list.

(Speaking of Mr. Bradbury, apparently we got it all wrong when we've read Fahrenheit 451 as an anti-censorship book; looks like it's an attack on television. Add another book to the NTR pile...)

There are, of course, collections aimed at middle grade and young readers that aren't half a century old that are widely available and enjoyed by kids. Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (and its sequels) is only a quarter century old! Schwartz is a collector of folklore and his tales represent those that are often told aloud and by necessity short enough to be memorized. I would consider these stories essential for campfires and slumber parties -- in fact I remember many of them from campfires when I was young, a testament to their lasting power. The stories themselves don't scare the reader as much as they might a listener as a large number include directions at the end for grabbing someone while screaming the last crucial line.

On the quieter side of things there's Cynthia Rylant's collection Every Living Thing gathers a dozen short stories where an animal plays an integral part in changing a person's life. I have to admit that the stories caught me a little off guard at first because they have an almost "adult" feel to them. "Planting Things" tells of an older retired couple, a man who likes to work the garden for the joy of it while his wife is housebound with illness. A jay makes a nest in one of his flower pots on the porch and while he delights in watching the fledglings grow and leave the nest his wife is content to stay in her bed and hear his second-hand tales. When the birds have flown off he collects the nest with the intention of setting it out the following spring to "grow" another family of birds.

And when I finished I couldn't help wondering "What would a kid make of that story?" Indeed, what do young readers make of stories that don't exists to push a happy ending or solve a particular riddle but instead celebrate small, changing moments in life. It's thoughts like this that lead me down a trail of optimism that the revival of the short story is immanent.

Another fine collection aimed at the middle grade reader is Richard Peck's Past Perfect, Present Tense, a brilliant title for a short story collection if ever there was one. Peck's collection begins with an introduction that briefly explains how short stories work. He then provides an introduction to his first-ever published short story including what his assignment was and how he approached it. Many young writers will appreciate the insight as much as they will the humorous story that came out of his thinking. Like many good teachers, Peck shows and tells giving his voice authority without scaring readers away. Each of the books sections contains an introduction that explains their grouping or origins. I wish there were more books like this.

Or are there?

This is where I wanted to open up the floor for discussion. What I like, what I am attracted to, are stories by a single author because I can see the breadth and variety of the author's thinking. If I like an author's style I'll want to read more, and while I understand the benefit of a story collection by many hands if a particular story doesn't catch me I might not search out that author to see if something else does.

Additionally, I am curious to know if anyone out there can recommend essay collections for children. I have seen in the past chain bookstore attempting to push David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day on their Teen Beach Reads table and scratched my head. In the beginning, Sedaris' essays were funny but they don't leave a lasting impression and I never said to myself "Teens would really love this!" Still, as I said, I am curious to know if anyone has encountered collections of essays that would be enjoyed by younger audiences.

I will add that as far as non-fiction goes I think there could be better coverage of collections on music, politics and general interest. The Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Non-required Reading, and the Da Capo Best Music Writing anthologies, among others, are totally acceptable for teens but what's out there for the younger reader, the pre-teen who might be interested in general non-fiction topics but wants something more substantial than a collection of factoids? Any ideas?

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Our story thus far...
Episode One - Low Humor
Episode Two - Non-fiction?
Episode Three - Trash
Episode Four - Shorts
Stay tuned for the final episode in the series: Part Five - The Index to Periodical Literature