Nom de Plume

I rarely read short stories; they seem to require a curious mindset, in which one feels intelligent but mildly ADD. Generally, I feel one or the other. That start and stop, start and stop puts me off, before I even begin. And it’s a shame, because my bookshelves are teeming with shorts. Like Mark Winegarder’s That’s True of Everybody. It was one of my Edward R. Hamilton purchases at least a year ago. I had read Winegardner’s novel Crooked River Burning, and liked it. So what the heck, I thought. The book has been moldering away since.

Well, I’m down with the flu–recovering nicely now, thank you–and spent all of Sunday lying in bed reading. One of my informal resolutions for the year is to catch up on the many titles I’ve bought but haven’t read. This was one. And it was a strange one.

Oh, not in a bad way. It’s just that I recently finished this book, and I can barely remember any of the individual shorts–but am still left with a general impression of everything being off somehow, that the strangeness of all the characters is somehow illuminated but universal. It was good.