Story Batch Four: 20 Stories Between 4 And 5K Words
MURAKAMI, WELTY, PALEY, SCHULZ, CLARKE, DAHL, CRANE, MOSLEY, UPDIKE, BECKETT ETC.
WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?
This is the latest in my ongoing survey of short stories. I’m packing them into batches, based on their length; with this reference information, writers can get a sense of what a particular length can offer both writer and reader. I hope this survey will also point you to some stories and authors that are new to you.
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The big, exciting news about this length— 4-5K words— is that it beats every other word count category for popularity. I regularly add stories to my survey list, and this group grows faster than any others. It’s quite a variety, too— you’ll find several stories that were perennial lit canon stories when I was young, but you’ll also find a bunch of genre classics here, and a bunch that I wouldn’t know where to put.
I have so many stories of this length that I have to break the megabatch into two junior batches. A warning— this first junior batch is mostly very strange and creepy. If needed, you can skip to the three most adorable stories here for some relief— the Stephen Crane western yarn, Richard Middleton’s Ghost Ship tale, and the O. Henry comic perennial.
PART ONE
(20 stories)
Bruno Schulz, Cinnamon Shops 4020
Whatever the hell it is that Bruno Schulz does, he’s the best ever. As I write more of these capsule essays, and more of these weird writers pop up in the survey, I find that I’m feeling self-conscious about overusing words like “hallucinogenic” and “dreamlike.” Forget about “nightmarish”— I’m trying to avoid that one altogether.
But Bruno makes it difficult for the commentator. The oneiric effect he gets (you’re welcome) relies on various devices, but the one that haunts me the most is the shift from one scene to another. This story shifts multiple times, in Bruno’s pillowy and humid manner. And the details— the rhythms of the sentences, and the color of the images— he packs so much into each paragraph, I got to the end and double-checked the word count, fearing I’d wildly undercounted the first time. Nope. It’s just that Bruno Schulz’s 4020 is different from another writer’s 4020.
Amazingly— the very next story is literally that same exact word count. I recommend you read them both. Clarke covers a lot of territory at this length, certainly, but Bruno makes you feel like a forcefed goose enlisted to make surrealist pâté.
I call them cinnamon shops because they are paneled with dark, cinnamon-colored wainscoting. These truly noble businesses, open late at night, were always a subject of my fervid daydreams. Their dimly lit, dark, and formal interiors were redolent of the deep odor of dyes, sealing wax, incense, the aroma of distant lands and rare materials. You could find Bengal lights there, magic boxes, stamps of long-vanished countries, Chinese decals, indigo, colophony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake root, windup toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in flowerpots, microscopes and telescopes, and above all, rare and unusual books, old folios full of the strangest etchings and stunning stories.
Arthur C. Clarke, The Sentinel 4020
This is, so far, the only Clarke story I’ve read, but it’s a small masterpiece. It’s got science, of course, but also poetry, horror, awe— it’s a heady brew. 4,000 words is enough to tell a story of physical events but also enough to include a bunch of philosophizing along the way. Clarke uses language to give us the physical feeling of wide open distance on the moon, just as McMurtry did with the West in “Lonesome Dove.”
This was the main story that Kubrick built “2001” on top of.
Perhaps they wish to help our infant civilisation. But they must be very, very old, and the old are often insanely jealous of the young. I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have broken the glass of the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.
Ryu Murakami, I Am A Novelist 4049
Ryu is “the other Murakami.” Here’s what that means— Haruki Murakami is a Japanese fiction writer who’s become trendy with American readers. I’m a fan; I have a bunch of his books. But if I have four story collections by Haruki Murakami and one by Ryu Murakami, that’s not because I prefer Haruki, as wonderful as he is. I actually greatly prefer Ryu, but his stuff hasn’t been translated as much into English. Like Haruki, Ryu is a prolific short story writer, but Ryu’s stories scare off the kind of reader that gets romantically attached to Haruki.
Forgive me for reducing this phenomenon to a glib and reductive formula: Haruki appeals to middlebrows, while Ryu appeals to perverts.
I’m neither a middlebrow nor a pervert, though my dowsing wand tacks toward each extreme once in a while. The siren song of the middlebrow scores a bullseye with me when writers like Anne Tyler, Harper Lee, John LeCarré and J.D. Salinger are on offer. These writers are charming rather than cutesy, their best prose avoids self-indulgence, and they traffic often enough in pizzazz and narrative drive that I’ll go to this group from time to time. (Especially LeCarré, damn his eyes.) If writers are going to be this accessible, I’d prefer they also be more stylistically idiosyncratic, but these are good writers. Not junk.
The perverts get on and off my radar for similar reasons; if they’re making weird sex and/or violence a big part of their fiction world, I’m in, but if the prose style isn’t unusual, the jolts of these perverse incentives are never going to be consistently jolty enough to drag me away all day long from the better writers.
Thus, Ryu Murakami.
My current favorite novel (of the novels I keep forgetting I’m supposed to be reading) is by Ryu, and you tell me whether you think the plot is perverse: a group of teens runs afoul of a group of middle-aged socially awkward ladies, and a murderous feud develops between the two groups. I like to believe that there’s some social satire going on there, and I just don’t get it because I’m not Japanese. But this is just my horseshit cover story— really, I’m just a pervert who enjoys reading stories about old biddies who ride mopeds and stab annoying teenagers. Biddies, mopeds, teens, and stabbing— I didn’t know how much this combination appealed to me, because I wasn’t even aware a book like this could exist. If I had ever heard that all four of these things popped up in Anne Of Green Gables, I would have read it by now.
Haruki Murakami’s stuff is dishwasher safe, but he’s just weird enough— and absolutely inventive enough— that I’m a fan. Ryu Murakami, though— that is a different kettle of fish entirely. I first heard of him when I watched a notorious movie based on one of his notorious novels— Audition.
So, weird violence and weird sex— Ryu gives you that stuff sometimes. But not always, and I don’t miss it when it’s not there. This story is more what I love in Ryu’s work— not so much graphically perverse material, but very weird aberrant psychological material. Remarkably, he manages to do this with a light touch. It’s actually adorable the way he pulls it off here; sort of “O. Henry for perverts.”
“Did he look like me?” “He... well... forgive me, Sensei, but is it true that you’ve put on a bit of weight recently?” I weigh eighteen kilos more than I did when I started out as a writer. “The photo in your first book, Electone Guerrilla...” “Electronic Guerrilla.” “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry. My daughter takes lessons on a Yamaha Electone, and—” “You were saying? There was a photograph of me in that book, yes.” “And have you changed much since that picture was taken?” I’ve changed plenty. What do you expect? But it’s not as if you wouldn’t recognize me. “The Okutegawa-sensei who came to our club brought a number of his books, or rather your books, and signed them for us. I was given one myself, and the girls—” “I’ve never taken one of my books to a bar in my life. Of all the shameless—” “One of our girls is pregnant with his child.” I’m not surprised. For a creep who thinks nothing of going around handing out fake autographs, knocking up a bar girl or two would be all in a day’s work.
Roald Dahl, Man From The South 4058
Classic story, adapted on a classic episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” and then reworked for the underrated Tarantino episode of “Four Rooms.” (plot: guy bets his lighter will light ten times in a row, and if he loses, his finger gets cut off.)
Bohumil Hrabal, The St. Bernard Inn 4104
This is a great comic story, by a Czech writer who really ought to be better known. Hrabal is a bit like Mark Twain, a bit like Hasek, but he blends their satirical tall tale tradition with modernist spice. His helter-skelter narrative approach is really special; one of these days I’m going to figure out how to rip him off. In the meantime, I’ll just be digging his work.
Next day, my brother and sister-in-law not having slept that night, cousin Heinrich Kocian arrived, and that he was a very small cousin we knew – whenever he was about to eat a frankfurter, it would hang down to his knees before he’d taken the first bite – and so from a distance it looked as if he was leading a small cow. When he reached the house, my brother thought he was leading a big calf, a young bullock. But it was the St Bernard.
O. Henry, The Ransom Of Red Chief 4169
This is another comic classic, with very dry humor, but more tightly edited than prose of its era often seems today. Contains one colloquial use of a famous racial slur. Otherwise it hasn’t dated. It remains a useful model if you’re interested in blending broad comedy with understatement.
Just at daybreak, I was awakened by a series of awful screams from Bill. They weren’t yells, or howls, or shouts, or whoops, or yawps, such as you’d expect from a manly set of vocal organs — they were simply indecent, terrifying, humiliating screams, such as women emit when they see ghosts or caterpillars. It’s an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.
Walter Mosley, The Sin Of Dreams 4185
Walter Mosley is too smart for me to ever be shocked by how many things he’s able to pull off, but I can’t say I expected him to write a story that would remind me of Robert Bloch’s trashy speculative fiction. That’s not a dis of either writer, by the way. I suppose you’d call this story science fiction, as it uses imagined science to make a larger point about humanity. But even if Mosley is working with a pulp formula, I love how he smears in some blues/soul/hiphop culture into it.
Richard Middleton, The Ghost Ship 4191
This is one of my favorite stories ever, and if you like this sort of thing, it can’t be beat for pure enjoyment. If you’re looking for some warmth on a blustery day, Schulz and Ligotti and Murakami and the rest may not help, but the ghost ship is just perfect.
Even parson was surprised, and he did not shake his head very hard when the Captain took down some silver cups and poured us out a drink of rum. I tasted mine, and I don’t mind saying that it changed my view of things entirely. There was nothing betwixt and between about that rum, and I felt that it was ridiculous to blame the lads for drinking too much of stuff like that. It seemed to fill my veins with honey and fire.
Roald Dahl, Taste 4232
Dahl does a thing here where the whole story hinges on a very tiny amount of plot. And he has a character expounding endlessly on a bunch of jargon about wine; normally I’d find that stuff very dull, but the plot’s suspense makes it rivet. And Dahl always handles this kind of thing perfectly when he knows a story needs it. I just made some notes for a story I’m writing, reminding me that I need to steal this structural device from Dahl.
John Updike, Museums And Women 4247
I knew an English teacher once who didn’t like Updike. She condemned him for his facility, and for his adulterers from Connecticut. I went along with all that, as I couldn’t read everything, and my interests then as now lay elsewhere. Plus, he’d publicly mocked Kerouac, and that didn’t sit well with me.
Take Kerouac down from his pedestal, certainly. He didn’t handle himself well up there. And insist that he be evaluated reasonably, not childishly, certainly. But don’t tell me he was never any good. He was very good indeed with the Mexican delirium section of his arguably overpraised magnum opus.
But these days, when I’m trying to get some understanding of the terrains involved with short fiction, it no longer makes sense for me to blow off Updike. If a fictional character wants to hail from the northeast, and wants to cheat on his wife, I would prefer they do these things when I’m not around. But if they are planning to hail and cheat inside sentences like Updike’s, I can meet them in the vestibule and chat from time to time. Short stories only, please; the Rabbit novel I tried failed to seduce me. But those sentences, and that line; my god.
When I try to picture my school days, I seem to be embedded among boiling clouds straining to catch a glimpse of this girl, as if trapped in a movie theatre behind a row of huge heads while fragmented arcs of the screen confusingly flicker. The alphabet separated us; she sat near the front of the classroom and I, William Young, toward the rear. Where the alphabet no longer obtained, other systems intervened. In the museum, a ruthless law propelled her forward to gather with the other bold spirits, tittering, around the defenseless little naked statues, while I hung back, on the edge of the fountain, envious, angry, and brimming with things to say. I never said them.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Taibele And Her Demon 4279
In which a lowlife poses as a demon in order to get laid. You can walk away from this obviously misogynistic premise if you like, and I won’t judge you. Nobody will. But you will miss a surprisingly beautiful and poignant story if you do. This is my idea of a tearjerker, if you need more evidence of my perversity.
Gerald Kersh, Queen Of Pig Island 4297
Gerald Kersh liked to mix seedy grotesquerie with humanism; this is perhaps the quintessential example of that approach. A great tragic story.
Jon Padgett, 20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism 4302
Like Maupassant with Boule-de-suif, Padgett’s first story established him immediately as an essential writer. He stands out even in weird fiction’s current crop of excellence, and this is his acknowledged masterpiece. Interestingly, he cut it down drastically, from around 14,000 words; this revision appears to have worked a kind of alchemy on the material.
A good lesson, if you need one, in how economy can help achieve a seductively unsettling effect.
Samuel Beckett, Dante And The Lobster 4308
Avant-garde art— which I’ll define as art that refuses to follow the conventions that help us evaluate and process art— has an advantage with a consumer who’s become weary of artistic convention and besotted by rulebreaking. With anyone else, the opposite is true; the discarding of convention will be hard for them to get past.
For the consumer who enjoys both convention and the flouting of it, the situation is different. A consumer burdened by this open-minded philosophy will try to figure out what an artist is trying to do, and whether she succeeds, and whether the result is enjoyable.
When a writer of prose narratives is monkeying around in the manner of this Irishman, I enjoy it, and then I try to figure out why. The jury is still out on this; so far, I can’t tell you why I think this story is great. I do say that his command of the English language is Nobel-worthy. What is he using this command to accomplish? I’ll get back to you on that.
Roald Dahl, Dip In The Pool 4310
I’m reading these out of order, so it just occurred to me: this story is actually LONGER than Cinnamon Shops. That ought to give any writer pause; Dahl has a lot to do to set up the conditions for the ending. A lot, and it takes a lot of words for him to do it. But it feels like nothing, because he writes so well. Whereas Schulz writes so well, his story feels like ten stories.
Ramsey Campbell, The Companion 4336
In 1991, Ramsey was no longer satisfied with this story from 1973. He felt the first half was less tight than the second.
Well, maybe. You won’t catch me arguing with Ramsey Campbell, but the first half— where the protagonist walks around a carnival and has a lot of creepy thoughts about moments that scared him as a kid, and about the car accident that killed his parents— seems pretty strong to me. It’s got plenty of solid description of carnival sights and sounds, and characteristically Ramsey makes those details float at the edge of the reader’s vision. Realistic, but vaguely unsettling— nobody does that better than Campbell. Maybe a little bit of the first half is vague in a way that’s more confusing than unsettling, but for the most part it’s all strong.
And then you get to the second half, where he’s on the Ghost Train ride; that’s where it really takes off. I’ve seen plenty of fiction depicting this kind of dilapidated fairground milieu (cf. Bradbury, Robert Bloch), but I’ve never seen it done better than Ramsey does it here.
Ryu Murakami, It All Started Just About A Year And A Half Ago 4338
Typically offbeat story idea from Murakami. I imagine people will have varying reactions to this story of a man who becomes gradually less clear about his sexuality. To me it feels sweet and warm. Especially by Murakami’s standards.
I felt I was beginning to understand what happiness is about. It isn’t about guzzling ten or twenty energy drinks a day, barreling down the highway for hours at a time, turning over your paycheck to your wife without even opening the envelope, and trying to force your family to respect you. Happiness is based on secrets and lies.
Shirley Jackson, The Renegade 4386
Shirley was incomparable on the ugly cruelty of provincialism. This story is sickening, but the specific violent details are not what really makes my stomach churn. The horror comes from finding out what it feels like when neighbors see you as an outsider.
Shirley knew all about that.
Stephen Crane, The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky 4381
You can find at Wikipedia the typical guff about this story’s symbolism, theme, and so forth, and only you can say whether all this enriches the story for you. Crane maintains an ironic distance from the material; it’s as if he’s jumping onboard the 20th century and mocking the myths and tropes of the Old West from a comfortable vantage point.
What I love about it is how the structure lines up with the word count. You get a fairly detailed look at the setting up of each character in the coming conflict, and once that’s accomplished, the final joke comes so fast it makes me laugh when I realize there isn’t any more story.
Crane’s prose can be apocalyptic, but he can also write in a tone so amiable you don’t always notice how poetic he is. When a writer of such gifts decides to spin out an amusing trifle, we’re in for a treat.
An aside: Crane wrote a lot in a short life. Paul Auster wrote a very long book about Crane recently, and he gives us a great deal of discussion about Crane’s work. There was quite a variety of it; he wrote novels and short stories and journalism and what they used to call sketches, and some other things besides.
Crane is seen as a modernist today. I need to read more to figure out why this is; I think the key is that this modernism is relative to his era. Auster says one crucial innovation was Crane’s way of giving readers permission to think as we liked about what went on in his stories. Rather than the moral lecture readers were used to in that era, Crane invited us to use our own judgment. And Auster says Crane created the cool ironic detachment that led to Hemingway, Joyce, Camus, and countless other writers ever since.
Stephen Crane is the fellow holding the banjo. Cropping is mine on this photo borrowed from Auster’s excellent book about Crane.
Thomas Ligotti, The Night School 4424
This is arguably second-tier Ligotti, which simply means it lacks the undefinable spark that marks his finest work. But what of it? If you’re a Ligotti fan, you can’t get enough, and while I wouldn’t recommend beginning with this, I also doubt any potential Ligotti fan would be turned off by it. The atmosphere here is so potent I’ve had to be careful not to crib from this story. I have some upcoming fiction taking place in a night school setting, and I keep picturing this story whenever I’m supposed to be writing my own.
Although I cannot claim that these often complex diagrams were not directly related to our studies, there were always extraneous elements within them which I never bothered to transcribe into my own notes for the class. They were a strange array of abstract symbols, frequently geometric figures altered in some way: various polygons with asymmetrical sides, trapezoids whose sides did not meet, semicircles with double or triple slashes across them, and many other examples of a deformed or corrupted scientific notation. These signs appeared to be primitive in essence, more relevant to magic than mathematics. The instructor marked them in an extremely rapid hand upon the blackboard, as if they were the words of his natural language. In most cases they formed a border around a familiar diagram allied to chemistry or physics, enclosing it and sometimes, it seemed, transforming its sense. Once a student questioned him regarding what seemed his apparently superfluous embellishment of these diagrams. Why did Instructor Carniero subject us to these bewildering symbols? “Because,” he answered, “a true instructor must share everything, no matter how terrible or lurid it might be.”
I have to say: some deep cuts. All news to me but Cinnamon Shops, The Sentinel, and of course Ransom of Red Chief.
Great stuff here again, Karl. Some of these I am familiar with: others not so much. These days, I am on the look out for new writers. My last decade's worth of reading seems utterly dominated by the same old names, in the same way that I'm still listening to the same music as in 1995. Your words have tempted me to give Schulz and Ligotti a try first. They sound as though they might find a way into my subjective and debateable canon. I'd love your suggestions on where to start. Updike seems to strike you in much the same way as he has always struck me: easier to admire than to like. Lots of lovely sentences about, you know, toasters and bird-baths. I always want a bit more at stake in my fiction. BTW - 'pillowy and humid'! Not too many writers can afford to use up a phrase like *that* on a Substack post. Nice work!