This was inspired by the horror stories I read to cheer myself up from job angst.  I feel a little better now. 

            I don’t like reading short stories.  I like the meat of a novel, a big thing to hold, a journey to undertake.  Short stories are like one night stands, novellas are sort of like dating a guy knowing he’s moving to Utah at the end of the summer.  A novel is a nice, steady, long term relationship.  (There is something to be said for the fact that I find enormous book series to be daunting.  That’s just too much commitment.)

            In middle school I read Skeleton Crew by Stephen King (or maybe it was earlier…?).  Apparently I didn’t realize I was going into a book of short stories.  I finished the Mist, an amazing story, then went on to Here There Be Tygers (one of King’s first short stories, written while he was in high school).  The boy wasn’t the same boy.  After 135 pages with Billy, who the fuck was Charles?  Here There Be Tygers is short, less than five pages, so in my head, I just replaced Charles with Billy.  When I got to The Monkey, I gave up pretending, and just read the short stories.  I liked them, still do, but have never gotten over that initial shock and betrayal.

            Horror has always been about short stories.  The horror novel, with some notable exceptions, is a relatively recent construct, vaulted to its present place of popularity by Mister King himself in the late seventies, early eighties.  After last January’s go-round at school, I purchased the Dark Descent.  I got subscriptions to Cemetery Dance and Weird Tales.  I was going to read and write short stories, dammit!  I was going to experience the true nature of horror!  And I read (and loved) the required chunk of Dark Descent.  I even went a little further, but it sits on my shelf with a bookmark about halfway through.  I read the first story and a half in my first Cemetery Dance issue, then let it sit til today.  Weird Tales I haven’t touched.  A novel keeps me going ‘cause I want to know what happens next.  Every time a short story ends, there is an opportunity for me to lose interest, and set the book (or magazine) down.  Is my attention span too long, or do I simply not have the discipline?

            I read two stories in Cemetery Dance today (Issue #59, if anyone is reading along at home).  I like the Bog Man story, did not care for the Painkeeper tale.  I could do better.  Cemetery Dance has rejected better, written by me.  What gets me about short stories are their endings.  Novels need closure, we’ve spent so long with the characters, we would feel short changed with a cliff hanger.  In short stories that seems like the standard.  The monster kills, then wanders off…who knows what havoc it will wreak next?  It’s an interesting formula, or it was, before I read it six hundred times.  I’ve even been (very) guilty of writing it (more than once.)  I think people do it because they know they can get away with not giving a solid ending.

            This all being said, I think that I am more likely to be published in the short form than the long one.  I made a New Years Resolution to write a short story a month or twelve over the course of the year, and have written exactly two, one of which may never see the light of day.  So I guess I need to suck it up and read them, because that’s the only way I’ll write them better.  Here I go…