How to read short stories

With a bit of why and where thrown in

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

Chances are if you read short stories as a kid you didn’t think of them as short stories. They were ghost stories. And I’m not being glib: for the longest time anthologies were the last haven for short stories, and genre ones at that.

The stories from that time which stuck out for me did so because of their high concepts, scary or mind-blowing in a way just as easy to convey verbally as they were read; I didn’t recommend them to others so much as recap their concepts in miniature. There was Stephen King’s ‘The Jaunt’ in which a boy is trapped with no senses and only his thoughts for a second less than infinity; or Stephen Baxter’s ‘Touching Centauri’, about a leap in technology that lets humans bounce a laser off our nearest star only to expose the universe as a sham when it crashes from lacking the power to keep up with such a huge expansion in required faked reality. Short stories were a delivery device for such concepts and their attendant thrills and chills; and at most, at school, they were photocopied sheets headed with unpleasantly old-fashioned names — Saki, Maupassant — for us to bluff our way through.