Recently Read: To Charles Fort, with Love

To Charles Fort, with Love by Caitlín R. Kiernan

I've been reading docbrite's stuff since the days of the second novel, and when the Doc keeps mentioning greygirlbeast, sooner or later I had to investigate, and then I wind up reading more and more that makes me think I might actually like her stuff. It didn't take long before I decided to add pick up a book or two. I've since increased that to "all but a book or two," after reading only one of the short stories in this volume.

With my own writing, I prefer the short story, and, truth be told, as far as reading is concerned, I admire a good short story more than I admire a good novel. Telling a complete, satisfying tale in a fraction of the space is much more admirable than doing so in a larger volume. You want to tell just enough to get people thinking, to get them interested, and just enough to satisfy them. There's a balancing act, and what you don't tell is sometimes even more important - the pieces you don't fully explain, the dangling bits of wonder, those are what keep people thinking about the story long after they've read it.

These stories have that tantilizing quality, but they don't presume to think you need everything explained. There is an undeniable style to these stories, one of the more obvious elements of which is her ability to create an endless variety of compound words to describe a particular nuance. With or without such words (and she has said they are a stylistic phase, and now she doesn't use them very often if at all,) these are descriptive stories; you get impressions of scenes and feelings and characters, but there's some work for you to do. As a rather poor example, she may provide you with bits and pieces of an equation, but perhaps some of the numbers remain as variables, and maybe some of the operations aren't defined. The intent isn't so much as to arrive at a solution, but to savor the problem itself.