The Last Hours of Pompeii

A short story by Marc Nieson

Reviewed by Max A. Gordon

Setting: an apartment living room complete with TV/VCR
Protagonist: a father/ex-husband
Narrator: first person – “Dad”
Tense: present

Imagine being trapped and isolated, unable even to reach out and touch those most important to you. Imagine the impotence forced on you by having to watch as disaster devours your loved ones. Imagine, now, that you, yourself, have had a hand in creating the disaster.

These are themes touched upon in this short story. The narrator participates in and facilitates his young daughter’s obsession with watching disaster videos, specifically (as the title suggests) those involving volcanic catastrophe. He realizes that her obsession is distancing her from him on an emotional level, closing her off from their relationship rather than reinforcing it, as he intended. The more obsessed she becomes with the images, the more distant she becomes, and the more the images become a prophecy of the future of their relationship.

Reading this story is watching a slow-motion train wreck, both fascinating and horrifying, as the reader begins to realize the dangers that surround all of us with regard to the ones we love, posed by our inability to change the progress of our isolation. The cautionary warning offered here is to turn off the television, the internet, or whatever else we may be allowing to separate us from our loved ones, and to talk with them or play with them, or even to argue with them, but to somehow engage with them and, thereby, avoid the heartbreak of finding ourselves encased in ash, preserved forever in the unfulfilled act of touching one another’s lives.

At ~4000 words, this is a great read with very little to criticize. The inkwell is full!

ePublisher: Carve Magazine, Fall 2008 / Volume IX, Issue III
Carve describes itself: “Carve Magazine (or Carvezine) is an online literary magazine that publishes literary short fiction on a quarterly basis.”

Format: I read online, using a browser.

ePublisher: Carve Magazine, Fall 2008 / Volume IX, Issue III
Carve describes itself: “Carve Magazine (or Carvezine) is an online literary magazine that publishes literary short fiction on a quarterly basis.”

Format: I read online, using a browser.

Sexy, Hot, Sad, Tragic, Accident

A short story by Krishan Coupland

Reviewed by Lawrence Reeve

Digital cameras make a shutter sound when the button is pressed, but they don't need to. The tinny recorded sound (they all seem to use the same one) is a nod to the days of bulky Nikons with heavy shutter mechanisms that wound film and chunked metal, and each one made you feel you had captured something important.

Like a digital photo shoot SHSTA transitions through several offline and online perspectives of a young woman's death, and each transition makes a false noise hollowing out the meaning of her death a little more each time. The accident is re-configured into an online event, a brief spasm of YouTube hits, a bid for Twitter-fast popularity, me-too souvenirs, and a stadium memorial full of grief-stricken faces on the big-screen designed to feed the nightly trash news.

People feel connected to her because she is online, only because she is online, a Little-Girl-In-The-Well story that touches but does not penetrate. One is left with the impression that nothing important was captured here, that her tragic death was observed but not felt, tagged but not understood, and recorded without context.

At 2500 words it is a splendid, fast read. Enjoy.

ePublisher:  Eclectica Magazine Vol. 13, No. 1 - January/February, 2009. Eclectica describes itself as one of the longest-running literary ezines on the web. Their global perspective adds flavor to the ten pieces of short fiction, and includes other magazine content, such as travel, reviews, etc.

Format: I read online using a browser, without being annoyed by advertising, and it prints nicely, too.

A Dying Mother

A Short Story By Kelly Lundgren Pietrucha
Reviewed By Susanne MacDougall

A mother calls her daughter every day to remind her that she is still dying and hangs up. This is the entrance to a story about the complexity of a mother-daughter relationship coming to an end, reduced to persistent, eerie calls and obligatory hospital visits.

The opening paragraph is gripping, but the story itself struggles to live up to those first few lines even with its interesting language and concise dialogue.

We follow the daughter on her way to the hospital and end up in a decrepit hospital room where the dying mother insists on retelling a story that the daughter already knows. The mother insists that the previous version was a lie. We don’t know which is the truth but the retelling, which involves a man named Peter, is definitely more interesting than the first.

Is this new telling really about Peter or the mother? Is it deathbed truth telling or just another elaborate lie to cover a sad life? Does it really matter? For me this is the core of the short story. We all know how time changes life’s stories. The question left unanswered is why.

Pietrucha’s language is vivid and the exchanges between mother and daughter engaging. The topic is grim but filled with the familiar ironies of life. The storyteller takes us on a on a bumpy ride, much like the ride the main character is on with the dying mother. Overall it is a good, solid read.


ePublisher: Carve Magazine

Format: Web browser, no advertising

Johnny Cash Beset By Darkness

A Short Story By John Marshall Daniel
Reviewed by Max A. Gordon

Setting: A carnival
Protagonist: The Beastman (Gordon)
Narrator: first person - Gordon
Tense: present

Speaking about oneself in the third person speaks volumes about a lack of involvement in one’s own life. Speaking about oneself as a fictional creation, in the third person, even more eloquently speaks to dissociation. Such is the case with The Beastman, a character both cynical and lost until rescued by the past.

The tone adopted by this first person narrator serves to move the carnival setting from the ‘exotic’ into the mundane, thereby enhancing the reader’s insight into the characters and elevating the theme of redemption.

Told in the present tense, with little explicit back-story, the past is clear and the future invites optimism without being overtly promising.

With only minor copy editing oversights (subject-verb agreement, unintended tense change, formatting) this ~4000 word story is certainly worth a read. Well done – the inkwell is four-fifths full!

ePublisher: storySouth A “Best Of” Issue Celebrating Seven Years Of Online Publishing. storySouth is published three times a year, and hopes to showcase the best new talent arising out of the south.

Format: I read online using a browser, and was untroubled by advertising at the website.

Why Read Fiction Online?

By Lawrence Reeve
It is fitting that the inaugural article for this blog appears during Read An eBook Week (March 8-14), an admittedly self-serving invention of the eBook business counting on your willingness to buy their eBook related products. In subsequent articles we intend to review online fiction, but thought it might be worthwhile to first lay out the rational for why you should supplement your (paper) book and magazine fiction sources with online work.

My first experience reading fiction online came in the early days of the Internet when I stumbled upon an erotic short story. Stumble being the online equivalent of typing ‘bush’ into a primitive search engine (AltaVista) and seeing what random sites appeared.

For those of you too young to know, the first search engine results were based on the quaint notion that site owners should identify their site with the appropriate key words. Porn sites quickly abused this by listing the most popular search terms 7000 times, thus guaranteeing a porn site would pop up when you typed in the name of a recent president (Yes, the first George Bush).

It was a story so contrived I could feel the clichéd situations being assembled in each paragraph like Tinker-Toys. It was replete with zero dimensional characters, purple prose, bad grammar, misspelled words, and single entendres that could only aspire to double.

This, and my occasional forays into erotica since, clarified my complaint about erotic stories in general. All that artifice strips away the mystery, since we know that the fundamental plot components we were all taught; rising action, climax, and falling action, will simply be the physical sensations of the protagonists.

I did recognize the one redeeming value of such online stories though, and that was the titillation I felt at the use of such explicit language. Here was a library of stories where one could read about any perversity described in the most perverse terms possible, without the shame of a co-worker discovering a dirty book in your briefcase. Erotica was the reason to read fiction online.

Such was the state of online fiction circa 1995. Some would argue that it has not progressed much since then. This blog, however, is an attempt to dispel that notion.

Much has changed since those years; principally, the ubiquity of internet access, a revolution (read decline) of the traditional book publishing business, the release of every popular book in the public domain as an eBook, better online display technology, and a new crop of writers who feel comfortable releasing their work online. All of which suggests that the world of online fiction should be a rich one in the future. Particularly, new online fiction.

Authors have long complained that good work is overlooked by publishers in favor of that with marketing potential, and that established authors can get any quality of work published. New authors, it is said, are quickly dismissed unless the first paragraph of their work is so deftly written it stimulates all three plot components.

I believe this perception to be correct, and it has doubtlessly prevented many an excellent author's work from seeing the light of day. If you doubt this, recall the Steps Experiment, in which an unknown author submitted the text of Jerzy Kosinski’s award-winning and best-selling novel Steps to fourteen top publishing houses, including the original publisher of the novel, and it was rejected by all of them.

Self-publishing, previously the last resort of the desperate (and wealthy) author grown tired of rejection, has re-invented itself on the Internet. It is now possible for an unknown author to publish an eBook online at minimal cost, bypassing the not so discerning eyes of an agent or publisher, and be read by the Internet public. Success stories are few so far, but the promise is there.

One previous obstacle, display technology, meant work was formatted inconsistently and unattractively, lacked portability, and lacked electronic equivalents to bookmarks, highlighting and page browsing, capabilities we have all come to expect while reading. A variety of new platforms are now available for reading which have eliminated these obstacles. I am currently reading H.G Wells' The Time Machine on my iPhone. There are others, equally attractive in their ability to make the reader feel comfortable reading online, and more and better to come. But why should you read fiction online now? Here are my reasons.

You don't need any special hardware to read online. Special platforms are available if you want it, but if you're reading this online, you're ready to go for most eBooks.

eBooks are cheap. Compared to paper there are significant savings in purchasing online work.

eBooks will reduce your carbon footprint. Saturday Night Live didn't call the seventh book 'Harry Potter and the End of All Trees' for nothing.

Feel good about clearing out your bookshelves.  Great readers like to see the books they have read to remind them of the good times. Get with it. List everything you have read on your Facebook page for the world to see how literate you are. Then donate your paper books to the Internetless masses and increase literacy.

Indulge your technology fetish. There is spectacularly grand and expensive display hardware for eBooks if you have to have it. Google 'eInk'.

Enjoy snubbing traditional publishers and online retailers. Only buy work that is Digital Rights Management (DRM) free. The industry would like nothing better than to consolidate on a platform and DRM software so they can control distribution. If you let them handle eBooks they same way they did music, sooner or later publishers will arrest you for illegal reading.

Refresh your fondness for a favorite book. There are over 27,000 free eBooks (all your favorites) in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog.

You can still read the dirty stuff. I recommend The Naughty Bits: The Steamiest and Most Scandalous Sex Scenes from the World's Great Books by Jack Murnighan, and now available as an eBook.

Discover a new author. If you're one of those people competing for the most friends on Facebook, you could single-handedly create a buzz with a few judicious posts.

It only takes one good read. We love books because we have a lifetime of heightened emotions associated with the visual and tactile characteristics of those musty paperweights. One good read online and the pleasant associations will begin. I can hardly wait until an image of a silverfish crawls across my iPhone, just like it did the first time I read my dad's copy of The Time Machine.

The good fiction is out there. It will take some digging, but use the links on this blog to start, and refine your sources until they feel like a city's worth of old bookshops.

In subsequent articles we intend to review the best new fiction available online in order to point you to fun and interesting work. Give them a read, and let us know if we have made the effort worthwhile.