Review: Tales where readers add details
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 4, 2013
This is an interesting part of the fictional genre known as "flash fiction," short short stories, in this case no longer than 1,000 words each, no more than four pages. The idea is to offer readers just a spare showing of the events, just enough to spice-up their imagination and prompt them to use it to fill in details. This is a good technique. As the great Argentinean writer Jorge Borges said, two people write good writings, the writer and the reader. This saying is especially true of "flash fiction" that leaves much to the reader's imagination. Dail's tales are horror stories.The first of the five stories is about a girl who cries when people die. When she cries the dead become alive again, but only for a moment. The second focuses on a man who wants to find out what is in a box. The third shows readers what happened to a man who wandered in forest. The fourth is about superstations. Are they true facts? The last, the one I liked best, focuses on a more than 90-year-old woman in a nursing home who hears a song that she hadn't heard for some fifty years. Her husband sang the song to her when he proposed and died close to fifty years ago. Why is she hearing the song? What will she do about it?