Review: Contents too short to get a handle on.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 3, 2012
Nicky Drayden, <strong>Delightfully Twisted Tales, vol. 4: Wisps, Spells, and Faerie Tales</strong> (Nicky Drayden, 2011)Short-shorts have adopted the euphemism "flash fiction" for, what, two decades now?, and I still can't find myself getting myhead 'round most of them. There's a real art to the creation of a great short-short (and if you're going to aspire to a lofty term like "flash fiction", you should <em>aspire</em>, dagnabbit), comparable in many ways to the art involved in the creation of a good poem, and so few authors get that. Most of them seem to look at the short-short as a way to dispose of an idea that simply can't hold any more baggage. But here's the thing: there IS no idea that can't hold more baggage than, say, 250 words. (Hell, Nicholson Baker writes whole <em>books</em> based on ideas that most people think can't hold more baggage than that....) The result is, inevitably, an unsatisfying story that needs to be a lot longer than it is rather than a carefully-crafted piece that will provoke thought. Drayden crams a few of them into these eight pages along with a piece or two of verse, and all of them fit the bill. There are some good ideas here that beg fleshing out, but in their current incarnations, there's not even enough to really judge the writing, much less the stories themselves. **