Not What You Thought? and Other Surprises Note that proceeds from the sale of this diverse collection of short stories support a charity for homeless ex-servicemen. The stories here all have a 'not-what-you-thought' twist ending. Most genres are represented – SF, war, romance, horror, adventure, spiritual, magic realism, and more.
In my experience what often makes short stories compelling is they are analogous to the precise, contained, Act 1 ‘Inciting Incident’ scene in a novel. That is the scene where a hero encounters a life-changing problem that he spends the rest of the story trying to come to terms with. Many of the stories here are good examples of this. In each story one or two characters are introduced in the context of a problem; they proceed on a short path to a reckoning of one sort or another; and the twist is a re-framing that removes or resolves the original problem, and points to others, larger and very different. Thus such contain the seed, the core dilemma a protagonist would face in a novel-length treatment of the story idea. I especially enjoyed the twist most of these stories end with. For me the twist means the depicted events have two unambiguous meanings: the flow that events would have taken without the twist, and the actual flow they will take as a result of it. These stories crack open a world just long enough for a quick glimpse at a critical moment in the hero’s life. The reader fills in the rest, the implied story.
I won’t comment here on specific stories except to say I admired how self-contained and compressed they are. I particularly enjoyed ‘Call of Duty’, ‘First Impression’, ‘Temptation’, ‘A Good Man,’ ‘The Spectre’, and ‘Lottery Loser’. This collection won’t disappoint fans of the short story genre.
