The Remarkable Intruder

I've always been a fan of the novella, especially in genre fiction, where the suspense and/or conceit can start running thin after about two hundred pages. The problem with the novella is in publishing one. They are too short to be novels and generally too long to sell as short-stories to magazines. As for the web, most venues have incredibly short word-counts for stories, some sites requesting that stories be in the 1000 - 2000 word length.

Not so at Mysterical-E, an excellent (I'm biased) e-zine that regularly publishes long stories, novel excerpts, and novellas. Their new issue is out and my novella, The Remarkable Intruder, is in it. I wrote this a couple of years ago: it's a comic-mystery with a modern day Holmes and Watson named Tommy and Miles, two friends from college. Miles is the stay-at-home genius and Tommy is the girl-crazy gadabout that tells the tales. I was going for a tone that was half Arthur Conan Doyle and part P. G. Wodehouse, and wound up, of course, with all Swanson, massively inferior.

Anyway, the excellent folks at Mysterical-E were kind enough to publish it, along with having published my only other stab at the Novella, The Girl With the Clock For a Heart.

So click on over and read the story if you have time and/or the inclination. Thanks.

Full Dark, No Stars

I think Stephen King is at his absolute best in the novella form. He has never been a good self-editor, and some of his books are too long for the stories they tell (not all of them--The Stand is an example of a book worth its length). But in the novella form, and he's written a lot of them, he can take one good idea, or one bad situation, and just run with it. He's written some classics: The Body, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, The Langoliers, The Mist. King's new book is another collection of novellas, or technically, three novellas and one short story, and all of them are about depravity and retribution. It's nice to see that King has not lost his power to disturb; in particular, there are descriptive sequences in "1922" that rattled around my brain for a little too long. And each of the novellas are sick and twisted tales, summed up well by a quote from the book: "When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit." I wouldn't recommend this collection over Four Past Midnight or Different Seasons, but if you've read those two and liked them, definitely read this.