Melody Writes

Photo by Courtney Baucom on Unsplash     This year, I tried to shift my focus from novels to short stories and journal about them, with mixed results. I read more short stories, but fell off of the journaling. I found it was slowing me down, and if my journal wasn’t handy, I would put off reading the stories. Eventually, I decided to just enjoy the short stories as they came and not worry so much about journaling. That said, I do want to highlight ten of my favourite stories this year. I am limiting this selection to magazines, newsletters, and free online, not anthologies. This is also by no means an exhaustive list of my favourites, just ten that stayed with me. Listed roughly in the order I read them, I think. 1.  The Grit Born by Frances Ogamba - January 2024 - The Dark A lonely woman, Egoabia, learns about a company called Rebirth which will send special powder that can be moulded into a child. This story was unsettling the whole way through with a brillian...

The World Outside is Elad Haber’s debut collection of twenty-one short stories. There is a wide variety to this collection including fairy tale retellings, post-apocalyptic science fiction, and stories about grief. It’s hard to find one overarching theme that binds the stories together, but if I were pressed to pick one, it would be the human experience. Even with such different subject matter, at the heart of each story are people living, hating, surviving. I’m not going to review each of the twenty-one stories, but I’ll talk about the ones that stayed with me the longest. Ophelia and the Beast: Haber opens his collection with a mashup of Hamlet and Beauty and the Beast. Ever since reading Hamlet in high school English, I have been interested in Ophelia and her dismal fate. Haber’s Beast rescues her from death and gives her new life in this short piece. It Only Rains at Night: One of the post-apocalyptic tales that dominate so much of the collection. In this one a young girl is trappe...

Craft is unlike any other short story collection I have read. At times, it felt less like an anthology of tales, than a continuous narrative. This is because of “the writer”, an unnamed character at the centre of it all who happens upon the devil at a party in her twenties and sleeps with him. After their encounter, he periodically haunts her life, and she writes stories for the devil that purport to be about other people, but feel more like thinly veiled pieces of the writer’s life. Writing stories for the devil sounds dark, but this book is anything but. The devil in this story, is not the fire and brimstone monster torturing souls forever, nor is he a completely misunderstood angel, a victim of a vengeful god. This devil is more of an elusive idea, or phantom, guiding the writer through her life, and who may even be nothing more than a figment of the writer’s imagination. And although too much ambiguity can leave me frustrated, here it is welcome and fits the style of the book well....