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On my post yesterday on this story, I claimed a certain ambivalence re the story’s attempts and affectations. Lee Allred claims to have cracked the lock and opened to story. And, frankly, he makes a compelling case. His argument (complete with diagram) appears below. (The only changes I made were the addition of hyperlinks.)
Tell him what you think.
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I don’t know what this story means. Maybe you can tell me. It certainly intends to tell me something, but I’m leery of drawing conclusions.
It’s starts off as yet another of those once-upon-a-time-in-my-memory-in-the-West stories, then suddenly throws a three-paragraph bit of essay at the reader, then ends with a new vignette from, oh, a couple decades after the first—this story only the slightest bit connected with the first. It left me a little dizzy. And if it weren’t for a genuinely surprising and painful moment in the second story, I might have been left completely confused.
But somehow that moment provided an aesthetic completeness.
Continue reading “Bright Angels & Familiars: “The People Who Were Not There” by Lewis Horne”
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This is the third and final entry in this series. The first part of our interview was about Ms Hallstom’s novel-in-stories Bound on Earth. The second was about her editorship of the literary journal Irreantum. This third portion is about the short-story collection, Dispensation: Latter-day Fiction, that she edited for Zarahemla Books (review).
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Let’s start with what criteria a story had to meet to even be considered for inclusion. What were the ground rules going in to this anthology? Continue reading “Angela Hallstrom and the Art of Short-Story Arrangement”
A Motley Vision 