Flashy Fiction and Other Insane Tales | |||||||
Jen Wylie and Sean Hayden | |||||||
Amazon Digital Services, 91 pages | |||||||
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A review by Trent Walters
Each writer brings a personal asset and aesthetic to the collection. Sean Hayden creates vivid characters in
various, odd blue-collar jobs whose temperament may be likened to a whistling pressure cooker barely able to
hold its lid down. Hayden's strongest work was the horror story, "The Punkin King," where a son warns his
mother not to carve the Halloween pumpkin, but she does anyway....
Jen Wylie, on the other hand, has a talent for illustrating a new facet of the tried-and-true vampire trope
in her vignettes. Her most powerful concept was in "Forgettable, the Beginning" about a young girl who has
the superpower of being forgotten, which ends with a reverse of King Midas' tragedy.
Being a fan of the short short as well as a writer and former editor of poetry, I have my own sensibility
and come to the table with expectations of the form: density, compression, flashes of insight into humanity,
playfulness, arc, closure, etc. While these stories may not appear in the year's-best lists, this pair of
writers is still shiny in their careers. It may be fun to experiment and watch where they may be headed to
next. If the foregoing captures your fancy, check out a sample to see if this one's for you.
Trent Walters teaches science; lives in Honduras; edited poetry at Abyss & Apex; blogs science, SF, education, and literature, etc. at APB; co-instigated Mundane SF (with Geoff Ryman and Julian Todd) culminating in an issue for Interzone; studied SF writing with dozens of major writers and and editors in the field; and has published works in Daily Cabal, Electric Velocipede, Fantasy, Hadley Rille anthologies, LCRW, among others. |
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