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SHORT stories have a difficult time winning a reader's heart. They have to be swift, as, knowing that it is a short story, our attention span will be short. They have to engage readers with a myriad of messages, only one of which is ultimately revealed in full – not bluntly, but subtly, subtly enough to enthral readers with a sense of fulfilment, that they are wise enough to get the underlying message.

It is a game of hide and seek, and within such a small number of pages, reader and writer must come to the same conclusion. Most of the time, they don't, however. But that is the true joy of short stories – writers keep readers guessing, and readers think they have guessed right. "Ah, I get it. The wife goes to meet her lover and ends up dying in a car crash," the reader will exclaim.1

"Maybe," the writer will chuckle, half wishing the reader has really got it, and half feeling happy that his idea remains opaque. 2

As this after all is a game, the tone has to be playful, and the voice, personal and stylish. At times, a short story writer will have an embedded story told in footnotes (as I have quickly learned to do in this review).

Readers, their eyes traversing between the top and the bottom, become even more intrigued. Not that this technique gives a clearer understanding of the writer's mind, sadly. It muddles it.

"Ah, the parents are so romantic," a reader blurts out a revelation.

The writer now guffaws, "You fool, read the footnote. They dance like two strangers trying to pass each other in a narrow corridor!" 3

But the reader thinks he is smart to have figured out what he thinks he has figured out. And he reads on. With no time to waste, he most likely is wrong – but it doesn't matter, really.

Together, short stories form a collection, and the order in which they are arranged is important. The most impressive piece must take the lead, lest readers give up on the entire book upon reading the first few lines of the first story. Readers, more inclined to big dramatic novels, tend to be less forgiving of short story writers.

"They can't write a full novel, hence a collection of short stories," readers will mumble, their hands quickly turning the pages and their eyes darting from one page to another impatiently. 4

"What I have in there will blow you away," the writer cries. 5

Indeed! If you are such a reader, of such a sceptical disposition, do allow me to recommend this collection of short stories: The Weight Of A Human Heart. It is a book that's heavy not because of its slight number of pages but because of the wonderful short stories the writer weaves with his heart.

The writer must be whole-heartedly in love with language and literature. It is a love that is reflected in every paragraph and in every story throughout the entire collection. This is a love letter to English, as a language, and a paean to literature, as a source of enjoyment.

The writer's mastery of language is not at all pretentious, though. He is a scholar at times and a comedian at others, taking readers on rambunctious rides in stories that poke fun at the English language and literature, the very things that he honours.

In the story entitled Four Letter Words, a son talks about his dad whose life can be succinctly covered in nine four-letter words, none of them decent.

I highly admire the writer's penchant for trickery. He is a writer who winks towards what might be allusions to his thoughts, and distracts readers with stories that are all at once colourful, playful, humorous, heartbreaking, melancholic, bitter, and affectionate. In the end, readers care less about the codabut more about how intoxicated they are by the beautiful stories that take place in Europe, Africa and Asia, and the writer's incredibly poignant reflections on loss, hardship and frailty of the human spirit.

Obviously discontent with constraints that force boring stereotypes on literature, this writer is highly creative and he pushes the limits by making up arbitrary literary experiments never before seen or heard of, making literature entertaining and exhilarating. 6

I am smitten by the writer 7 and his debut. It is a wondrous literary feast I so want to devour yet so wish I could savour slowly. Why not make this your entrée, your main course and your dessert? You will be utterly pleased.

1. The wife of the narrator in the story entitled Africa Is Crying had actually gone to see the gorillas before the car crash.

2. In fact, he thinks Africa, being the wife's true love, has ironically devoured her, and he, equally ironically, chances upon the scene of death, not knowing it is the wife's deathbed.

3. The parents of the narrator in Footnote are boring individuals and they were virgins when they married.

4. I too used to have such shallow presumption.

5. That's the writer of this collection of short stories bellowing, and what he says is true.

6. Have you read a story in which another story reveals itself in the footnote? There is one in this collection.

7. Ryan O'Neill, an Australian writer and a metaphor for good storytelling.

NOS4R2

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"EVERYONE lives in two worlds.

"There's the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren't. Mostly, the real world sucks.

"But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought.

"In a world of thought – in an inscape – every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history."

So says Maggie Leigh, a rather unusual librarian with a special gift involving Scrabble tiles.

Protagonist Victoria "Vic" McQueen finds her way to Maggie at the point when she really needs someone to tell her that her gift of being able to find lost things by crossing a long-gone bridge on her Raleigh Tuff Burner bicycle doesn't mean she is crazy.

Maggie explains to Vic that there are certain strongly creative people in the world who are able to use objects unique to each person to cut the "stitches" between the real world and their own inscape, and bring them together to express their own particular gift.

For Maggie, it is getting otherwise unknown information through her Scrabble tiles. And for Vic, it is finding lost objects by riding along the Shorter Way Bridge, which was destroyed when she was eight, on her bike.

However, like all such "gifts", there is a price to pay for using them, a fact Vic is unaware of until she meets Maggie.

The problem is, the price is not always an obvious one.

Vic, whose adored father eventually leaves his unhappy marriage and family, grows up to be a troubled teen. One day, when she is 17 and attempting to run away from home, she rediscovers her old Raleigh bicycle, long thought to have been disposed of when she was 13. In a fit of teenage pique and self-pity, she rides it to find trouble across the old Shorter Way Bridge, and find it she does.

At the Sleigh House on the other side of the bridge, she meets Charles Talent Manx III, another gifted person like herself, but who uses his gift for a more sinister purpose. Charles, whose special object is his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith, likes to take innocent young children in his car to a special place in his mind that he calls Christmasland, where they can have "fun" and be "happy forever".

And he has been doing this for a very long time now.

Naturally, he is very interested in Vic, who has similar talent to him, but she succeeds in escaping and getting him arrested by the police, although at great cost to herself and others.

This deed reverberates throughout the next several years of her life, affecting her mental and emotional state, and her family life. For Charles is not so easily defeated, and with the help of accomplice Bing Partridge, he eventually comes back to get his revenge on her.

Vic was not exactly an easy protagonist for me to like, or even sympathise with at times. Author Joe Hill writes her quite realistically, and without compromise. He also applies the same grey brush, but inversely, to the story's villains, Charles and Bing. By the end of the story, you can understand how they came to be how they are, and more importantly, to understand how they view themselves.

The concept of inscapes, and being able to cross the divider between the real world and our in-ner thoughts where anything is possible, is not original but it has always been one to fascinate me. And I appreciate how Hill uses the concept in this story as a tool to explore what consequences can come of our actions, and how some gifts come with an unavoidably high price.

Readers interested in such a concept should check out this book.

Similarly, if you understand the meaning behind the book's title NOS4R2 (or NOS4A2 in the United States version), which is also the licence plate number of Manx's Wraith, and are interested in that genre, then this story might be of interest to you.

Also, fans of Stephen King might want to take a look at Hill's work, as the two have a link. (If you don't already know the link, you can check out the Acknowledgements at the back of the book for strong hints – I'm not telling!)

There are also various literary references incorporated into the story – kind of like the "Easter eggs" that animated features are famous for – if you can spot them. For an example, look out for mention of the Frobisher sextet from the novel and movie Cloud Atlas.

And as a bonus for readers who really do read everything, Hill has included a short extra something right at the back of the book, just like the after-credit scenes in certain movies.

Joyland

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Stephen King serves up a murder-mystery that's sweet, fluffy and a tad lightweight, but you'll savour every little strand.

IT has been a long time since a Stephen King book grabbed my attention from the start and held it right through to the end. Once a voracious reader of all things King, I haven't been a fan of the man's later works, ever since I left 1999's meandering Hearts In Atlantis half-read.

Of the ones that followed, Cell (2006) was all right, mainly because it fell into one of my favourite categories of fiction, the apocalyptic novel. Aside from that one, though, I've been somewhat reluctant to tackle any of the author's more ... imposing tomes out of a reluctance to be disappointed any further.

Still, word that he is coming out with a sequel to The Shining – one of his best ever – entitled Doctor Sleepthis September piqued my interest. And as an appetiser, he would be serving up an entry in the Hard Case Crime series entitled Joyland a couple of months before that.

(HCC, in case you didn't know, is a murder-mystery imprint started in 2004 by Charles Ardai featuring old as well as new stories by prominent crime/mystery writers like Donald E. Westlake, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain and Erle Stanley Gardner. Joyland is numbered book #112, though the official website lists only about 90 titles.)

So, about Joyland, King's second HCC contribution after 2005's The Colorado Kid (which became the basis, kind of, for the TV series Haven): I picked this one up on my recent book-buying spree during the Hari Raya holidays and finished it more or less overnight. The book is an absorbing read, and the credit for that is due more to King's accomplished storytelling skills than to its story, such as it is.

For a "Hard Case Crime" book, you see, Joyland has actually got very little in the way of crime. Sure, there is a murder-mystery at the centre of things, but it doesn't appear until we're well into the book and then fades out again until it resurfaces much later.

Mostly, Joyland is about a conflicted 21-year-old college student named Devin Jones, who gets dumped by his girl almost at the same time he gets a summer job working in the titular amusement park in North Carolina.

Where the book really scores high marks is in its depiction of carnival life, the parlance and little behind-the-scenes nuggets of information, in capturing the things that go into creating the mass illusion – call it magic if you must – that makes such places so special in people's lives and memories.

As Dev gets inducted into the world of "selling fun", so too is the reader drawn into this hard but happy life, made especially eager to find out what kind of shape this likeable protagonist's early adulthood will leave him in for the rest of his life. A parade of interesting supporting characters troops past us as we follow him on this odyssey, most of whom it's easy to like, and some easy to loathe; though the revelation of the killer's identity left me somewhat dismayed.

There is a supernatural element in here that is somewhat jarring when you consider the core theme of the HCC imprint is supposed to be "hard boiled crime" after all. But then, this is a Stephen King book, so we shouldn't be surprised to find its murder-mystery spiced with ghosts and people who have the "Shining".

One of these psychic types, a boy suffering from muscular dystrophy, has a key role to play in Dev's life, and the relationships that develop here – between him and the doomed young Mike Ross, as well as with his strong-willed, free-spirited mother Annie – are predictable and yet among the sweetest aspects of this coming-of-age tale.

The mystery revolves around the murder of a young woman some years ago. It happened right in Joyland one busy night, in its Horror House attraction. The killer was even caught on film by the numerous camera-wielding "Hollywood Girls" (a fine example being on this book's rather lurid cover) who prowl the park taking and selling souvenir snapshots, and yet he was never identified.

Talk in the park is that the Horror House really is haunted, by the victim's ghost. And when Dev and his pals start poking around, they realise that she was not the murderer's first victim....

The come-and-go mystery is maintained in the reader's peripheral view thanks to King's tried-and-tested skills in the use of foreshadowing. Most of the time, though, you will simply be caught up in the brilliantly conjured sights and sounds of Joyland as seen through the eyes of an earnest young man with a huge hurt in his heart.

There is pure storytelling magic to be savoured in little Mike Ross's inevitable visit to the park, and through so much of the book besides – not least of which is the heart-rendingly beautiful final page. Could be I'm just getting maudlin in my advancing years, but this ability to evoke extremes of emotion in his readers is one of King's true gifts.

It also could be that I found this such a compelling read because it's just around a third, maybe even a quarter, the length of some of the writer's other opuses and so I knew I wouldn't have far to slog. I prefer to think that it's because he's firing on all cylinders here. The pleasure of reading Joyland is a good sign indeed for Doctor Sleep.

Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Ahad, 25 Ogos 2013

The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf

The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf

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