A short story I recently read

‘Girls Have Sharp Teeth’ by Genevieve Mills Read it here in about 20 minutes. Thinking about narrative voice… It’s swiftly evident that our narrator is a teenage girl, and she has a great narrative voice. The vocabulary and semantic fields support the fact this is a teenage voice: the first line mentions a female collectiveContinue reading “A short story I recently read”

A short story for Halloween

‘A Collapse of Horses’ by Brian Evenson Read it here in under 30 minutes. Thinking about why it’s unsettling… The story opens with a shocking statement made by the first-person narrator: his family have died, in an horrific manner, while he’s been injured. His tone when revealing this is utterly detached. And he’s using directContinue reading “A short story for Halloween”

Book review

You Let Me In, by Camilla Bruce You can read the opening here (‘look inside’). This is a deeply disturbing novel. The protagonist, novelist Cassandra Tipp, has vanished, leaving behind what is essentially a memoir, a document containing two competing narratives about her life. In one story, Cassie tells of a vampiric 1,000-year old faerieContinue reading “Book review”

A short story I recently re-read

‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, by Edgar Allan Poe Available here. Read it in about 15 minutes. Analysis:                                Thinking about using rhetorical devices… This is the opening of a classic Poe horror story. The story is told in the first person, by aContinue reading “A short story I recently re-read”