Short stories – Graham Clements

Review of The Dark Man by Referral by Chuck McKenzie

Graham Clements — Wed, 01 May 2024 23:52:00 +0000

The Dark Man, by Referral and Less Pleasant Tales, is a collection of ‘horror’ short stories. I put the horror in quotation marks as the stories are not that horrific. They are more thriller stories in the tone of The Twilight Zone, with a bit of added humour. There is no blood, gore, or scary shocks, but plenty of twists. Most stories are about people getting their just deserts, so readers can feel good about what happens to the evil characters.

The title story, The Dark Man by Referral, is a prime example of bad people getting their just deserts. It is a tale of a boy whose mother is in a relationship with an abusive man. The boy meets a mysterious dark man who gives him a toy that is not as innocuous as it looks, at least to his mother’s partner.

Confessions of a Pod Person would make a great movie. It is Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the point of view of the body snatchers. Unlike in the movie, their invasion fails, and the pod people must deal with the consequences. This was my favourite story in the collection.

Other stories include Bad Meat, a zombie tale of sorts. Retail Therapy will have readers thinking about justifiable homicide as a customer endlessly tries to bargain with a shop owner. The Eight-Beat Bar is about being tortured by a musical earworm, like having Hotel California constantly groaning on in your head until you really want to ‘check out’.

The collection contains 20 stories. Some are as little as a paragraph, while others are much more substantial. McKenzie concludes the book with a heartfelt outline of what inspired him to write each story. He tells us that he gave up writing for years but now has his muse back. All the stories have been published in other magazines and collections. Even though the stories were written over decades, they seem to belong together.

I enjoyed reading this collection and recommend it to anyone who has had a bad day and wants to see someone get their just deserts.

Review of Us and Them by Anthony J Langford.

Graham Clements — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 06:09:00 +0000

Us and Them is a collection of short stories and poems that will open your heart to the lives of others, especially the mind of its author, Anthony J Langford. The collection will have you thinking about how you interact with others, and had this reader vowing to be more open to what might be going on in other people’s lives.

About half of the stories are autobiographical scenes from the author’s life, giving insight into events that have influenced the person he has become. They illustrate his quest for adventure and his genuine desire to understand others.

But among that desire to open up, it is a book of regrets, of things not said and done. In one story, he is haunted by a girl crying on the streets of New York and his failure to ask her what is wrong, instead being like all the other people who just walked past her. As he says in one of his poems, “It is always worth it, To reach out, Even if it doesn’t go well”. The collection also ponders aging and its effect on us.

It is a book about someone looking back at their life and contemplating what he could have done better.

Collectively, the poems and stories had me contemplating how well I have lived my own life.

Christmas Anthology

Graham Clements — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 01:08:00 +0000

I have a gift for those who read this blog: a Christmas anthology containing a fantasy story written by me. I have just fixed the epub and pdf file links, as they did not appear to be working.

epub file
mobi file
pdf file

It has a diverse range of stories written by writers from the Australian Writers’ Forum.

Merry Christmas.

My writing efforts for August.

Graham Clements — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 05:28:00 +0000

I have finally made time to write my monthly blog post about my fiction writing efforts for the previous month. I have been extremely busy writing, editing, critiquing and being sick. Yep, my ulcerative colitis has come back at the wrong time, but when is a good time for it?

Fiction Writing.

I continued writing my novel, adding another 8549 words. I am very close to the end of the first draft, so it was with great reluctance that I stopped to write a short story I had committed to finish by the end of August.

I started the short story on the 17^th of August, hoping to finish it before attending the Melbourne Writers Festival at the end of the month. At the end of August, I had written 5,582 words, and it was still nowhere near finished. The story is for a Christmas anthology created by members of the Australian Writer’s Forum.

So, all up, I wrote 14,031 words for the month, which is not quite the average of 500 words a day that I am aiming for. I met my quota of 500 words a day on only 23 days. I have now written about 129,000 words of the novel.

Critiquing.

I critiqued another story for critters.org and then committed to critiquing a whole novel on Critters. Fortunately, the writer writes much shorter manuscripts than I do, with it being 66,000 words. By the end of the month, I had critiqued the first six chapters, about 10,000 words.

Reading.

I finished reading the very good classic; I am Legend, by Richard Matheson. It is one of the original apocalyptic novels. In it, a virus decimates the population, leaving one lone survivor to battle vampire-like creatures. It was made into at least two films, one recent one starring Will Smith and the much better The Omega Man. The novel is very different from both films. Although written 60 years ago, the story still packs a punch. I then started reading Dust, the third book in Hugh Howey’s apocalyptic Wool series.

Melbourne Writers Festival.

I went to the festival for the third year in a row. The only science fiction author I saw on a panel kept apologising for his book being science fiction, so I did not buy it. I learnt a bit from a panel with the editors of Peter Carey and Jonathan Franzen (I’ve read several of both author’s books.) The best author talk I went to was by mistake. The festival organisers changed the venue without telling me, but my ticket still got me in to see Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket). He was there promoting a novel for adults called We Are Pirates, and with a title like that, I just had to buy it. Overall, the festival was not as good as the two previous years. I hope to write more about it in upcoming posts.

Divine Writing.

I had one non-fiction article published on Divine this month, about a casting call for an Australian web-series Aliens Vs Crips, where four people with disabilities try to survive an alien invasion.