"By excluding almost everything," Steven Millhauser recently wrote about the short story, "it can give perfect shape to what remains."
In his dazzling story, "The New Structure," which Harper's published earlier this year, Millhauser effectively leaves no remainder. He conjures a fantastically proliferating setting -- an air-conditioned nightmare of seamless consumerism, a vast subterranean mall that is also a smoothly acquisitive corporate entity -- which our unnamed narrator describes with a mixture of muted distress and sheer awe. But "structure" also refers to the unorthodox construction of Millhauser's story itself, with its uneasy voice of communal anonymity and comfortable claustrophobia. Just as the company comes to dominate the town, psychically, financially and geographically (buying up houses, turning the living rooms into offices), hardly a paragraph goes by in which the vast "Under" is not lovingly detailed. Nothing exists here that is not a response to Millhauser's setting; it is all setting. The structure, in short, is the structure.
And some of the best stories, I'll argue, are about stories. It's an admittedly somewhat tautological conclusion that I've reached over the last few months, during which I've consumed little fiction outside of short stories. For my next two columns, then, I've shaken up five recent and forthcoming collections, of interest to Astral Weekers, and rolled out a gem from each. What connects them is their playful interrogation -- sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring -- of the short story form. They jolt us into fresh ways of reading.
John Langan's "On Skua Island," from "Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters" (Prime: 256 pp., $24.95), kicks off with a twist on Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." Langan's version of James' first sentence reads: "The story had held us, round the dinner table, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was weird, as, on a February night in an old house with a strong storm howling off the ocean, a story should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till the eight of us adjourned to the living room with our drinks." The narrator is a Langan stand-in, an academic and scribbler of weird tales himself, and the conversation in this seaside house quickly turns to the popularity and metaphorical resonance of various horror-story staples: ghosts, vampires, werewolves, zombies and mummies.
