An Overlong Short Story

A House in the Neighborhood

For anyone who has been anticipating my complete book accounting, I apologize. I’ve moved yet again, and this move has been a toughie. But to the task at hand:

The above book was panned on Kirkus Reviews, somewhat unfairly, I think. Still, it wasn’t my best effort. But I maintain it wasn’t all that bad. The novella attempts a very modern story during the Age of COVID. Its alter ego is a braided story set in the same geographical territory as the COVID one, but a couple hundred years earlier. This older segment has to do with Native Americans coping with an influx of whites into the native homeland as well as a wink and a nod to some even earlier Vikings (Northmen did in fact reach Oklahoma, leaving a rune-engraved boulder there. You can visit that runic stone today.)

The COVID story lies at the core of a neighborhood with a very fussy Home Owners Association (HOA), a marriage floundering in boredom, and a rogue cop’s activities. I’ve since learned not to have so many characters and subplots wedged into a novella, but the book does work to a certain degree. Read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea or Steinbeck’s Cannery Row for the best way to tell such an overlong short story. Live and learn, right? But my primary lesson is that my talent lies in writing the longer, more complex novels.

Shuffled into the later books of this list are four volumes on geometry/philosophy as well as a few poetry chapbooks. These will follow in short order. I promise.